CATHERINE DENEUVE, NEMO SCHIFFMAN IN ON MY WAY

Deneuve goes wandering in rural France

On My Way is a little French road movie starring Catherine Deneuve. She plays Bettie, a former Miss Brittany (from 1969 ) who runs a provincial restaurant that's in financial trouble. Bettie goes on a "fugue" and wanders along country roads away from the autoroute in her Mercedes after learning her married lover has left his wife -- not for her but for a young woman training to be a beautician. Along the way she consents to pick up her seldom seen 11-year-old grandson Charly (Nemo Shiffman, son of the director and of d.p. Guillaume Schiffman [The Artist]) and take him to his grandfather while his mom goes to Belgium for a job. This isn't a great movie, but it's easy to watch, especially if you're a fan of the mature Deneuve. Those who think of her as a beauteous but off-putting "ice queen" must not have seen the more than half her oeuvre she's made since turning forty. These films display a mellower, more soulful woman than the stiff beauty who memorably starred in Donkey Skin, Belle de Jour, or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Though she has been in over a hundred films, Deneuve may never have been in one quite like this. More often recently she has tended to prefer to be in ensemble pieces like Desplechin's A Christmas Tale of Honoré's Beloved. Here with many locations and many characters, she remains constantly at the center.

A small film with Deneuve the focus of every scene can't fail to be permeated by her distinctive aura, however much it is a "departure" from her usual more regal or elegant roles. As in any "road movie," she is acted upon; things happen to her. First, the shocking revelation about her boyfriend, which she gets from her aged, but still lively mother (Claude Gensac), whom she lives with, in the house where she was born, and who runs the cash register of the restaurant. (Deneuve's own mother lives near her in Paris, on her own at over 100.) They have words, and the next day at lunch, Bettie gets in her car and "s'en va," goes off. The film refers to Deneuve's own attributes, notably her famous beauty and her love of smoking. She's not only a former beauty queen, but even takes Charly to a reunion of the other French regional beauty queens for her year. Having gone back to smoking after the shock of being dumped, she runs out of cigarettes right away, and this leads to a comic scene with an old farmer (Pierre Toulgoat) who takes forever to roll her one, and a sexual adventure, when Marco (Paul Hamy), a rakish young dealer in contraband cigarettes at a road house called Le Ranch, falls in love with her, gets drunk with her, and takes her to bed at a motel.

The scene at the distinctly déclassé Le Ranch, where Bettie is adopted by a gaggle of local woman as well as Marco, is a prime and memorable example of the kind of environment you don't usually find in Catherine Deneuve's work with Téchiné or Desplechin. To begin with French high-art films tend to be set in Paris, and this is as non-Paris as you can get, way more kitsch, and way more friendly.

Little Charly is preconditioned by his mother to dislike Bettie, and when her credit card is refused at a roadside shop he runs off, but they bond, and he comes to adore her and will not accept the idea of her leaving when they find his grandfather. Feisty and hyperactive, Nemo Shiffman, who's been nominated for a César like Deneuve, nonetheless has a lightness in his performance that contributes to the film's humor and charm.

Things turn almost Hollywood-French toward the end, with accordion music, sing-alongs, and a big family and neighborhood summer gathering for wine and food en plein air. Bettie's daughter, Charly's mother Muriel, played none-too-subtly by French singer Camille, shows up unexpectedly at granddad's house in southeastern France, having already washed out in her Belgian job, and dives into a a loud rant against Bettie that ends in tears and hugs. Most clichéd and audience-pandering of all, Charly's grandfather (Gérard Garouste), a handsome old chap who's the town's well-heeled outgoing mayor, falls for our star, and two kids run off-screen happily chanting "live goes on." All of which signals that On My Way is not only entertaining but a humanistically life-affirming little picture. But Renoir and Ozu's laurels remain unchallenged. This has memorable bits. It's no classic.

But Emmanuelle Bercot isn't a director noted for conventional crowd-pleasers. She's an actress with a recent credit in the docu-realistic social commentary feature Polisse, and her first important directorial effort was a film where she stared as a women who gets romantically involved with a teenage boy. On My Way is an offbeat Valentine to beautiful aging women and Deneuve in particular. It runs on a little too long and has a too-conventional happy ending, but it has rough edges and real stuff too, and through odd incidents and a use of non-actors pretty neatly avoids being boiler-plate art house pap. Catherine Deneuve remains impressive at seventy, beautiful, zoftig, a smoker, able to lend a glow to any scene she's in without marring its authenticity.

Elle s'en va, 113 mins., debuted in competition at the Berlinale in Feb. 2013. Screened for this review as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, where it was scheduled as the opening night film. It opened in France 18 Sept. 2013, receiving general acclaim (Allociné press rating 4.0 based on 21 reviews). Regular US theatrical release began in NYC Friday 14 March 2014 at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. It opened on the West Coast Friday 4 April 2014.



. . . . March 6 – 16, 2014

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.