Le roi de l'évasion

This is one on the best movies I have seen last year, and was lucky to see once again lately on DVD. It is so fresh, celebrating what is best in life: love, friends, freedom, nature, sensuality, and in an original way, with people you rarely see on movies, I mean elderly farmer, whom are very authentic and funny... Also the director really succeed in creating a world and atmosphere of its own, with incredible character, and succeed every time in surprising you. You also feel sometimes like its a kind of dream, and that the movie beyond its realistic kind is somehow almost fantastic. Of course, if you are the kind of people whom only like classic character, handsome boys and sexy girls, you will be very disappointed. But if you like original and somehow crazy movies, that are sincere and simple, you will definitely like this one!

When I first read about the movie, I thought I might be bored, but I was wrong. The movie is very funny, from beginning to end. The humor is sometimes slight, sometimes obvious, sometimes verbal, sometimes visual. The plot is original and rich. The hero is a gay man in his forties, leading stagnant life, not necessarily fulfilling, but not miserable either. Several things happen that cause him to doubt himself, and develop midlife crisis. He's attempting to make some drastic changes in his life, and goes though a comic journey of finding himself. Although the hero is gay, the story conveys a message that is universally appealing, for gay and straight viewers. Very enjoyable movie!

This is a 'film' from French director Alain Guiraudie who got a lot of attention for 'Stranger by the lake'. In this film from 2009 we have a 43 year old tractor salesman Armand - who is gay and likes to cruise the local beauty spot for 'older men' falling in love with a 16 year old girl.

Her father does not like it and neither do the police. So they go on the 'run'. This basically means panting about the woods in various states of undress then stopping for a bit of al fresco rutting.

Now there are some very well observed conversations about love and relationships and the whole point of life. They are by far the most appealing aspects to this movie. Where it falls down is in the sheer lack of credibility of the plot. The idea that any police force this side of North Korea has the power or manpower to behave the way they do here is ludicrous. The love story is also badly realised and the running away scenes are not even pretentious enough to be laughable.

This is a film where you could watch segments on fast forward and you would not miss a jot. I found it massively underwhelming and a bit insulting to the intelligence to be honest. This is one I should not have bothered with as I felt a lot of the problems with the aforementioned 'Stranger by the lake' are prevalent here too. I will not be beating a path to watch any more of Mousier Guiraudie's future efforts. But if you can suspend belief for an hour and a half and enjoy 'bear' types in the woods then this may be worth a punt.

Where to begin?!A good start would be the total, even fraudulent,misuse of the word 'comedy' to describe this film. Bearing in mind the storyline (middle aged homosexual man in a small french village becomes involved with a sixteen year old girl), I knew I wouldn't be rolling in the aisles with laughter but I did expect witty, ironic and wry (but not too much since they are French after all ...). What I got was a handful of badly delivered, moderately funny lines and a total absence of any, even slightly, comic scenes. Which brings me to the next problem, the so called plot. Again I didn't expect a Hollywoodian epic, just a well written plot with strong characters.The reality? A series of 'scenes' with no particular sense, a large number of which focused on a man cycling or running or looking socially inept. The characters were one dimensional characters,for which I felt no interest, empathy or affinity. I had no idea where the film was going (nowhere, incidentally)and I had the impression neither did the director. In short I found this film self-satisfied,pretentious and dull.

I had to sleep on this film to really get it.

What happens: An utterly french form of cinematic licence generates classic and true surreal humour. A playful narrative reversal based on an all prevailing rule of 'what if' .

What if:

1.You take a common narrative - the straight married man's midlife crisis leads him to seek comfort in a gay friend and question his sexuality - and reverse that to a partnered non-monogamous gay man has a midlife crisis and seeks comfort in an affair with a teenage girl.

2.You take a common cinematic portrayal of the gay man as young, good looking, urban, sophisticated and inverse that to one of a fat, perhaps unattractive, unsophisticated, small town (straight butch role of) tractor dealer. This narrative inverse generates the unusual context from which we shall experience provincial french life.

From that point, the logic of questioning 'possibility' itself quickly accelerates and dominates the film.

What if the Conservative catholic small minded provincial France commonly portrayed as the real France allows for men to commit sodomy and fellatio each other as a matter of course ?

What if sex is made predominant on all levels of provincial France - gang rape, gay cruising, underage sex, etc so that in the end the 'what if' logic runs out of control and poses the ultimate question, at what point should one stop undoing expectation and to what extent, if you reverse all expectation, do you alter reality ? The excessiveness of narrative reversal turns out to be a classic surrealist strategy.

The English translation of this film is "The King of Escape' - but a better translation would be 'The king of evasion'. Armand carries with him this honour despite on many occasions appearing to look like the ultimate loser. He spends most of his time literally running around France in nothing but his underpants.

The question of evasion is central to the purpose and intent of this film. The evasion of expectation at any cost. Armand's midlife crisis embodies that reflex - indeed you could argue all psychological crisis is a play off between the need for confrontation and the desire to escape.

The film goads conservative France with a relentless uncomfortable matter of fact explicitness. In doing so it forces both hidden realities and fantasies to the fore. A deceptively simple film turns out to be a clever well thought out and powerful form of speculation about how we implicitly engineer society.