If you saw the trailer ofOn black roads, there's a lot to bet you dropped a little embarrassed laugh, or at least an annoying blow. Don't worry, the movie isn't as bad as the trailer suggested. Neither is it very good and we will try to understand why...
First a book
Walking to rebuild, this is what Sylvain Tesson undertakes in 2015 after a fall that is missing – a little! – leave it tetraplegic. From the Cevennes to the beaches of Normandy, he traces a diagonal through the hexagon and promises to use only the black paths. The secret tracks that twist the relief, avoiding agglomeration and modernity to embrace the wild. Boiting, in the midst of physical repair, he managed to climb to the Atlantic and gained a real success from bookshops:On black roads. An ode to silence, to wild nature, to contemplation and to immobility imposed by his condition as a walker, in a world where everything goes ever faster.
AfterVicky (2016) andMystery (2021), Denis ImbertThe aim is to make an adaptation of this literary work on the grand screen.Jean DujardinIt will play the main role (renamed for the film Pierre) all in a film whose trailer suggested a full sinking potential. IfOn black roadsImbert betrayed everything that made the essence of the original material. We'll see why...
Pure anti-narrative juice
A narrative of walking and solitary adventure can only result from an anti-narrative form: encounters never appear where they are expected, the climax are fleeting and multiple, the temporality sometimes stifles to tighten up to other moments, silence is omnipresent... Could not be suitable for an adaptation of such a book than a purely documentary work – replaying the journey, the encounters, while they take place directly before the objective – or fictional, but embracing its detached quality of narrative order. And it's going well, we've had in the movies lately two examples of beautiful films coming under these two possibilities.
... the documentary option
The Snow Pantheris the first. And this is an example that is all the more striking as it is also a sister work of an eponymous book by Tesson, following the footsteps of the famous animal photographer Vincent Munier. The documentary film was filmed at the same time as Munier took his photos and Tesson wrote what was going to be his book, directly at the bottom of the regions where the ghostly feline roams. As a result, tricephalous works, produced simultaneously and feeding one another instead of parasitizing one another. This is the first way that could have been filmedOn black roads...But Denis Imbert missed the check, so he remained the second option.
... the a-narrative option
The second possibility is that of fictional film but detached from scripting constraints:The Mountainof Thomas Salvador is the perfect example. Made mostly of silence and contemplation, but allowing a completely fictional part, the film grabs its spectator with its atmospheres, its silent side and the plastic beauty of its images. Salvador needs nothing to verbalize – or almost – everything goes through images. And this is (unfortunately) again not the choice that Denis Imbert takes...
... the Imbert option
But what is he doing, the brave Imbert? He takes what makes the structure of Tesson's literary work (described above) and returns it like a glove. Where silence nourished the soul of the healing writer, Imbert injected into it a constant voice-off, resolutely too verbose for a Jean Dujardin to paint. The narrative becomes pure conventional narrative, created ex-nihilo by a cutting positioning the fall in false climax of the film. And the writing work, par excellence silent and solitary, becomes a constant hustle and bustle: Pierre scratching in his notebook whispering the sentences that he puts on paper, Pierre giving pompous sentences to his interlocutors...
Soft Characters
Worse, it makes Peter unbearable. When he does not mix his peremptory aphorisms with the few people he meets, Dujardin's character sometimes becomes a strange paternalist preceptor for a young guy whom he crosses on the way, or the distressing bourgeois who is avoided in the evening. But writing becomes even weaker when it touches female characters, arranged in the narrative to look at the old lone wolf (even when they are twenty years younger).
« I am happier in front of kidneys in an inn than in front of a quinoa in an urban restaurant. »
Jeannot and the promotion
There is stillOn black roadsbeautiful landscapes of a rural France, which one would have wanted a thousand times more detail than the face of Dujardin, filmed in all fashions. And a promo campaign (inspired by the title of this critic), where Dujardin goes from newspaper to set repeating how much he cares about his kidneys, his deep France and the ruralness that we forget too often... A message that is understood, often legitimate, but so artificially as to lose any substance. In short, a flop that encourages us to (re)discover the book of Tesson's eponymous or dive into real contemplative films, includingThe Snow PantherandThe Mountainare perfect examples.
[...] of the writing act (although little shown in the film), exactly as On Black Paths a little earlier this [...]