WESTERN (67)

Directed by: Manuel Poirier

Starring: Sergi Lopez, Sacha Bourdo, Elisabeth Vitali

The Pitch: A Spanish shoe-salesman and Russian petty-thief wander aimlessly through the French region of Brittany - marking time, meeting people, and trying to pick up girls.

Theo Sez: A sly fable of multicultural France, ending with our heroes accepted into a family where all the kids have different fathers - a place, like the (ideal) country itself, where parentage is unimportant, who you are is all that matters. National identity is very much a recurring motif - even before the final credits, with their little flags of origin beside everybody's name - in this tale of two foreigners in a "foreign" part of France (Brittany, with its own language and traditions), made by a foreign (half-Peruvian) director ; fortunately, the good-liberal dream of inclusiveness isn't allowed to overwhelm what remains a discreet, diffident film - the kind where the camera moves away from a moment of intimacy (the girl saying "I'm going to tell you something very few people know") rather than towards. It's about giving people their space, which is also why it takes 130 minutes for the heroes to bond, and indeed why there's no reductive 'bonding scene' per se (just the sharing of adventures, building friendship organically) ; it's a lovely movie, taking pride in its shaggy-dog rhythms and gently teasing (not least in its title) our thirst for action - so that after a while you just surrender, waiting to see where it'll take you next and agreeing with Bourdo that "we don't need to go anyplace special". What's onscreen isn't always very memorable - though the Ideal Man survey and the dinner with the barmaid (and her cousin) are undoubted highlights - but it's the attitudes that matter, the "philosophy" behind it : as with the "Good Morning" game played by its characters - you greet a passer-by, and score a point if they greet you back - nothing in Life is as sweet, or important, as connecting.