Movie Review by Alice Castle
Starring: Laetitia Casta, Benoît Magimel, Matteo Tardito, Yann Goven
Director: Damien Odoul
Is a damaged person capable of change? This is the question posed by Daniel Odoul’s ERRANCE. Filmed in glorious retro techni-colour, with gloriously authentic fashions, Odoul tells the story of a passionate, love affair between a man and a woman as the swinging sixties turn into the seventies.
Jacques (Benoît Magimel) has returned from fighting in Algeria with a taste for violence, and an even greater thirst for alcohol. Lou (the Loren/Bardo-esque Laetitia Casta) is his long-suffering wife. Her only joy is their son Cesar, who she hopes she can love passionately enough to protect from paternal damage. Jacques keeps promising to go it straight, setting up home in the sunshine on the ‘as yet’ unspoiled Mediterranean coast, but he’s already sucked into a life of petty-crime, gambling and casual sex.
Odoul, whose rural coming-of-age drama LE SOUFFLE won critical acclaim last year, wants us to travel to another time, when single mothers in Catholic countries would have found it difficult to go it alone. In the beautiful coastal setting, Lou puts up with an increasingly ugly and unpredictable husband ‘for the sake of the child’ because she stands by her man, despite his significant failings.
