Film review

  • My Donkey, My Lover & I

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • Firebird

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peeter Rebane (2021)

    In 1977, on a military base in Soviet-occupied Estonia, a cadet falls in love with a dashing fighter pilot.  At the start of Firebird, Sergey (Tom Prior) is in a tentative romance with Luisa (Diana Podharskaya), secretary to the base commander, Kuznetsov (Nicholas Woodeson), and counting the days to the end of his national service.  The arrival on the scene of Lieutenant Roman Medveyev (Oleg Zagorodnii) changes all that.  He and Sergey are initially drawn to together by a shared interest in photography and theatre.  Sergey has never been to the ballet; Roman has an exeat to see The Firebird.  He arranges for Sergey to drive him there and watch the show.  The intensely vivid colours on the stage contrast gorgeously with the thoroughgoing greyness of the Cold War-era military base.  On the way back from the theatre, the physical relationship between Sergey and Roman begins.   Homosexuality in the Soviet Union armed forces was illegal.  Roman, all set for a doubly high-flying military career, is nervous of being found out, especially once an anonymous letter comes into the possession of hostile, inquisitive Major Zverev (Margus Prangel).

    Sergey had intended, after military service, to return home to work on his widowed mother’s small farm.  Instead, with Roman’s encouragement, he applies successfully for a place at a prestigious Moscow drama school.  By 1979, he’s flourishing there but is shocked by Luisa’s news when she comes to visit:  she and Roman are to be married and she’s pregnant with his child.  The second half of the film takes place in the early 1980s.  Sergey is about to graduate; Roman, on a temporary posting to Moscow, takes an apartment there, leaving his wife and their young son back in Estonia.  The affair between Sergey and Roman resumes.  When Luisa arrives to celebrate New Year with her husband they and Sergey mark the occasion together, at what proves to be a last supper.  Sensitive to his lover’s divided feelings, Sergey departs next morning, leaving a note that tells Roman their relationship is over.  Luisa reads the note before her husband has chance to do so.  She returns to Estonia and Roman joins the Soviet invasion forces in Afghanistan, where he’s killed in action.  In the film’s closing sequence, Sergey is back in a theatre (and conspicuous in a distracting way:  he wears a DJ and black tie – unlike any of the other men glimpsed in the audience).  With tears in his eyes, he’s watching the same Stravinsky ballet that marked the start of his and Roman’s romance.

    Firebird, receiving its world premiere at this year’s (online) BFI Flare festival, is the first dramatic feature by Peeter Rebane, who has previously directed pop videos and TV shows, and the documentary Tashi Delek! (2015).  He and Tom Prior also produced (with Brigita Rozenbrika) and wrote the screenplay, based on The Story of Roman, a memoir by the Russian actor Sergey Fetisov (who died in 2017).  Rebane is Estonian, as is much of the cast, though Oleg Zagorodnii is Ukrainian and Diana Podharskaya is Russian.  Yet the dialogue is in English – I guess because the lead actor is British and/or Firebird means to make its mark in the Anglophone market.  The non-native speakers of English aren’t all equally comfortable with their lines but this isn’t a big issue.  Prior and Nicholas Woodeson (an experienced screen East European – Borgen, The Death of Stalin) speak lightly accented English, which helps unify the sound of the film’s voices.

    This absorbing film has real merits but it must be said that it features more plot clichés than surprises.  Although the visual leitmotifs are well worked out (and well photographed, by Mait Mäekivi), the ideas underlying them are very familiar.  The pelagic imagery is the standout example.  In a prologue, fragments of which replay in Sergey’s mind at subsequent points, two pre-adolescent boys swim underwater.  In the opening scene proper, Sergey, Luisa and their friend Volodja (Jake Henderson), another cadet, have made an unauthorised excursion from the air base to go swimming – the emphasis, for Sergey anyway, seems to be on holding his breath underwater for as long as possible.  Sergey and Roman swim and make love in the sea on the night of The Firebird:  the sequence climaxes (the only word for it) almost comically, with a shot of two fighter jets soaring overhead.  On a later, otherwise idyllic seaside trip together, Sergey reveals to Roman that his best friend in childhood drowned at the age of thirteen, in light of the boy’s father’s reaction to his son’s incipient gayness.  By now, Peeter Rebane’s illustrations of forbidden sexual feelings putting you in deep water are getting a bit much.

    For as long as the action is focused on the military base, the main characters’ predicament is plain.  Extravagantly homophobic insults directed at Sergey and his fellow cadets, in the disciplinary rants of their psycho supervisor (Kaspar Velberg), convey the taken-as-read impossibility of actual same-sex activities in this environment.  The supervisor abuses his charges as ‘fags’ etc not because he thinks they are but because these are the most insulting terms he can think to use.  Once the narrative moves on to Moscow, however, it loses clarity – especially regarding Sergey’s relationships at the drama school.   He’s a leading light of his year, attracts students of both sexes but is disengaged from the other students.  Rebane may mean to suggest that, because of his devotion to Roman, Sergey lives like a monk while they’re apart but it’s hard to accept that interested parties in this community would know to leave Sergey alone.  Masha (Ester Kuntu), who fancies him, also recognises that he’s committed to his studies (she says he always has his nose in a book).  Yet Ester Kuntu’s warmth and sparky curiosity in the role make it hard to believe that Masha wouldn’t be determined to find out more about Sergey.

    Roman and Luisa’s wedding breakfast is held at the air base.  All Roman’s colleagues, even the piggish Zverev, are in attendance; the bride and groom’s families are noticeably absent; the only civilian present is Sergey, despite his unhappy feelings about the marriage.  He appears to have accepted an invitation in order to seduce Roman when they briefly leave the dining room and that Zverev can then again try and fail to catch them in flagrante delicto.  The best moment of this mostly unconvincing episode comes in Colonel Kuznetsov’s remark that he understands how Sergey must feel seeing Roman and Luisa together.  ‘I knew what was going on under my nose’, says the colonel and Sergey freezes.  ‘Yes,’ Kuznetsov continues, ‘if he hadn’t come along, she would have married you’.

    Once Roman is in Moscow and Sergey moves in with him, the scenes between them are fine.  A party in the apartment, however, where the guests are other military officers and drama school students, made no sense to me:  aren’t Sergey and Roman both intent on keeping their private lives just that?  There are good bits here.  The cultural confusion of Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’ playing at a party in Moscow is funny.  Volodja opens a door to find Sergey and Roman inside, in each other’s arms:  after the extended suspense of sequences where the pair avoids detection by Zverev, the suddenness of this is effective.  But Volodja makes the discovery only so that he can then reveal to Sergey that he wrote the poison pen letter about Roman’s sexual preferences which triggered Zverev’s mission to discredit him.  It’s also puzzling that the always apprehensive Roman isn’t more anxious about the consequences of Volodja’s discovery – and, indeed, that there don’t seem to be any consequences.

    Tom Prior is thirty but looks younger, passing easily for a fresh-faced cadet and someone of normal student age.  Prior gives a decent performance but, in such a big role, doesn’t show enough range to avoid becoming repetitive.  The two other faces of the film’s love triangle are more compelling.  Diana Podharskaya is emotionally fluid; she impresses despite an underwritten part.  Oleg Zagorodnii, with his chiselled features and penetrating eyes, cuts an imposing figure.  He makes you think Firebird would have been better as (and as per Sergey Fetisov’s title) the story of Roman, who is subject to stronger pressures than Sergey to conform and conceal, and always ambivalent.  One of the dramatic highlights is the immediate aftermath to a dangerous flying mission that Roman is lucky, and knows he’s lucky, to survive.  Sergey seeks him out to check he’s OK, Roman, in that moment, is ready to throw emotional caution aside.  This close shave, in retrospect, foreshadows of Roman’s death in action, which has another aspect too.  His departure for Afghanistan, soon after Luisa’s discovery of his affair with Sergey, has the quality of a suicide mission:  Roman feels his sexuality leaves him nowhere to go.

    After learning of his death, Sergey pays a call on Luisa and her child – an affecting scene thanks to the trio’s mess of unhappy feelings.  The fatherless son (uncredited on IMDb) is particularly expressive, though he looks considerably older than the three-year-old I thought he was meant to be.  But neither this scene nor Sergey’s return visit to The Firebird is quite the film’s last word.  Concluding text notes that Estonia, on regaining its independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, espoused more liberal approaches to same-sex relationships; but that recent years have seen a sharp regression in Russian attitudes to gay men in the military.  Peeter Rebane plays his final card unusually late.  Right at the end of the closing credits, the unlovely Major Zverev returns to view.  His is the face on the screen immediately before it goes dark.

    18 March 2021

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