Le Dernier vol (2009) - film review

French Sahara, 1933.  Having set out to find the man she loves, an aviator who went missing during an attempted flight from London to Cape Town, Marie Vallières de Beaumont is forced to land her biplane near to an outpost of the French Camel Corps.  Here she meets Antoine Chauvet, a lieutenant who is in conflict with his superiors.  Faced with Marie’s determination, Antoine knows that he has no choice but to help her in her desperate quest. The unforgiving desert landscape presents a formidable ordeal, but in the course of their mission Marie and Antoine discover a truth they could not have expected...

Karim Dridi’s follow up to his critically acclaimed urban drama Khamsa (2008) is an altogether different kind of work, a sprawling blockbuster adventure-romance which, whilst visually stunning, lacks the passion, intensity and inspired touch of the director’s previous work.  The film stars Marion Cotillard (her first French film since her Oscar-winning apprearance in the Piaf biopic La Môme) and Guillaume Canet, who are romantically linked in real-life, although you would hardly guess that from their evident lack of chemistry in this film.  Cotillard and Canet had previously appeared together in the off-the-wall romantic comedy Jeux d’enfants (2003).

The film is a faithful adaptation of the 2003 novel Le Dernier Vol de Lancaster by the French journalist Sylvain Estibal, which was inspired by the true story of Bill Lancaster and his fiancée Chubbie Miller.  The story certainly has the potential to make a sublime piece of cinema but Dridi’s adaptation is too mechanical, too classical for his film to convey anything like the power and bleak romanticism of Estibal’s novel.  The stilted dialogue and shallow characterisation thwart Cotillard and Canet’s best efforts, so no wonder their performances are little more than lacklustre.  Throughout, the film can’t help looking like a pale imitation of Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient (1996).

For all its failings, Le Dernier vol still has one trump card - its breathtaking visual design.  Antoine Monod’s cinematography is a feast for both the eyes and the soul, particularly in the film’s second half when it captures with a blistering intensity the immense power and beauty of the desert location.  The desert becomes a key component in the drama, not just a pretty backdrop but a protagonist that exerts a strange malevolence and sinister charm.  After a painful hour-long crawl, the film virtually redeems itself in its last twenty minutes or so, as Dridi’s flair for visual poetry exerts itself and transforms a bland piece of melodrama into something far more unsettling and profound.

© filmsdefrance.com 2010

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