03/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: Claude Lelouch’s melancholic musical road fable is a treasure trove of friendly old tricks from a particularly personal filmmaker

The appointment of Claude Lelouch as the recipient of the 2024 Glory to the Filmmaker Award at the 81st Venice International Film Festival may be up for debate, not least among devotees of the Cahiers du cinéma camp. “Remember this name, for you will never hear it again,” the revered cinéphile magazine predicted after the 1960 premiere of his first feature, Le propre de l'homme. Sixty-plus years and fifty-plus films later, he’s now referred to as “a personality who has made a particularly original contribution to the contemporary film industry”, as the award in question defines its honourees. The French octogenarian (87 next month), who won a “Little” Golden Lion at Venice in 1996 for Men, Women: A User's Manual, also brings his brand-new work Finalement [+see also:
trailer
film profile] to the festival, this time out of competition.

Lelouch’s “musical fable” features a somewhat melancholic, slightly impish wanderer (Kad Merad from Welcome to the Sticks [+see also:
trailer
film profile]), hitchhiking his way through the Normandy region and southwards to Avignon. To each driver along the road, he “comes clean” regarding assorted sordid pasts, changing his story each time. In one, he’s a former priest, defrocked due to energetic fornication; in another, he’s a porn director; in several, he’s a wanted criminal. He recommends The Bridges of Madison County to a farmer’s wife and clandestinely slips her €5,000 for a new tractor. He meets Jesus and his disciples (including a very cheerful Judas) and gets God a glass of water. On and off (and quite well), he blows jazzy ditties out of his trumpet. We get plenty of chanson singing, race cars at Le Mans and a joke about a man with size-9 feet who buys a pair of size-6 shoes just for the bliss of removing them once he gets home.

All the while, several people desperately seem to want to hear from our enigmatic anti-hero (his phone was thrown into the sea already in Normandy). Now and again, 1970s footage of actors Lino Ventura and Françoise Fabian turns up (from Lelouch’s own 1973 film Happy New Year). A present-day Françoise Fabian appears, who is in fact the main character’s mother, while his father in fact is, or was, Lino Ventura. Also named Lino, surname Massaro, our lead turns out to be a successful lawyer who’s turned his back on career and family, at least partly due to a brain disorder known as frontotemporal dementia. Also referred to as “folly of sentiments”, his condition has now sent him off in pursuit of whatever remains… finalement, in the end. If all this sounds rhapsodic and convoluted, it may indeed be the child of this man’s chaotic brain. Or possibly the director’s?

Never fully accepted within a French new cinema wave that his worldwide hit A Man and a Woman ironically may be the definitive poster child of, Lelouch remains, if nothing else, a “personality” of particular originality. As for Finalement, a mixture of “greatest hits” put in a bag of old tricks, shaken and stirred, could be a not-entirely-flattering description. A friendly reunion, quite pleasant at that, could be a kinder one. The final verdict may be up for debate.

Finalement was produced by France’s Les Films 13, France 2 Cinéma and Laurent Dassault Rond-Point. Its international sales are handled by StudioCanal.