Western

Poirier's film took home the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes last year, which is as much an indication of the direction the festival is heading in as it is of the director's considerable talents. A tender, comic road movie that manages to cover only about seven miles of road, Western is set in and around Brittany on the French Atlantic coast. It's a starkly beautiful landscape, full of open fields and soaring azure skies, and it's here that we meet Poirier's two disparate protagonists, the Russian émigré Nino (Bourdo) and the Spanish traveling shoe salesman Paco. While on route to a delivery, Paco stops to pick up the hitchhiking Nino, and summarily has his Renault stolen by the diminutive, nappy-haired vagabond. Distraught, the handsome Spaniard flags down a passing car driven by Marinette (Vitali), a lovely Frenchwoman who offers to take him to the nearest police station to report the theft. Paco declines on the grounds that picking up hitchhikers could cost him his job, and ends up staying in Brittany and developing a romance with Marinette. Several days later, Paco spots Nino walking across the street from Marinette's flat, rushes over, and beats him within an inch of his life. Chagrined by his actions, Paco soon finds himself in Nino's hospital room offering apologies, and when Marinette shows him the door, the men take off on their own, intent on traveling the open road together. As in more traditional road movies, Paco and Nino pass the time trading philosophies, bickering, and generally developing a tenuous relationship, one that is continually tested by the fact that Paco is constantly surrounded by beautiful women wherever he goes, while his more hesitant companion can't seem to find a girl to save his life. Things come to head during a wedding party when a drunken Nino loudly berates the assembled women on the grounds that they're only interested in surface appearances. From here on in, the duo's mission is apparent: Get Nino laid, before he explodes. To that end they embark on several wild schemes, most of which go predictably and disastrously awry. Almost falling into the realm of the French sex farce as seen from a whole new angle, Western slides in and out of pathos, bouncing from pure comic moments to jarring, violent outbursts. As part of the new wave of French provincial filmmakers (Marius and Jeannette's Robert Guédiguian is another), Poirier takes the metropolitan concerns of modern-day France and transplants them to the countryside, an effort which focuses the comic elements while freeing characters to dawdle about without appearing to be in stasis. It helps, of course, that he's a wonderfully intuitive director, and also that both Lopez and Bourdo -- on whom the film hangs -- are equally excellent in their sad-sack neo-Laurel and Hardy roles. Many have already heralded Poirier as the cutting edge of the new French cinema, and while that may be overstating things a bit, it's worth noting that this is a road movie unlike any other you've yet seen.