Mathieu Amalric's forays into directing are so little-known outside France that when Tim Burton's Cannes jury handed him the mise-en-scène prize for On Tour, more than one prominent critic described the film as Amalric's first.
It's his fourth.
It's safe to say that in very few countries besides France would an aspiring director have made it to film number four, based on films one and two and three.
Amalric will tell anyone willing to listen that his career as an actor – a rather good one most of the time – is really an unplanned detour if not an outright error.
The son of a journalist and a literary critic set out to remain behind the camera. He worked as an assistant on films by Louis Malle and Romain Goupil. The story goes that wacky Georgian director Otar Iosseliani was short on actors and drafted the 19-year-old Amalric to play a part. Later, Arnaud Desplechin gave him juicy roles – most recently as the black sheep son in A Christmas Tale. Amalric has cavalierly engaged in full frontal nudity with the same reticence Mickey Rourke brings to plastic surgery.
In On Tour, the female protagonists remind their impresario, played by Amalric with a pencil moustache so sleazy it gives pencils a bad name, that they're doing their strip tease numbers not for him or, indeed, for any male member of the audience, but for themselves and for other women. So there.
In the sexually explicit Baise Moi – an ugly, stupid French film that got way too much attention some years back and was shown in way too many countries and prompted way too many quasi-scholarly essays – two angry women have explicit sex with a series of men and kill most of them, on purpose. In Damien Odoul's 2007 film The Story of Richard O, a woman kills the title character in the opening reel – without meaning to, angry because she'd asked him to wake her from a sound sleep and rape her and he did something sensitive and benign instead. A movie in which a man dies for not attacking a woman sexually isn't something the general public sees everyday. Nor is Mathieu Amalric's erect penis, which is on frequent display here, along with the rest of his anatomy, as his Richard prongs 13 utterly willing, physically varied women in the weeks before his accidental death.
Amalric's friend Odoul plays his ex-friend in On Tour. Odoul's character gives Amalric's character an epic, mostly verbal, dressing down. In his own film, Odoul gave himself an athletic cameo as a wrestling instructor who pins Amalric to the mat with alacrity.
You may have seen Amalric's stupendous performance in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, or his strangely underwhelming turn as the villain in the most recent James Bond film, Quantum of Solace. If you're lucky, you'll get to see him play one of notorious real-life criminal Jacques Mesrine's brainier accomplices in the wonderful two-part Mesrine.
I would urge you to seek out Amalric's work as an actor way before I'd suggest you check out his alleged skill as a director.
In On Tour, Amalric plays Joachim Zand (for what it's worth, Amalric's mother's name is Nicole Zand), a disgraced former hotshot in French television circles who seems to have offended every last colleague he ever had in Gaul. After a sort of exile in the USA, Joachim is back, touring the coastal towns of France with a spirited American group of New Burlesque strippers. The troupe sports some real troupers, whose post-modern, proudly empowered take on the art of disrobing is genuinely entertaining.
Joachim considers these bawdy broads to be his surrogate family and he wants to give them the thrill of performing in a Paris theatre. But there seems to be a queue of individuals jostling to say "Over my dead body!" We never find out what, exactly, Joachim did to alienate so many fellow professionals but there will be not a micron of a sliver of a comeback for Joachim if his enemies have their way. Joachim is a world-class jerk – he even visits an ex-girlfriend in the hospital where she's recovering from surgery, to hit her up for a venue for his show.
Joachim's greatest talent seems to be for screwing up everything he touches. Somewhere along the way he fathered two sons. They have a long way to go to be an obnoxious as their dad, but there are probably worse things for two boys than to go on the road with zaftig American women whose inventive wardrobes are designed to be removed.
The ladies are fun to watch but much of their dialogue sounds improvised, as in clunky and strained. Almost forgetting to mail a postcard is about as high as the drama gets.
And yet – this is the film that French Premiere Magazine is championing as their 'Film of the Month’ for June. This is the film that the vast majority of French critics at Cannes proclaimed a breath of fresh air.
It's not that it's awful – because it isn't. It simply isn't very good. It has the raw ingredients that might, just might, make for a tight, entertaining film but Amalric obviously thinks free-wheeling is a valid substitute for narrative oomph.
The smart, daring damsels of the New Burlesque movement go by names like Mimi, Kitten, Dirty Martini, Julie and Evie. Take out their musical numbers and you have precious little left.
There are offbeat scenes that have the scary ring of truth – a drink spilled on an air hostess in a hotel bar, an uncomfortable encounter with a supermarket cashier who wants Joachim to inspect her wares on the spot.
But mostly – and this is where a directing prize seems beyond goofy – On Tour rambles from scene to scene, immortalising random dialogue from fleshy female protagonists whose deeper selves are barely fleshed out. A few dialogue exchanges and speeches are so amateurish as to be cringe-making.
Then again, not nearly as cringe-making as the sight of Amalric in The Story of Richard O having sex with a parade of people whose salient attributes are that they're female and breathing.
