On Tour (15) 111 mins **Best known to UK cinemagoers as a sprightly actor’s actor, in films like 2005’s Kings & Queen and this year’s Wild Grass, Mathieu Amalric has a growing rep in his native France as an actor’s director. In this curio, his third film in the chair, Amalric plays Joaquin, a tour manager dragging five burlesque dancers (and their multiple costume changes) around dingy venues on the French coast. Between rehearsals and gigs, he attempts to keep appointments of his own – with a furious brother (fellow director Damien Odoul), a hateful father, and the wife and sons he himself abandoned.
Though Amalric pays lip service to the New Burlesque ethos – that it allows women to take charge of their bodies – his dramatic subtexts remain generally patronising. While the boys sport black eyes and bruised emotions as badges of their seriousness, the girls – played with varying degrees of competence by real-life burlesquers – are employed as light relief: all hairspray and nipple-tassels, and no credible suggestion of any life beyond the footlights. Their live routines form the ramshackle highlights, but with none of the relationships going anywhere satisfying, the film’s low-key razzle-dazzle comes to seem vaguely suspect: like Showgirls with subtitles.
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