... and I'll happily give you ALL of Jean-Luc Godard, who has had the effrontery to bring out a new title to excite the heavily anaesthetized taste-buds of the Academic-Pseud axis. If he's lucky as many as thirty people may see it with probably fourteen successfully fighting the urge to throw up. Meanwhile the REAL filmmakers of whom Nicole Garcia is one, continue to entertain, albeit the tame reviewer manqué at films de France has, as usual, seen fit to trash it. This time around Garcia directs her own son, Pierre Rochefort and coaxes a half-decent performance out of him if anybody asks you. He plays a drifter who appears content to remain a supply teacher indefinitely despite being urged to remain in the case of at least one school. Over the Whitsun weekend he notices that one boy has not been collected. He takes him home and discovers the boy is shared between his estranged parents and the father has forgotten it is his turn at bat. At a loose end the teacher takes the boy home with him and subsequently to where the mother is working as a waitress in Montpelier. Perhaps inevitably the thee lost souls bond and when he learns that the mother owes some serious money to near-gangsters Garcia allows the story to spin off at a tangent and reveal that a man who barely has change of a match is in reality the scion of a wealthy family who, in their wisdom, had him committed several years before. Garcia brings off this volte-face as effortlessly as Billy Wilder allowed The Apartment to segue from comedy to drama in 1961. Another fine effort from a fine writer-director who is also a great actress on the side if anybody asks you.
Review of Going Away
