One of my biggest regrets of attending last year's London Film Festival is skipping out on Excuse My French when it was my next screening. It's always refreshing to find rare films as an inflight movie. Despite the circumstances, Excuse My French is still a film with a great rhythmic energy, reminiscent of the auteur work of Wes Anderson and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. While this pace is kept up throughout the whole film, it's disappointing that it doesn't implement enough quirk or edge into its content. It brushes over clichés, albeit utilising them well, but not exploring them beyond archetypal necessity. Films that dive into school environments with such immersion and heightened fantasy are usually hit-and-miss for me, and this is both at the same time. Perhaps if I understood or related more to the Muslim/Christian tension in Egypt then the film's political themes could've resonated more, but it's entertaining and empathetic at the very least. Being different and pushed around is easy to relate to in any form and well executed here. With his idiosyncratic style, Amr Salama could easily give us a couple of great commercials before breaking through with a mainstream movie if he wished to do so.
7/10
