Another French road movie? With all its stereotypes? Yes, but Freewheeling is saved by its remarkable duo of actors and a true science of the rupture of tone.
Louise, an overworked nurse, wife abandoned by her husband – who has fallen in love with her best friend – and by her son – who has gone to Australia – tries to move her car, an old Volvo that belonged to her father, to avoid another fine, when she realizes that she no longer has the strength, the ability to come out of it to face reality. The solution ? Roll, roll again, roll again. And meet people, on the road, who will make him live incredible, frightening, funny, moving adventures. At the end of which…
Freewheeling is therefore, inevitably, what is called a road movie. Louise – beautifully embodied by Marina Foiswho knows how to make his character unpleasant, almost unsympathetic when necessary, so as never to fall into sentimentality – will cross France from east to west, from Beaune to Cap Ferret. Freewheeling does not escape – but should it? – completely to the stereotypes of the genre: a lot of eccentrics of all kinds will cross his path, between a hitchhiker with an astonishing gift of ubiquity, ROMs determined to open his roof to the sky, a gastroenterologist capable of carrying out a wild psychoanalysis, and above all a possible surrogate son, a young man in distress armed with a gun (we don’t say a pistol!), who is also wonderfully interpreted by a Benjamin I could even more convincing than in Lost Illusions.
Fortunately, the well-packaged script reserves enough little surprises for the viewer to avoid the feeling of being on familiar ground becoming boring. And, as we have said, the two actors always remain fascinating, not betraying the truth of their characters for the pleasure of a good word from the dialogist or a colorful situation, like so many French films are crazy about. Didier Barceloof which this is the first feature film, does not try to impress us with any virtuosity, and instead chooses to work on its breaks in tone, which is an intelligent way of warding off the predictability of a trajectory, which would undoubtedly have gained from being stripped of certain “psychologizing” evidence.
And then, and it’s no small matter, it’s our darling, the ultra-gifted Peter von Poehlwho is responsible for a very fine soundtrack, which encourages us to forgive certain slippages, such as the really too heavy reference to the inevitable Thelma et Louise.
Eric Debarnot