Le Passager de l’été (2006) - film review

Since her husband left her, Monique has put everything into running the family farm.  She works tirelessly, although the burden is more than she can manage.  When a young man named Joseph turns up on her doorstep looking for work, she readily hires him to help out on the farm.  Despite the difference in their ages, Monique and Joseph find themselves drawn to one another and it is not long before Monique finds a place for her handyman in her bed.  Joseph soon grows tired of Monique and transfers his attentions to his employer’s attractive daughter, Jeanne.  This betrayal is more than Monique can bear...

Le Passager de l’été is one of those frustrating films that promises so much but delivers so little.  The story it tells has immense potential, and with such a strong cast it is hard to imagine how the film could fail to hit the mark.  But fail it does.  It’s almost heartbreaking to see the efforts of such talented performers as Catherine Frot and Grégori Derangèr being thwarted by the film’s technical and artistic deficiences. With its languid pace and anaemic composition, Le Passager de l’été feels like a Mills and Boon novel that has had all the passion sucked out of it.

This was the first film to be directed by Florence Moncorgé-Gabin, daughter of the iconic French film actor Jean Gabin.  She had previously worked as a script supervisor on various films in the 1970s and 1980s, collaborating with celebrated directors Jean Pierre-Melville, Claude Pinoteau and Claude Lelouch on such films as Un flic (1972), La Boum 2 (1982) and Attention bandits! (1986).  She has also made one short film, Les Pros (1986), featuring Jean-Paul Belmondo.

If there is one reason for watching this film it is to get an insight into how life was lived on a farm in the early 1950s, to appreciate just how hard life was for farm workers before the advent of modern farming methods.  Even here, however, the film falls somewhat short of the mark.  Instead of a realistic depiction of country life, with all its sweat and grime and tears, what we are shown is a romanticised Disney-style portrayal, which looks looks suspiciously like an advertisement for a variety of French cheese.

© filmsdefrance.com 2008

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