Vincent n'a pas d'écailles (2015)
Directed by Thomas Salvador

Film Review

Vincent n'a pas d'écailles promotes itself as France's first superhero film and one that is one hundred per cent free of digital effects.  It's a pitch that sounds too good to be true but expectations of a crumby Batman-on-a-shoestring abomination are resolutely shot to pieces by what up-and-coming film auteur Thomas Salvador lobs in our wary direction.  It's actually an anti-superhero film, about an ordinary-looking drifter (played by Salvador himself) who, on discovering that by taking a shower he becomes a cross-between the Bionic Man and the Man from Atlantis, prefers to keep this to himself as he seeks out a modest life in sunny Provence.  Salvador's film is quirky, funny and poignant - all in a refreshingly downbeat way - but, above all else, it is highly original.  You're unlikely ever to have seen a film quite like it, and probably never will again. 

This may be Thomas Salvador's first full-length film but he is no stranger to cinema.  He already has half a dozen short films to his name, many of which have garnered considerable praise from the critics, and his 2006 short De Sortie won him the prestigious Prix Jean-Vigo.  Salvador's idiosyncratic style of cinema defies a simplistic genre classification - Vincent n'a pas d'écailles is as much a piece of social realism as it is a sci-fi fantasy, a romantic comedy as well as an adventure movie, but in fact it is all of these things and none of them.  It is the kind of film that defines its own genre, as uniquely magical and poetic as the equally unclassifiable films of Georges Méliès and Jacques Tati, with literally nothing else to compare it with.  You can if you wish read a deeper philosophical meaning into the film, but Salvador appears content to entertain with his weird powers of invention.

Vincent n'a pas d'écailles may have had a miserly sum of one and half million euros at its disposal, but it looks sumptuous, primarily because it is set in one of the most resplendent areas of France, the Gorges Du Verdon in Provence in southeast France.  Alexis Kavyrchine's stunning location photography contributes much to the film's raw lyricism, making it a celebration of the natural world as much as anything else.  In the sun-dappled lakes that seem to stretch on forever in this earthly paradise, we have the wonderfully surreal spectacle of the central protagonist flying in and out of the water like a humped-back whale on steroids, a humorous allusion to Free Willy (1993) which has big payoff at the end of the film.  Through such vivid sequences, Vincent's intimate communion with Nature is powerfully expressed - this is the film's spiritual core around which Salvador constructs a smple but effective fable on the theme of identity and integrity.

Salvador honours his promise not to resort to CGI trickery.  All of the effects that we see in the film are of the old-fashioned sort that rely far more on ingenuity and sinew than technical wizardry, and they are none the worse for that.  Now that CGI has become so sophisticated and endemic (almost to the point where physical sets, and even real actors, have become virtually redundant) it's hard to believe that the effects in Salvador's film were not realised digitally, yet they were and they are incredibly realistic.  Whether he's leaping twenty feet into the air or surging across the Atlantic like a whale propelled by jet turbines, Salvador convinces us that that his screen alter ego is a man with genuine superhuman powers.  The film may have had a micro-budget, but its effects are comparable with, if not better than, those of your average Hollywood blockbuster, and you can't help wondering if laziness rather than a striving for better effects has been the driving force behind the CGI revolution.

Salvador's film clearly owes something to the silent films of Buster Keaton, and its self-effacing hero has a very Keaton-esque quality about him, his attempts to lead a normal life endlessly frustrated by events that force him to take to his heels and follow one death-defying stunt with another.  The gentle humour is tinged with poignancy as Vincent's hopes of settling down to an ordinary life with a nice girl (rising star Vimala Pons) are endlessly frustrated, first by his own sense of loyalty to a work colleague which leads to an unfortunate incident with a cement mixer, and then by the French gendarmerie, who end up chasing him around Provence like a bad Keystone Cops tribute act.  Vincent's insistence that he does not have scales (meaning he is a regular guy and not a freak) falls on deaf ears - even his girlfriend has to check out for herself that he doesn't have webbed feet.

With virtually no dialogue and nothing in the way of a score, Vincent n'a pas d'ecailles is practically a silent film, relying almost entirely on its visuals to tell the story and suggest (rather than force) the appropriate emotional response, which it does with considerable ease.   The unassuming, easy-going nature of the central protagonist is reflected in the film as a whole, which makes a virtue of being underplayed and unshowy but, in doing so, it risks passing without being noticed.  Thomas Salvador is not the kind of artist you'd ever expect to see blowing his own trumpet (at least not too loudly) so his debut feature may not find the audience it deserves.  Fortunate are they who are able to catch this pleasing little oddity at it zips past, for it is assuredly one of the most sincere and original French comedies in years.

Film Synopsis

On the spur of the moment, Vincent leaves the city and heads south to Provence in search of a new life.  Here, he finds work as a labourer on a construction site and takes time out to go swimming in the region's bountiful lakes and rivers.  It is whilst he is indulging in his aquatic leisure pursuits that Vincent realises he has acquired the strength of ten men.  Not only can he swim like a dolphin, he can also leap into the air higher than any man.  These new-found special powers last only whilst Vincent is in contact with water, which is fortunate because his only desire is to live an ordinary life.  One day, he meets a young woman of his own age, Lucie, and a mutual attraction soon develops, although Vincent is coy about revealing his superhuman prowess to her.  Vincent's summer idyll is brought to a sudden close when he ends up on the wrong side of the law after pushing a cement-mixer through a car windscreen.  Pursued by the police, the young man makes full use of his unwished for powers to evade capture and begin a new life, in a land far away...