Movie Review The Sweet Escape

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As a diary entry today (Friday 19th October 2018) involved only two event of note. 1/. I went to the barbers for a shave, and found there was only one customer ahead of me, who was very close to being finished with by the young lady barber. Two minutes after I arrived about eight other customers arrived. Had I not got there before them I would have ended up waiting about two hours. 2/. The film review of The Sweet Escape. This was the fourth feature in this year’s week long International Film Festival, for which I have a free pass. It’s a lovely if inconsequential French comedy from 2015. Spoiler alerts. Written by, starring, and directed by Bruno Podalydes, it tells of an advertising agent, Michel, who has dreamt all his life of escaping to the skies in a postal-delivery aeroplane. When he stumbles on a photo of a kayak, he sees its shape as not unlike a wingless plane, buys one online, and despite lack of experience, he decides to set off on an adventure with no destination in mind. His wife seems unusually keen for him to take the trip rather than worried about his mid-life crisis or how ill-prepared he is. After a few funny if predictable mishaps he reaches a riverside camp site just four kilometres from where he set off, and various circumstances keep him from getting much further downstream before he ends up back there repeatedly. Other guests seem equally trapped there but happy. Two older men build a rope-pull ferry to reach to and from the opposite bank despite there being nothing there worth going there for. Michel sends his wife faked phone photos and messages claiming to be much further on in his journey. He learns that he has left the sat nav indicator on which means each image can betray his real lack of progress but also learns from images sent to him that his wife is seeing another man rather than visiting her gym as she has been claiming. Michel ends up having affairs with several women, and there is a running gag in which he sees and upsets an angry fisherman who he insults for resembling the actor, Pierre Arditi, and he is played by Pierre Arditi. The film doesn’t end. It simply stops as Michel sets off in his Kayak again, probably doomed as ever for his dreams to go nowhere while he thinks he is making great progress. The song about a plane without wings captures a sense of the cheerful delusion Michel is living out. Amusing rather than hilarious comedy, with some dashes of existential messages about nothing mattering anyway. Youtube – the trailer for The Sweet Escape Arthur Chappell