"À Tout de Suite" (Right Now, 2004) was an attempt to make or pay homage to the films of the French new wave, shot in black-and-white with handheld cameras and showing amoral (or just aimless) youth. Apparently, the pouting, seemingly zombified Isild Le Besco (Sade) is the muse of director Benoît Jacquot, but she is no Ana Karina (the muse of Jean-Luc Godard in "Bande à part" and other movies of the 1960s). Similarly, Ouassini Embarek (Beach Café) who play Baba, the minor criminal playing at being a Robin Hood turned very wanted (by the police) man with whom she Besco's character Lili hooks up, lacks the charisma of Sami Bouajila (Adventures of Felix).

Both of the "romantic leads" have long faces. Isild Le Besco's face looks horsey to me and the long stringy hair that is generally hanging over her face does not enhance its beauty. And the length of Ouassini Embarek's somber face is further exaggerated by a pile of curly hair. Both are skinny, too.

I don't know if either of them can act. Besco is playing a horny zombie. Embarek has some intensity and manages to look troubled after a bank robbery went bad and both his buddy and a bank employee were shot. It does not seem to be just the increase in danger but regret about being responsible (even in part) for the employee being killed that bothers him.

Lili is a Parisian art school student at the start. I thought she was a lesbian, since she is sneaking another female student into her bedroom in the large apartment occupied by Lili, her father, a sister, and a housekeeper. Later in the movie, she is taken in by a lesbian in Athens.

But Lili falls in love (or something) very, very quickly with Embarek. Although generally lacking in purpose or initiative, she takes the sexual initiative (full frontal nudity) in seducing Embarek.

He and another bank robber were allowed by the police to leave with hostages and loot. After dropping off the hostages, Embarek calls Lili, who offers to sneak him and his more brutish partner in crime Alain (Nicolas Duvauchelle) into her room.

Although Embarek says he will come back for her, she decides (without any deliberation about the consequences) to go along. The hide out for a few days, then take a train to Spain, followed by a boat to Morocco, and a place to Greece. The only trouble form officials en route is a Moroccan concerned that they don't have any money.

They have a lot of money and rent a villa on the sea in Casablanca. Lili says this is the first holiday of her life, which, given the size of her father's Paris apartment, seems unbelievable to me. But then, most everything in the movie seems implausible to me.

Well, OK, 19-years olds make impulsive decisions, especially in thinking they are in love. That much is plausible. And maybe Alain's contempt for Lili.

The only character I found interesting was Embarak's mother. Lili goes to the barbershop Embarak's father runs, and he takes him home for lunch. After he returns to his shop, Embarak's mother shows Lili Embarak's room with a stack of stolen television sets. Her pain that her son is in grave danger seems like a real feeling, like his feeling of being damned for the death of the bank teller. Isild Le Besco never conveyed anything more than annoyance or bored affectless torpor. She stares into space a lot.

I don't find the travelogue aspect or the cinematography in any way special and don't care about Lili, who is in every scene. I don't like how she looks, I don't like her limited thoughts, and I don't like that she does not have to pay for her follies and crimes, except for some inconvenience.

The two pairs of bank robbers don't go on a rampage and there is no shootout (and Embarak is not impotent...), so I don't see much connection to "Bonnie and Clyde"(or "Badlands"). I see more resemblances to "Jules et Jim," "Bande à parte" and "À bout de soufflé" — with nudity, but without characters of much interest or of any depth. (Jean Seberg's mol of Jean-Paul Belmondo's minor crook in the last mentioned is similar in blandness, but does not have hair hanging in her face...)

It took me a while to realize that the story was set in the past — not as long ago as the first new wave movies (1959-60), but the mid-1970s. My basis for this is Diana Ross's "Do you know where you're going to?" (not exactly a subtle choice of songs for this anti-heroine!) in a night club. The movie was based on J'avais dix-huit ans (When I was 18, though Lili in the movie is 19) by Elisabeth Fanger.

©2010, Stephen O. Murray

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD