SAINT AMOUR
North American Premiere • Comedy • France, 2016
DCP • 1.85 • Dolby 5.1 • Color • 101 min
Directed by: Benoît Delépine, Gustave Kervern
Written by: Benoît Delépine, Gustave Kervern
Cinematography: Hugues Poulain
Film Editing: Stéphane Elmadjian
Original Score: Sébastien Tellier
Produced by: Gustave Kervern, Benoît Delépine (No Money Productions), Jean-Pierre Guérin (JPG Films)
Cast: Benoît Poelvoorde (Bruno), Gérard Depardieu (Jean), (Bruno), Vincent Lacoste (Mike), Céline Sallette (Venus), Gustave Kervern (L’oncle)
International Sales: Le Pacte • lepacte.fr
Deadpan humor hits the highway for a romp through France’s most beautiful wine-growing regions, finding pathos - and some highly improbable sex - along the way. Benoît Poelvoorde brings his signature staccato to the role of Bruno, a lonely, patched-together, wannabe-anything-but cattle farmer. Bruno hopes to drink his way through his personal crisis by taking the “national wine tour”, a series of regional wine stalls at Paris’ annual agriculture trade fair. When Bruno’s buzz turns belligerent, his father Jean decides that a tour of the real wine country is just the thing to help his son better appreciate France’s rural traditions. On the spot, Jean hires a cabbie, the handsome but smug city slicker Mike, and the unlikely trio hoof it out to the countryside to squeeze in a little drinking between hilariously awkward hookups and offbeat encounters, including one with author Michel Houellebecq as a disturbing B&B proprietor. Gérard Depardieu brings some heft to the proceedings as the genial, but slightly befuddled dad hoping to reconnect with his wayward son.
The holy terrors of Franco-Belgian film are back with their seventh film. Writing/directing duo Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern are specialists when it comes to the anarchic road trip comedy. There’s the cross-country wheelchair “odd-yssey” Aaltra (COLCOA 2005). There’s Depardieu starring as a not-so-easy-rider in Mammuth (COLCOA 2011), and there’s Near Death Experience (2014) in which Michel Houellebecq takes a philosophical spin as a suicidal cyclist. Their work has always flirted with the absurd, as with the Sundance Special Jury Prize winner Louise-Michel (COLCOA 2009) about factory workers pooling their money to hire a hit man to kill the boss, and Avida (2006), about a dognapping by two deaf-mute ketamine addicts. But as chaotic and broad as their films can be, there is usually a touch of authentic tenderness extended to their characters, even if some of them don’t deserve it. Both Delépine and Kervern got their start in TV, doing political satire. They still contribute to the Canal + comic show, Made in Groeland.
QUOTES:
“…leaves you feeling warm, fuzzy and with a taste for the simpler things in life: this wine-soaked adventure knocks Sideways out of the park.”
– India Halstead, Culture Whisper
“…should go some way to restoring Gérard Depardieu as one of France’s greatest actors.”
– Judith Prescott, French Film Review
