On Tour/Tournée

The first film to screen in competition at Cannes turns out to be a fairly humble affair. Mathieu Amalric, that infuriatingly charismatic French actor, makes his directorial debut with a drama about a declining impresario – the type of character John Cassavetes might have loved – struggling to reconnect with his children and rebuild his professional career.

Or is that really the theme? Amalric has, it seems, been following the recent revival in American burlesque and has attempted to make a film concerning that odd diversion. The oily, fumbling protagonist (played with reliable élan by the director) has hooked up with a troupe of aging US dancers and – for his own concealed reasons – taken them on a tour of France. They bump. They grind. They bump some more.

Unfortunately, the dance routines and the bawdy adventures seem somewhat bolted-on to the protagonist’s story. Moreover, the dancers’ dialogue, as is often the case when Anglophone characters speak in foreign-language films, comes across as oddly distant and a little under-directed.

The good news is that Amalric finds space to create another of his engaging, supernaturally sleazy outsiders. Wearing an absurd collar and a deeply unnecessary moustache, he manages to fling equal degrees of poignancy and hopelessness about the screen. It’s just a shame that, on this occasion, this fine actor didn’t have a slightly better director.