Tournée (On Tour) | Review

Tease, provoke and titillate are terms we often associate with what we’d find in a Burlesque show – in Mathieu Amalric’s On Tour those definitions are non-applicable and as vacant as the resort towns that line the West coast of France in the off season. Despite appearances, the tattooed and plus sized real life characters aren’t the issue here — while the docu visual treatment of several of the acts of “nouveau” Burlesque provides the film with momentary sparks, its melange of non-professional actors bathing in a less than rigid narrative surroundings is the main reason for the film’s self inflicted black eye.

There is a definite resemblance between the salt and pepper haired Joachim character that Amalric portrays and some of the male characters that inhibit the worlds that Fellini created – and we get a sense that a zoo-like, untidy, off the hip aesthetic and feel is what the filmmaker is looking for in exploring a tale about a shipwrecked troupe of U.S based promised not the world, but Paris by a shabby-looking, shaky French promoter. Comprised of real people with funky stage names and attitudes to match, initially, the lure of girl talk in the dressing room, behind-the-scene, last calls in hotel bars sounds alluring, but in a just under two hour format they become tedious to listen to.

Behind the camera, Amalric cares a little too much about the atmospheric details and cares very little about why we should empathize with his character or his cast of outcasts. The rock bottomness discourse about one man’s realization that the opulent world is no longer accessible should deliver more substance than moments where he steals sugar packets and mints from restaurant establishments without the disregard of habitual shoplifter, but out of desperation. With everything having slipped out of his hands, including his visiting sons, his one last shot at not necessarily fame, but at salvaging his life ends with a tagged carefree gust of air — if the film was thirty minutes longer, he’d have a sad clown face and would have drowned in a tub. Not proportionate to the well-rounded figures of the troupe, On Tour doesn’t offer much in trading one set of problems for whole new set.

Reviewed at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Main Competition Section.

111 Mins. May, 12th, 2010

Rating 1.5 stars