Plein sud (2009) - film review

One summer, 27-year-old Sam takes to the road in his car, his direction: south.  On the way, he picks up a brother and sister, Mathieu and Léa.  Léa is strikingly beautiful, the kind of girl no man could resist.  Even better, she loves the company of men and is all too willing to please - just like her brother, who is eager to embark on his first gay romance.  As they make their way towards Spain, the three people get to know one another and become good friends.  But Sam has a secret, an old wound that never ceases to rankle.  Not even a wild fling with the over-sexed Mathieu can divert him from his darker purpose.  Sam has made up his mind to find the woman who wrecked his childhood and has left him scarred for life.  His mother must die...

You may run, but you can’t hide.  The impossibility of escaping from oneself is the central motif of Sébastien Lifshitz’s third and darkest feature to date, an intense existential drama dressed up as an old-fashioned road movie.   Plein sud distils many of the themes that characterise Lifshitz’s distinctive brand of cinema, such as family breakdown and its consequences, the trauma of being gay and the impact of a destructive past on the present.   It is a bleak and unsettling film, the inner turmoil of the protagonists appearing cruelly incongruous in the sun-drenched southern France setting, yet, as in all of Lifshitz’s work, there is also a thin sliver of optimism, a wry smile behind the clouds.  You don’t have to fire bullets to attain closure.

The film’s hero, or rather anti-hero, Sam (played to perfection by Yannick Renier, a promising newcomer to French cinema) is a typical Lifshitz creation - brooding, sensual, enigmatic and dangerous.  Like a character in an old-fashioned western, he dominates the film with a quiet, sinister presence, the gun he has in his possession hinting at the deadly purpose in his mind.  On his journey south, to his fateful destiny, forces of life try to break into his morbid introspection, like gifts from the gods sent to lure him back from the brink.  But even when he happens upon the man who appears to be his beau idéal, a good-looking charmer who can hardly keep his hands off him, Sam is not diverted from his mission for long.  The corrosive power of past memories proves to be stronger than the lure of present distractions.  His psyche disfigured by a gruesome childhood experience, our hero has no choice but to see his journey through to the end, to confront and defeat his inner demons like a modern Ulysses.   

Lifshitz’s penchant for non-linear storytelling makes Plein sud something of a challenge, but those who stay the course are ultimately rewarded when the film finally comes together in its last ten minutes or so.  The narrative is fragmented by frequent extended flashbacks and inserts of sequences shot on a domestic low-resolution camcorder, the result being a jarring collision of past memories and present experiences. Although the film only barely hangs together, its disjointed nature vividly evokes the confusion in the mind of the central protagonist, a fractured soul who cannot escape from his past but must go on reliving the same painful experiences.   The climactic confrontation between Sam and his mother (Nicole Garcia in an admirably restrained performance) is downplayed to the nth degree and yet is deeply moving - one of the strengths of Lifshitz’s cinema is that it does not linger needlessly on the emotions, but rather it tells us just what needs to be said and no more.  Whilst Plein sud is not as comfortable a ride as Lifshitz’s previous films - Les Corps ouverts (1998), Presque rien (1999), and Wild Side (2004), which deal with similar themes - it offers a haunting exploration of the darker side of human experience that is every bit as perceptive, nuanced and daring.

© filmsdefrance.com 2010

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