Audrain

This film has all the ingredients to be a compelling work of contemporary French cinema (a protagonist who flees in the middle of the night for no reason, journeys through rural France--including through stunning Alpine landscapes, a partner who tracks him using the Grindr app, possible random hookups along the way, etc.), but it squanders them again and again, to no apparent end. Even the ending, which I will not give away, feels unearned. The highlights are the Alps themselves, the glimpses of the French countryside, the French Baroque (Rameau, Muffat, ec.) and modern (Ravel, Lasry) music, and the various female actors, who work with the minimum the script gives them to create standout characters. The two leads are dull, there should have been far more sex (even if it was not explicit) given the storyline, the few threads of philosophizing feel unintegrated, and the entire film could have trimmed at least 1 hour off its running time. The tedium was neither interesting nor engaging. Alain Guiraudie makes similar films that, no matter how plotless, feel far more alive (and full of sex).