57000 km entre nous (2008) - film review

Margot and Michel are a married couple who feel they have a mission to show the world that theirs is the perfect happy family.  They do this by documenting every aspect of their lives with a camcorder and uploading their homemade videos onto their website.  Their site attracts transsexual Nicole and her partner Khaled, who soon find a way of disrupting Margot and Michel’s idea of Utopia.  Meanwhile, the couple’s teenage daughter Nat plays games on the internet with a seriously ill boy in a hospital and flirts on-line with an older man.  Welcome to the age of the information highway.

Delphine Kreuter’s debut feature offers a tongue-in-cheek but very timely reflection on the extent to which the internet has penetrated our lives.  Who needs Big Brother when everyone is so keen to upload every last facet of their lives onto the Web for anyone on the planet to assimilate?  Shot on low resolution digitial video by someone with a very shaky hand,  57000 km entre nous has a rough and ready feel that makes it look as if it was knocked up on a home PC by a teenager for a school project - this is what makes it so distinctive and also so frustratingly difficult to engage with. 

The rare moments of insight and laugh-out-loud humour are somewhat lost in the impenetrable snowstorm of dross that makes up most of the runtime.  God alone knows how Mathieu Amalric ended up in this one; maybe the part of a middle-aged man giving piggyback rides to a sexually precocious teenager was too good to turn down?  Is this art or just someone having a lark?  With a little more discipline and a little less structureless whimsy this could have been something quite stunning.  As it is, the film (if you can call it that) is little more than a quirky divertissement which may prove to be even more ephemeral than the phenomenon it depicts.

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