Mammuth (2010) - film review

Serge Pilardosse hasn’t missed a day’s work in his life.  Since he began work at the age of 16, he has never been unemployed, nor has he ever taken a day off through sickness.  But on the day of his retirement, having just turned 60, he makes an alarming discovery.  Several of his employers have failed to declare his earnings and consequently he will not receive his full pension entitlement.  Serge has no option but to take to the road in his 1970s motorbike and track down these negligent employers.  What begins as an administrative necessity becomes something far more substantial as Serge retraces his past life...

Born to be wild...   It’s not hard to see the Easy Rider influence in this anarchic road movie comedy, even if the main protagonist is not some hot-headed youngster rebelling against stale conformity but a bedraggled 60-something trying to rescue his pension.  Firebrands Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda are happily reincarnated as a long-haired, über-paunchy Gérard Depardieu, who appears to relish the opportunity to play a geriatric version of his former self from Bertrand Blier’s Les Valseuses (1974).  So much for growing old gracefully.

Mammuth is the fourth social comedy from the writer-director team Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine, who originally found fame in France through their work on a number of satirical TV series set in the fictitious country Groland.  The duo’s truculent and often unhinged brand of comedy has proven hugely popular in France and their latest film is yet another spirited assault on the iniquities and absurdities of contemporary society, targeted specifically at the jugular of that modern day malaise, bureaucracy.  Just as the English spend all their spare time complaining about the weather, so the French amuse themselves by moaning incessantly about all the red tape they insist in tying themselves up in, Gallic irony at its best.

The one thing that Kervern and Delépine have yet to master is the art of narrative construction.  Mammuth is so disjointed that it looks as if the whole thing was thrown together whilst it was being shot, or else randomly assembled in the editing suite from ad hoc footage.  In this instance, the lack of structure is not a bad thing and actually works to the film’s advantage, accentuating the bohemian rule-averse character of its protagonist.  There are jokes in abundance, ranging from the truly inspired to the truly crass, but what makes the film so engaging is its exhilarating sense of freedom.  It not only reminds us of Easy Rider, it also evokes something of that film’s raw lust for life and melancholic lyricism.  This has to be one of the most inspired appropriations of the road movie format, veering drunkenly between social criticism and surreal farce as its protagonist’s tedious administrative errand turns into a colourful odyssey of self-discovery and self-renewal.

And who better to portray the free-spirited sexagenarian than Gérard Depardieu?  Sitting astride a gargantuan motorbike from the 1970s, Depardieu has the air of a Norse god combined with a beatnik relic of the late 1960s, not so much a force to be reckoned with as one to build a religion around.  His character is grotesque - a pot-bellied, uneducated loud mouth (whom the actor apparently based on his own father) - but he soon comes to epitomise our most fervent desires for free-living.  With a sublime cast to help him on his way, Depardieu holds us in his thrall with one of his most vital and engaging performances in years, leaving us in no doubt that there is plenty of life in the old dog yet.  So, what’re you waiting for?  Get your motor runnin’, head out on the highway...

© filmsdefrance.com 2010

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