Jose Garcia

(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.