Film Review
As directing debuts come few are quite as ambitious as that of
Christophe Offenstein, a César-nominated cinematographer who has
received numerous plaudits for his work, including several
collaborations with director Guillaume Canet (
Ne le dis à personne,
Les Petits mouchoirs,
Blood Ties). With a hefty
budget of 17 million euros, Offenstein finds himself helming a
sea-based adventure-thriller, but despite his best efforts he somehow
ends up drowning in an ocean of soggy clichés.
En solitaire delivers a minuscule
fraction of what it promises, although the fault lies not in
Offenstein's direction but in an infantile screenplay that stretches
credulity to breaking point.
First the good points - and there are few. François Cluzet
is an admirable casting choice for the lead character, a roughly hewn
Breton sea lover who is as at home on the billowing wave as a frog is in a
lily pond. The sequences depicting Cluzet's struggle against the
elements are a visual tour de force (masterfully photographed by ace
cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman) and are both viscerally exciting
and intensely involving. If only Offenstein had been able to
sustain this level of excellence, and had had the courage to jettison
the bulk of the anodyne padding that makes up most of the narrative, he
would had a near-masterpiece on his hands. Sadly, the film's
title proves to be a terrible misnomer. Cluzet appears alone on
screen for little over ten minutes. That leaves 86 minutes to be
accounted for, and most of it is excruciatingly painful to sit through.
The film quickly starts to lose its bearings when the narrative splits
and takes us off into the strained domestic life of the hero's
girlfriend. From action on the high seas to the tedium of
sub-standard television soap, with the cliché count climbing
ever higher. It looks as if things may begin to pick up when
Cluzet discovers a West African stowaway aboard his yacht, an event
that puts in jeopardy his chance of fulfilling his life's
ambition. A vague memory of John Sturges'
The Old Man and the Sea (1958)
flashes across your mind. Maybe
En
solitaire will turn out to be a similarly poetic odyssey in
which a man's proximity to Nature allows him to discover his
humanity? No such luck. By this stage, the ship is
well and truly sunk and nothing on Earth will salvage it.
Despite Samy Seghir's engaging persona and François Cluzet's
talent for introspective character development the interaction between
their two characters just fails to ring true. There is a
half-hearted allusion to the topical issue of illegal migration, but
this somehow gets lost amidst the tacky, totally predictable plot
digressions that ensue.
En
solitaire ends up as nothing more than the crudest of
advertisements for the Vendée Globe competition, its few moments
of excellence deluged into oblivion by a tsunami of breathtaking
mediocrity.
© James Travers 2013
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
Yann Kermadec's dream comes true when, at the last moment, he has to
replace his friend, Franck Drevil, in a round-the-world yachting
tournament. Driven by a fanatical desire to succeed, Yann is
ready to do anything to win the competition. But his ambitions
are threatened when he finds that a teenage migrant has stowed aboard his
craft...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.