FREESTYLE

REVIEW By CELIA IPIOTIS

Wacky and unerringly engaging, Freestyle (En Roue Libre)  opened FIAF’s film festival at the Florence Gould Hall. 

A total mess, Louise (Marina Foïs) drives up to the hospital where she is a nurse, and despite her friend’s pleas, refuses to get out of the car to work. She’s stuck–mentally and physically. Unable to exit her car, she drives until the petrol runs low and totally distraught, she parks in a gas station.

Here, her life takes a left turn. Observing a young man trying to steal cars, she hops into the back seat, only to become his getaway hostage. Intent on avenging his brother’s death, the emotionally devastated Paul (Benjamin Voisin) speeds towards the man he wants to assassinate. 

Along the way, Louise opens up about a life emptying out. Her son relocates to Australia, her husband takes up with her best friend and her mother — well that’s for you to find out. 

Held together by impressive performances tinted in compassion and spunk, first time-film director, Didier Barcelo, fashions a  film that rockets through its 90 minute run time.

Cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne keeps the lens tight on two faces, rarely more than one foot apart. When not penetrating quizzical emotions through absorbing close-ups, the camera opens on vistas of water. 

At each bend in the road, another character intersects providing colliding story lines– from a hippy hitchhiker who can’t tolerate audio waves emitted by electronic devices, to a shrink kidnapped by Paul to “fix” Louise in the space of an hour and naturally, there’s a band of gypsies who not only fix the car, but at the urging of Paul, cut out a hole in the roof of the car. It’s a skylight that liberates Louise. 

Wittily written by Marie Deshaires and Didier Barcelo, Paul and Louise incrementally move emotionally closer and closer right up to the Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid style ending.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Celia Ipiotis