You could be forgiven for thinking that the Caroline Vignal-directed film, Antoinette in the Cévennes (Antoinette dans les Cévennes), is just one big long romantic screwball romp were you to rely on the trailer alone.
Certainly there are elements of visual slapstick in the film – if you have ever wondered what two donkeys, with riders (one not so much riding as being pulled along the ground) looks like, this is your chance, and you will laugh, despite everything, you will laugh – and elements of the gleefully absurd as schoolteacher Antoinette Lapouge (Laure Calamy), facing the loss of quality vacation time with her lover Vladimir Loubier (Benjamin Lavernhe), the married father of one of the children she teaches, sets off on the exact same holiday as him.
Having never hiked before, and certainly not across the daunting ranges of the Cévennes in south-central France retracing the route of Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote of his experiences in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), there’s a great deal of physical comedy to be had watching Antoinette, brought to gloriously funny but emotionally vulnerable life by a superlative performance by Calamy, struggle with her stubbornly immovable donkey Patrick (with whom she eventually forms a close bond) and try to keep up with the other hikers who are consummately prepared for their holiday hike.
There’s also an immense amount of fun as you watch Antoinette, who spills her hopes and dreams of meeting her lover on the track to the first night group of fellow hikers at dinner (none of whom are using a donkey, thank you very much, for reasons that become readily apparent), become a legendary subject of gossip, such that every hostel keeper and fellow hiker knows who she is immediately upon encountering her.
If that’s all Antoinette in the Cévennes was, it would be still be a finely tuned, very funny film with a lot to recommend it because there is a great deal of enjoyment to be had watching someone get in way over their head, struggle to keep up and then somehow make it through one of the greatest challenges of her life anyway.
But Vignal, who also wrote the script which is mostly on the money but occasionally makes leaps that suggest a scene being cut at the last minute in the editing suite – at one point, for instance, Antoinette is all set to return to Paris, her dreaming of adulterous hiking set aside; the next she’s in a red dress in a field with Patrick – manages to make this abundantly watchable film so much more, investing it with a really affecting and highly relatable emotional resonance.
For all the wacky moves and poorly hilarious choices that characterise her ill thought-out arrival on the hallowed Cévennes walking track, it soon becomes apparent that there is a lot more to Antoinette than the need to be laughably close to her lover, who cares for her but wants to keep his marriage intact, and so definitely does not want her on the holiday hike with his wife Eléonore Loubier (Olivia Côte) and daughter Alive (Louise Vidal).
For a start, and this aspect of this most vulnerable of protagonists is portrayed with sensitivity and real insight, she is desperately sad and lonely.
She laments at one point that she has never had the best luck with men, and that her poorly executed rush to be by Vladimir’s side is emblematic of a life lived on the emotional margins where she is never the main attraction and always secreted away or poorly treated.
It is immensely affecting to watch, balancing out as it does Antoinette’s breathless excitement on the first night that she will be with her lover, which is expressed less as actual truth and more wish fulfilment, with Calamy investing her gushing, hopeful optimism with a sense of desperation that is almost palpable and clearly borne of a necessity to keep her lover close lest she lose him completely as she has lost everyone else.
In this one scene, we witness an object of comedic inspiration become a fully rounded and flawed person who simply wants what anyone wants – to be unconditionally loved and accepted and to belong to someone with authenticity and honesty.
You can’t help but grieve for Antoinette who may talk a big game but is secretly scared and lost like pretty much all of us if only we’re game enough to admit it.
It is this balance of screwball and emotional vulnerability that makes Antoinette in the Cévennes such a richly enjoyable film to watch.
It is augmented by the fact that the film spends its running time hinting here and there that here is the man that could be Antoinette’s real, true love, only to quietly move on in a story where the truest bond of all is between Antoinette and Patrick who helps her come to terms with a great many things on their mostly solitary trek through the mountains.
It is often when we are removed from the familiarity and ossification of our day-to-day lives that the truth of how we are living our life comes fully and unavoidably to the fore and so it is with Antoinette who has a series of small but profound epiphanies that make her realise that who she is is far more than the sum of her romantic aspirations.
These epiphanies, of course, unfold with as much vibrantly goofy humour as they do emotional impact, but cumulatively they infuse Antoinette in the Cévennes with a deeply affecting truthfulness that makes Antoinette one of those protagonists who leaps off the screen into your heart and stays there for the duration, long after the credits have rolled.
As romantic comedies go, Antoinette in the Cévennes is refreshingly and pleasingly unique because while there is much romance and comedy, the latter wholly unhealthy for the most part but that is true of most of us at one point or another, there’s also a great amount of relatable humanity.
Who among us hasn’t wished for that magical soulmate to appear and wondered if they ever will? Who hasn’t looked at the less-than-perfect they are with and wondered if there is someone else while doing their optimistic best to make a silk romantic purse out of a sow’s ear?
It’s a common part of the human experience and Vignal expresses it with empathy and heart, making Antoinette in the Cévennes one of those rare films that makes you laugh all while getting inside your heart and mind and making you wonder, as Antoinette, whether there isn’t something more to life and whether you shouldn’t be pursuing it even if it arrives by accident and when you are least expecting it.