À Tout de Suite

Benoît Jacquot's À Tout de Suite is a period piece, both as narrative (the film is set in the 1970s) and as cinema (it's highly reminiscent of some of the best-known examples of the 1960s French New Wave, with Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless being the most obvious influence). The story revolves around a bored bourgeois girl who goes off with a handsome, exotic-looking French Moroccan on the lam after robbing a bank and killing a clerk. With its black-and-white cinematography that juxtaposes smoothly evocative images with gritty and jittery shots, the film is certainly a successful imitation of the nouvelle vague. But that's about all: a deliberate lack of characterization and unwillingness to bother with even the slightest hint of motivation make À Tout de Suite an arid and ultimately pointless exercise in style, marked by a blank lead performance from Isild Le Besco, as the ennui-ridden Parisian art student who attaches herself to Ouassini Embarek's blandly handsome renegade. The French title, of course, can be translated as “Right Now,” which is when you'll want this mannered, oddly pretentious, essentially vacuous road movie to end. Not recommended. [Note: DVD extras include four extended scenes (5 min.), a DVD-ROM press kit, and trailers. Bottom line: a small extras package for a disappointing film.] (F. Swietek)