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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