Au galop (2012)
Directed by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing

Film Review

It was in Mia Hansen-Løve's irresistibly poignant drama Le Père de mes enfants (2009) that Louis-Do de Lencquesaing came into his own as an actor and was revealed to be a performer of rare charm and sensitivity.  With Au galop (a.k.a. In a Rush) Lencquesaing makes his feature debut as a director, and the very same qualities that mark him out as an actor of the first rank are to be found in his writing and mise-en-scène.  In narrative terms, however, Au galop is an ungainly hodgepodge of a film, bursting at the seams with familiar archetypes and well-worn plot ideas.  The allusions to the films of François Truffaut are far from subtle and become wearying after a time (particularly the unnecessary use of voiceover narration).  Yet, for all its flaws, Au galop is a film that is not without charm, and Lencquesaing's well-developed faculty for expressing the pains of life with acuity and compassion is as evident here as it is in his previous screen portrayals as an actor.

Au galop is fundamentally an exercise in compare and contrast.  Through the amorous exploits of three women of different generations it presents the changing face of romantic love as one gallops along life's highway.  Lencquesaing plays the main character, a writer with suicidal tendencies who falls hopelessly in love with a woman (Valentina Cervi) who is already in a settled relationship.  Alice de Lencquesaing, the director's daughter both on and off-screen, is the free-spirited teenager negotiating her first romantic fling.  At the other end of the age spectrum, a magnificent Marthe Keller gives widowhood a bad name as she goes off on her final quest for happiness.  The film might easily have been dubbed 'The Three Ages of Love', an enticing triptych of desire that resounds with truth, wit and gentle irony.

The problem is that, in constructing his narrative and developing his colourful cast of characters, Lencquesaing just doesn't know where to stop.  Xavier Beauvois is wasted in a secondary story strand involving the main character's brother that doesn't go anywhere and merely distracts from the main thrust of the film.  The impact of the death of a patriarch on his family could itself been the subject of an entire film but here it is one ingredient among many, its poignancy diluted by the superabundance of ideas that Lencquesaing feels he must crowbar into his first film.  Au galop feels like an Arnaud Desplechin film that has completely run away with itself, or a rampaging plant has been too timidly cultivated.  Whilst it is hard to deny that there is a piercing authenticity to this film, and that certain scenes within it are both captivating and intensely moving, it is to be regretted that Lencquesaing has yet to see the virtue of applying Occam's razor to his art.  But as directorial debuts go it's not a bad first bash.

Film Synopsis

Married to a successful businessman, the mother of a daughter she adores, Ada could not have made a better life for herself.  But then she meets Paul, a depressive writer who lives alone with his daughter.  For Ada and Paul it is love at first sight, but the romance has barely got under way before Paul's father dies, creating a cruel distraction.  Why is nothing in life ever straightforward?  Nothing but complications - and time goes past so quickly...