MOVIE REVIEW : No Place to Go in ‘Every Other Weekend’

Some of the greatest European films from the ‘60s, like Antonioni’s “L’Avventura and “La Notte,” were heavy on anomie and aimless drifting. But the aimlessness was illusory. The discontented upper-crusters in these films who wandered the city streets hung over with malaise were expressing a larger malaise in society; their purposelessness had resonance.

In “Every Other Weekend” (at the Fine Arts), the actress-turned-first-time-director Nicole Garcia is perpetrating her own variation of the Antonioni dreamwalk. Sleepwalk is more like it. There’s no resonance in this movie about a has-been actress (Nathalie Baye) who absconds with her two young children during a weekend hosting a Rotary Club gala in Vichy.

Camille years ago relinquished to her ex-husband (Miki Manojlovic) custody of their 10-year-old son, Vincent (Joachim Serreau), and 5-year-old daughter, Gaelle (Felicie Pasotti); the children barely communicate with her. While on the run, Gaelle gets sick and the doctor who treats her is amazed that her mother doesn’t even know the girl’s medical history.

We can see where this movie (Times-rated Mature for adult themes) is supposed to be going. In the course of her odyssey, which eventually lands her in a remote village in Spain, Camille is supposed to rediscover her children, and herself. We’re meant to regard her years as an actress as a bulwark against her maternal instincts. Her life is a tragedy because, as it turns out, the career she sacrificed herself for has fizzled; her children are strangers to her, and the time she spends with them does not deepen their relationship. Vincent, in particular, grows frightened and suspicious. Only the promise of viewing an upcoming meteor shower--he’s an astronomy whiz--keeps him in line.

If Nicole Garcia had brought out Camille’s mounting despair, the film might at least have worked as a character study. But Nathalie Baye isn’t very expressive here; she starts out glacial and that’s the way she ends up too. Since nothing really develops between Camille and her children, the movie seems transfixed, inert. A couple of sequences break up the ennui. In one, Camille, hearing the news that her husband is coming after her, can’t stop laughing from nervous exhaustion as she introduces her Rotarians. And the end, as she walks beneath a domed night sky streaked with meteors, is a revelation. But by then it’s too late to warm up to this movie.

‘Every Other Weekend’

Nathalie Baye: Camille

Joachim Serreau: Vincent

Felicie Pasotti: Gaelle

An MK2 Productions USA Release. Director Nicole Garcia. Producer Alain Sarde. Screenplay by Nicole Garcia and Jacques Fieschi. Cinematographer William Lubtchansky. Editor Agnes Guillemot. Music Oswald D’Andrea. Set designer Jean-Baptiste Poirot. In French with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Times-rated Mature (for adult themes.)