Une semaine sur deux (et la moitié des vacances scolaires) (2009) - film review

At times, 12-year-old Léa can’t help wishing that she had a different family.  Her ideal is to have parents who shared the same house, a mother who understood her better, and a brother who wasn’t so keen to save the planet.  As her parents try to rebuild their lives, Léa has her first experience of love, and begins to see the world in a whole new light...

Precocious infants accustoming themselves to their parents’ separation, a pre-adolescent’s first painful experience of love, improbable rencontres that soon develop into turbulent romantic liaisons...  Une semaine sur deux (et la moitié des vacances scolaires) latches onto so many recycled story ideas that it cannot help resembling a closing down sale in a charity shop.   For his third feature, director Ivan Calbérac assembles a superlative cast but, with callous disregard for their talent, loses them all in the Grimpen Mire of a script that seems to have been written by someone suffering from an extreme case of attention deficit disorder.  There are some beautiful moments along the way (Bernard Campan is superb, as ever, and gives a sensitive and convincing portrayal of a divorced father struggling to reconstruct his life) but instead of weaving these together into a cohesive whole Calbérac is content merely to skate along the surface, jumping from one cri de coeur to another, like a manic télé-zappeur.  Anyone who has seen Calbérac’s very likeable debut feature Irène (2002) can only be disappointed by this limp coming-of-age comedy-drama, which is barely salvaged by its talented cast.

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?