Rent On Tour (2010)

An extremely dull road movie which I switched off after 40 minutes - On Tour review by TB

The only film I'd seen Mathieu Amalric in was as the villain in the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, in which he played a one-note baddie whose primary trait was that he was a slimy Frenchman. But in the lead-up to the film's release, I remembered a lot of people talking about him being one of France's premier actors (and thus judging him only on that performance was unfair.) When scrolling through his IMDb, this film jumped out as not only did he write, act & direct it, but it also won awards at Cannes. I am always interested in seeing small-budget films, especially with writer/director/actors in them.

Unfortunately, this is a boring & surprisingly dull film, considering it having as it's subjects a troop of burlesque dancers. Amalric stars as Joachim, a washed-up former premier talkshow host/producer who had left France to go to the States but comes back with a company of burlesque dancers to put on shows around the French Republic. The dancers are extremely strong-willed & have no interest in listening to Joachim, preferring instead to mainly cause chaos in the hotels/towns they stay in.

In the 40 minutes I watched it, I simply saw a sequence of events which only tangentially connected to each other, but was in no way interesting. Joachim was shown either screaming down his phone at someone or standing around with a glazed expression whilst various people insulted him. There was some attempt to build characters out of the (real-life) dancers which amounted to almost nothing, even though this could have been extremely interesting.

But by far the worst thing about this film was the sound mix, which was absolutely atrocious & at times impossible to understand. For most of the part I watched, I had to turn my TV up to maximum volume simply to hear what was being said, but then the music/show sequences were "normal volume," so all of a sudden loud music would blare out, meaning I had to turn the volume down, before another dialogue scene which was quiet, meaning I had to turn it back up again.

After a while, I paused the film to use the washroom & saw it still had an hour to go, so switched it off. Whilst it may get better, I had run out of patience. Why it won awards at Cannes is beyond me...