A packed Picturehouse crowd waits excitedly for one of the Cambridge Film Festival’s main events: The SURPRISE FILM. A brief introduction generates further anticipation as the audience are told the film appeared at this summer’s Cannes film festival and that this is the UK premiere. The lights go down, the audience goes silent and the surprise film begins.
The movie opens quietly, introducing Daniel, a French teenager with long hair, silently drawing garish and colourful portraits of punk rockers. Daniel (Ange Dargent), a weedy geek often mistaken for a girl, is an outcast at school and even feels like an outsider amongst his own family. However, he soon finds a kindred spirit in the form of Theo (Theophile Baquet) a hyper intelligent loner and expert mechanic who transfers to Daniel’s school. The two hit it off right away, spending long nights round each other’s houses discussing girls, bullies and art, and come to the conclusion that they are secretly the cool kids. The fast friends soon decide they need some adventure in their lives, and begin work building their own makeshift car/house (complete with geraniums of course.) DIY caravan complete, the pair set off on a road trip across the French countryside in a wacky journey that leads them to experience a Korean sex shop, a terrible haircut and an over friendly dentist. However, the journey is tinged with the sad expectancy of what will happen when their adventure ends and they face the sad inevitability of what awaits them when they get older.
French, quirky … any idea yet? The film was MICROBE AND GASOLINE (Microbe et Gasoil), the latest work from acclaimed French director Michel Gondry. It’s an entertaining, funny and perhaps semi-autobiographical film in which Gondry conjures an image of what it is to be young through the untainted eyes of optimistic youth, in a film that will appeal to both a teen audience and nostalgic adults. The two newcomers Dargent and Baquet do a fine job carrying the story which also features Audrey Tatou in a supporting role. Though not the most ambitious of Gondry’s works, MICROBE AND GASOLINE still holds his trademark idiosyncratic direction and makes for a sweet, amusing and eccentric coming of age road movie.
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