Wednesday, January 25, 2023

IP5: the Island of Pachyderms (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1992)

 

In its strenuous bringing-together of disparate elements, Jean-Jacques Beineix’s IP5 may paradoxically seem to demonstrate a creative fountain too-rapidly running dry, forcing the director into attempting to find magic through near-random alchemy. In his last role (and therefore inherently quite moving, even if his character makes only limited sense), Yves Montand plays Leon Marcel, an escapee from the institution into which his relatives confined him, on a journey to close a romantic narrative left incomplete decades earlier. Olivier Martinez plays Tony, a virtuoso graffiti artist on the trail of Gloria, the woman he loves (Geraldine Pailhas), knowing only that she’s somewhere in Toulouse, accompanied by his much younger sidekick known as Jockey (Sekkou Sall), among other things a supposed mystically-gifted predictor of horse racing results and an ace car thief; it’s in the course of practicing the latter that they find Marcel asleep in a back seat and their trajectories eventually merge. Beineix’s sense of composition is evident throughout, and the clashing of aged gravity and contemporarily rooted multi-culturalism makes for some easily entertaining, if repetitive, dynamics. But the film ultimately seems arbitrary and pointless, weighed down by that tedious quasi-mysticism (Marcel appears to possess the divination skills that Jockey lasts, as well as being able to walk on water in one scene, and suchlike). For all the film’s professed belief in fated romance, it has little interest in its female characters: based on what’s shown, Gloria’s disinterest in Tony is visceral and well-founded, yet melts away based on no more than her succumbing to his willpower (or something like that). In such respects the film sporadically evokes Beineix’s earlier Moon in the Gutter, another rather heavy-going narrative built around another hard-to-buy romance, in that case though benefiting more fully from the director’s flair for imagery and mild subversion of expectations.

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