Charlotte Gabris

  • À Fond [Full Speed] (2016)

    À Fond [Full Speed] (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2020) I had a look at French action comedy À Fond on a whim, and I glad I did. While the first act of the film is a bit tedious in setting up all of the plot elements that it will later require, it gets up to cruising speed along with its premise: While driving south for the holidays, a family is stuck in a fancy new all-electronic minivan that can’t turn off its cruise control… at 160 km/h. While the highway patrol quickly gets involved, there are a few things it can’t fix, such as a massive traffic jam. Of course, this wouldn’t be a comedy without about half a dozen secrets, misunderstandings, long-simmering tensions and accidental complications aboard the minivan. À fond is thankfully billed as a comedy, which does help in stretching a fifteen-minute premise into a 90-minute film. It also helps keep some tension under control, as it’s clear early on that this is the kind of comedy that, at worst, goes for a bit of slapstick and nothing more serious. The “comedy” remains one of reassurance rather than outright laugher—despite a few chuckles, À fond doesn’t go for the overly absurd and remains grounded throughout. As befit the subject matter, there are a few fun action scenes throughout, most of them seemingly without intrusive CGI. (The climax is another matter, but the safety concerns are understandable.) Jose Garcia anchors the film, but special notice goes to Charlotte Gabris as a pleasantly dim-witted hitchhiker unable to grasp even the fundamentals of the situation. The script is a tight tapestry of loaded setups all waiting to go off, and it’s perhaps a bit more realistic than one would expect—during the climax, I wondered if a certain grip would hold and immediately afterward the movie had a further action beat focused on that failure. French cinema is one of the most cheerfully audience-driven ones on the planet, and it’s reasonably entertaining movies like À fond that demonstrate it best.

  • Gaston Lagaffe (2018)

    Gaston Lagaffe (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, December 2018) Given that Gaston Lagaffe was one of the comic book series with which I grew up, my expectations ran high about its newest movie adaptation. (There was one back in the early 1980s, but we don’t talk about it.) The biggest challenge in bringing Lagaffe to the big screen is that there is no real proper guide to follow—Lagaffe had been conceived as filler material for Belgian comics magazine Spirou, meaning that most of the albums are made out of one-page gags, or (at most) a short story a few pages long satirizing the inner workings of the magazine. What remains are the characters: Gaston, a well-intentioned but blunder-prone slacker inventor who tries to improve his workplace but usually ends up causing more trouble along the way. Then there’s the pets, the boss, the friendly girl (not necessarily the girlfriend), the policeman, the car, the various colleagues, and so on. This film sadly updates Gaston to modern standards, meaning than rather than go back to a 1960s magazine atmosphere, Gaston works for an internet company. Ew. But the betrayal of the characters runs deeper: Gaston as portrayed here by Théo Fernandez as an almost unlikable slacker with destructive propensities so acute that his boss (supposed to be an antagonist) becomes semi-sympathetic in dealing with Gaston. Weird. At least Alison Wheeler and Charlotte Gabris are nice to look at, and Wheeler does make for a great Mademoiselle Jeanne despite the wobbly screenwriting. Most of writer/director Pierre-François Martin-Laval’s movie plays dumb-for-dumb, lowering the level of the film to cheap gags; whatever flashes of brilliance usually come from the comics rather than the screenwriting itself further highlighting the contrast between the two. In between the grating characterization, dumb jokes, relatively low success rate of the jokes and missed opportunities, much of the film is merely so-so when compared to the source material. Fortunately, it does improve somewhat in the last few minutes, with an ending sequence that almost redeems Gaston and the film along with it. A rather cute singalong epilogue caps things off decently, but even a good last impression doesn’t do much to compensate for the film’s missed opportunities. This isn’t the only French movie to try and fail to do much with comic book source material—the CGI is there to free filmmakers from trying the same kind of gags than the comics, but the screenwriting lags far behind. But it’s too late to save Gaston Lagaffe from the results.