My Donkey, My Lover & I
Antoinette dans les Cévennes
Caroline Vignal (2020)
The donkey’s known as Patrick, the lover’s name is Vladimir and I is Antoinette Lapouge, a Paris primary school teacher. She can’t wait for the school summer holidays to begin so that she can spend more time with Vladimir. At an end-of-term concert, Antoinette (Laure Calamy), in a low-cut, close-fitting, shiny silver gown, leads her Year 5 class in a rendition of Véronique Sanson’s ‘Amoureuse’. The song choice and Mme Lapouge’s get-up are understandably disconcerting to some of the parents watching. Among them is Vladimir (Benjamin Lavernhe), whose daughter Alice (Louise Vidal) is one of Antoinette’s pupils. Rather than raising his eyebrows, he smiles a tad nervously and gives a wave of encouragement in the direction of Alice or her teacher or both. Antoinette belts out, ‘When I’m away from him/I’ve lost my mind a little …’ and Vladimir knows who she means. After the concert and a clandestine snog, he announces he won’t be available as soon as Antoinette had hoped. Vladimir is off to the Cévennes with Alice and his wife. They’ll follow the ‘Stevenson trail’, the route taken by Robert Louis Stevenson and recorded in his Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. The distraught, impulsive Antoinette heads there too, in pursuit. A very few screen minutes later, she’s being invited to choose a donkey for the mountain trek. She makes her selection and is told ‘good choice’ by a local. He’s joking. Patrick is notorious for refusing to budge.
On the face of it, My Donkey, My Lover & I is a barmy concoction of broad comedy, tourist commercial and character study. The writer-director Caroline Vignal has made only one cinema feature before and that was twenty years ago (Girlfriends). It seems long odds against the film working yet it does, not just in each one of its travelogue, comic and more serious aspects but, increasingly, as a whole. Simon Beaufils’ cinematography may well help boost holiday bookings in the Cévennes but the glorious landscape is context. The film doesn’t luxuriate in it: Vignal’s characters are usually too preoccupied with their own affairs to savour the surroundings. When Antoinette arrives at the inn where she’ll spend her first night there’s no sign of Vladimir and his family. At the communal supper table, she blurts out to inquisitive fellow guests the reason for her visit and admits she’s utterly inexperienced in this kind of holiday. That sows the seeds of a fame that spreads along the Stevenson trail in the days ahead: by the time Antoinette reaches her later destinations, her reputation, embellished by the various indignities she suffers en route, precedes her. Some of the farcical incidents are funnier than others but, as they accumulate, they add to the central character’s substance and, sometimes, pathos. The mixture of humour and pain involved – especially during Antoinette’s eventual encounter with Vladimir and his family – is surprisingly rich.
Caroline Vignal’s screenplay is a smart piece of work. The episodic structure dovetails with the heroine’s journey – six daily stages, staying overnight at different inns and gîtes. Travelling twenty or so kilometres a day chimes with Antoinette’s covering a distance of emotional ground but so does, on one leg of the expedition, her going round in a circle and ending where she started. She finds that Patrick is more likely to move if she keeps talking to him so she does: it’s a neat way of telling the viewer more about her, including her perennial habit of choosing the wrong man to get involved with. When he finally sees Vladimir, Patrick lets out a prolonged, alarming bray – an inventive, admonitory variation on ‘I’ve heard so much about you’. It’s right that the donkey takes precedence over the man in the order of the English title. The romcom convention of the couple-to-be at first loathing then warming to each other applies here to Antoinette and Patrick rather than Antoinette and Vladimir. The latter isn’t presented as a villain; when he and Antoinette have sex under the stars he is – as Antoinette tells Patrick next day – tenderly loving. Vladimir seems feeble, though, in the company of his apparently formidable wife Eléonore (Olivia Côte). As she and Antoinette walk side by side, with Vladimir and Alice a little way ahead, Eléonore explains that she realises what her husband’s up to, and that he’s done it plenty of times before. Antoinette is left feeling guilty and hurt – that’s even before Patrick suddenly takes off and drags her along the ground for a hundred yards. Soon after, Vladimir, along with his wife and daughter, disappears from the film.
The performances in all three title roles are very successful but My Donkey, My Lover & I comes off thanks to Laure Calamy, perhaps best known as one of the regulars in the international hit TV series Dix pour cent, aka Call My Agent! She was good in her supporting role in a very different animal-related film, Dominik Moll’s Seules les bêtes (2019), though without standing out in a strong cast. Vignal’s movie offers Calamy close to a one-woman show – she seizes the opportunity and shoulders the responsibility with aplomb. Her histrionic verve, which seems excessive at the start (and so threatens to get tiresome), proves to be crucial. This OTT quality, as well as sustaining the film’s otherwise fragile energy level, expresses the anxiety – and anxiety to please – behind her character’s bubbly affability. From the start, she makes Antoinette so exuberantly clueless that it’s hard to resent her as a would-be marriage wrecker. Calamy’s realistic acting is just as good, notably when Antoinette has no option but to listen, excruciatingly embarrassed, to Eléonore’s monologue. My Donkey, My Lover & I was a surprise critical and commercial success in France last year. Earlier this month, Laure Calamy won the César for Best Actress for her work in the film – an accolade that suggests César voters, despite the bad press the organisation has received in the last year or two, may be more broad-minded and good-humoured than their BAFTA counterparts have become.
Lying in her dormitory bunk bed – standard sleeping accommodation for her during the trip – Antoinette reads her copy of Travels with a Donkey. She’s already learned from Idriss (Denis Mpunga), one of her auberge hosts, that Stevenson undertook his Cévennes journey during the most difficult stage of what proved to be his lifelong partnership with Fanny Osbourne. Now she notes Stevenson’s observation that ‘We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend’. Patrick is too wily an individual to meet that description but Antoinette is genuinely grateful to him at the end of their six days together. When she learns he’s already on his next assignment she runs, despite a sprained ankle, to find him (another romcom trope). The idea is to say goodbye but Patrick’s new partner, whose name is Romain (Matthieu Sampeur), invites Antoinette to walk further with them. That’s what she does and how the film ends. Romain is probably the next mistake in her life but incurable romantic Antoinette can always hope.
19 March 2021