Thursday 18 September 2014

"Barbecue" (The Guardian 19/09/14)


Barbecue ** 
Dir: Eric Lavaine. With: Lambert Wilson, Franck Dubosc, Florence Foresti. 98 mins. Cert: 15

A limply chummy French midlife crisis movie, with Lambert Wilson heading up a group of greying friends as a philandering fiftysomething obliged to reassess his values in the wake of a heart attack. Everyone’s taking it easy from there: that coronary thrombosis provides the dramatic peak of a film otherwise composed of a boringly whitebread social set lunching, playing boules and bickering with no particular wit or style. Bright sitcom styling only exposes the absence of much cinematic ambition or purpose: it’s all too easy to imagine an ITV primetime version starring one Glenister or another, and it wouldn’t be any less skippable. 

Barbecue opens at London's Institut Français today.

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