Direction: Caroline Vignal
Country: France
This more-annoying-than-seductive French rom-com by writer-director Caroline Vignal (Girlfriends, 2000) follows Antoinette Lapouge (Laure Calamy), an impulsive, cheeky schoolteacher who follows her married lover (Benjamin Lavernhe) to the Cévennes, a South-Central region in France with vast, often uncultivated landscapes where he’s enjoying a trekking holidays in family. Once there, she realizes that no one understands her better than the overprotective donkey that makes her company.
Vignal, who took inspiration from Robert Louis Stevenson's 1879 book Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, was already bewitched by the scenery of this national park, where she had spent a week in 2010 with her family. Working from her light, thin and transparent script, the director totally relies on the freewheeling performance of Calamy, who, hanging on the wire between ecstasy and fragility, gives the film an air of sweet fantasy. She comes up against the limits of the script, though.
Colorful but with no major throbs, this uninspired walk in nature seems content with a few vaguely droll sketches that can get excessively wearisome. The scenes with Antionette and Patrick, the donkey, are oft-repeated and unimaginative, playing again and again until our patience wears thin. But most of all, the biggest problem with the film is not being funny enough.
