O Último Vôo

Marion Cotillard, Guillaume Canet, a full complement of Touareg tribesmen in picturesque robes, beautiful desert landscapes -- sounds good, yes? But what we get is a slow-paced, dreary movie which seems to have no particular point to make.

We are in the French Sahara in the 1930s. A conflict is established between a gung-go French captain, the commandant of the local garrison, who is determined to gain glory and promotion by crushing a local rebellion, and his lieutenant (Canet).

The lieutenant appreciates the local culture, speaks the local language and tries to rein in the captain. In flies a French aviatrix (Cotillard) -- she's searching for her lover, an English pilot who has crashed in the desert.

Actually, now that I think of it, there IS a point -- to show that Cotillard looks fetching on a camel. In this the film succeeds but not in much else.

To begin with, the plot is absolutely uninteresting. We have a french aviator woman, who comes in the Sahara to search for her missing husband, and an anti-colonialism french soldier who wants to defend the nomadic people.

So what happens in the movie ? Well... they move through a part of the desert, and... that's pretty much it. One or two sub-plots are started, but not finished, the movie wants to focus on its characters, but the total absence of background makes them empty, and we don't care for them a second.

To sum it up : no story, boring characters, uncreative cinematography, and a slow, horrible pace.

One needs to remember that French (and films from other foreign countries) films are not like American films. Neither the ending, nor the writing, nor the production may be what you might expect if most of what you see are American films. We liked the film, it wasn't great, but I do not consider it a waste of my time. We watched it on TV5, the DISH-TV French extra cost channel. TV5 gave DISH the wrong description, as it was for ONE LAST FLIGHT, a movie about a boy & his grandpa who share their love for aviation. Surprise, surprise, it was about a woman trying to enlist the French Foreign Legion (Légion Étrangère) to help her. We saw it in French and I ignore the subtitles, but my wife reads them. I'm French, she's English. We both concurred that the woman pilot looking for her lost love was NOT married to the lost love (as said elsewhere on this page). He was married to another. Anyway, just take these films for what they are, just a fantasy, and dismiss your critical sense and let your imagination put you right up on that screen, next to the characters as they play out their parts. That's my goal. Hope this helps. Rocky in Arizona

The film has some good points. It begins as a film about a French lieutenant in French Sahara who is trying to prevent his idiotic captain from causing a full-on crisis between the army and the Touareg. Along comes a French woman looking for her lost lover. At first it's just a distraction from the main, more interesting plot. Thus, for the first hour I really got into the film and was expecting to see the conflict between the French and the Touareg lead to an exciting climax. However, as the woman's story takes over the film turns into a disaster of boredom.

None of the characters are well developed, and it is particularly sad that none of the Touareg were developed as characters. On the good side, the visuals are nice, the soundtrack excellent, and Marion Cotillard is pleasant to look at.

Overall, this film is a prime example of could-have-been-better. A greater focus on the Touareg characters and their motivations, a more in-depth representation of the conflict between the French and the Touareg, and subjugating the love story to the background could have made this a great film.