Drift Away – first-look review

Xavier Beau­vois’ lat­est direc­to­r­i­al out­ing opens with a cel­e­bra­tion and a sui­cide. It’s a gris­ly jux­ta­po­si­tion that almost seems as though it’s being played for laughs, as the vic­tim in ques­tion inter­rupts a tuxe­doed couple’s shore­line pho­to shoot in sud­den and spec­tac­u­lar fash­ion. Indeed, judg­ing by local gen­darmerie offi­cer Laurent’s (Jérémie Renier) rather glib reac­tion to the inci­dent, it’s hard to know quite what tone Beau­vois is attempt­ing to strike here.

As it turns out, Drift Away is far more har­row­ing than it is humor­ous. Lau­rent is intro­duced as a sea­soned cop­per who’s seen it all, and hav­ing a tough exte­ri­or is evi­dent­ly essen­tial in his line of work, as we dis­cov­er through his rou­tine encoun­ters with the var­i­ous né’er-do-wells that occu­py this osten­si­bly tran­quil patch of Nor­mandy. But when Lau­rent fatal­ly inter­venes in a farmer’s sui­cide attempt, both his career and per­son­al life are thrown into disarray.

As with Beau­vois’ pre­vi­ous films, much of the script is com­prised of obser­va­tion­al dia­logue that doesn’t lead any­where in par­tic­u­lar but instead builds up a pic­ture of the cen­tral char­ac­ters; the kind of every­day exchanges you might expect to over­hear on your way to work or in a cof­fee shop. These con­ver­sa­tion­al tid­bits gen­er­al­ly feel true to life but occa­sion­al­ly come off a lit­tle rote, such as when Laurent’s female col­league express­es her wish not to have chil­dren due to cli­mate change.

It’s only after the fate­ful event on the farm, which occurs about an hour in, that idle chit chat gives way to more seri­ous dis­cus­sions per­tain­ing to the frag­ile and often frac­tious rela­tion­ship between France’s law enforce­ment and its civil­ian pop­u­la­tion. There is, of course, a wider socioe­co­nom­ic con­text to all this, but Beau­vois keeps our focus firm­ly on Lau­rent, per­haps to the film’s detriment.

As some­one in a posi­tion of pub­lic author­i­ty, Laurent’s indict­ment and sub­se­quent charge of invol­un­tary manslaugh­ter results in him being left to deal with the trag­ic con­se­quences of his actions. Despite the sup­port of his wife and young daugh­ter, Lau­rent is over­come with grief and so, being some­thing of a keen sailor (the orig­i­nal French-lan­guage title, Alba­tros, refers both to the name of a mod­el boat with­in the film and, more per­ti­nent­ly, the old nau­ti­cal metaphor for bear­ing a psy­cho­log­i­cal bur­den), he decides to quite lit­er­al­ly drift away.

The ever-reli­able Renier just about man­ages to keep things afloat, but ulti­mate­ly there’s not enough wind in the film’s sails to keep it on course for its near-two-hour dura­tion. And the less said about the mawk­ish final shot the better.