Une petite zone de turbulences (2010) - film review

Jean-Pierre has only recently retired but already his plans for a trouble-free retirement appear to be in jeopardy.  A manic hypochondriac, he naturally assumes that when he sees a spot on his right hip he is soon going to die from cancer.  His faith in the medical profession is such that he decides to take the matter into his own hands, and in doing so risks convincing everyone that he is losing his mind.  His second disaster is to find his faithful wife Anne in bed with an old friend and colleague of his.  He wonders how long it will be before his wife walks out on him and leaves him to die, alone and unloved.  He hardly notices the emotional crises that are presently afflicting his son Mathieu and daughter Cathie.  Mathieu’s relationship with his gay lover appears to be heading for the rocks whilst Cathie has made up her mind to marry a man whose I.Q. is only just above that of your average amoeba.  For Jean-Pierre, life could hardly get any grimmer...

Mark Haddon’s second adult novel, A Spot Of Bother (2006), receives a distinctively Gallic makeover in this offbeat comedy, scripted by and starring the incomparable Michel Blanc.  Mark Haddon is of course the unconventional British author and poet whose first novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (a story told from the perspective of an autistic teenager) became a worldwide bestseller in 2003.  Une petite zone de turbulences captures something of the eccentricity and disjointed absurdity of Haddon’s universe, but it lacks the essential British touch that would have made it much more daring and a lot funnier.  It says something about the state of the British film industry (i.e. the risk-averse nature of today’s film producers and distributors) that Haddon’s highly idiosyncratic novel should get its first dramatised treatment in France.

A good-natured little comedy, Une petite zone de turbulences marks a dramatic change in direction for its director Alfred Lot, who had previously distinguished himself with his debut feature La Chambre des morts (2007), an extremely intense thriller.   Producer Yves Marmion had originally approached Michel Blanc to direct the film but the actor declined, as he felt the film risked ending up resembling his earlier choral comedy Embrassez qui vous voudrez (2002).  Lot’s direction is far less inspired than it was on his first film, although his penchant for the macabre and weird is exercised in the film’s most shocking sequence, one that probably ranks as cinema’s maddest homage to the famous shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho. 

One of the strengths of the film is its ensemble of acting talent, which includes established names such as Miou-Miou, Michel Blanc and Mélanie Doutey, as well as rising stars Cyril Descours and Gilles Lellouche.  The combined presence of Miou-Miou and Blanc is enough to sell the film - they last appeared together in Bernard Blier’s anarchic comedy Tenue de soirée (1986).  Blanc is particularly well cast as the neurotic father, a recently retired executive type who becomes so obsessed with his imaginary crises that he ends up being almost oblivious to the real disasters that are piling up around him.  An actor who is beloved by French film audiences, Blanc has a rare gift for humanising grotesques.  Whilst many of the characters in his repertoire are ridiculous inadequates, he never fails to make us sympathise with them.  In Une petite zone de turbulences Blanc turns in one of his more engaging and nuanced performances, one that is both funny and intensely poignant. 

The rest of the cast are also supremely well-chosen and are pretty well beyond reproach.  Whilst the characters at first appear to be little more than stock clichés (the cheating wife, the headstrong daughter, the insecure gay son and the cerebrally deficient future son-in-law who appears to have missed several important stages in the evolutionary process), each actor succeeds in making his or her character believable and likeable.  Cyril Descours deserves a special mention for his sympathetic portrayal of the gay son whose emotional travails provide substance to the otherwise flimsy narrative.  By contrast, Miou-Miou and Mélanie Doutey are both criminally underused and have more difficulty extricating themselves from the tired old archetypes, although their presence is greatly appreciated.

Given Michel Blanc’s long association with comedy, it is surprising that in adapting Haddon’s zany novel he couldn’t inject more humour into the film.  There is certainly a fair abundance of comic incursions, from Marx Brothers’ style farce to the sickest kind of digression into black comedy (it’s probably best to avert your gaze when the main character attempts a spot of D.I.Y. surgery, cutting off an unwanted lesion with a pair of scissors).  The problem is that the comedy is pretty scattergun and is undermined by an uneven narrative that just seems to drift aimlessly in places.  What could have been a brilliantly tongue-in-cheek assault on the cosy bourgeois mindset ends up as a rather limp and structureless domestic comedy, a mild sitcom rather than the vicious satire it so badly wants to be.  It is almost the pallid inverse of François Ozon’s utterly ruthless Sitcom (1998), and you end up wishing that Ozon had been invited to direct the film.  Une petite zone de turbulences is not an unattractive film.  It has an appealing quirkiness and is at least partially redeemed by the sincerity of the performances, but it really does struggle to be much more than a pleasant little timewaster.

© James Travers 2012

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