Belle & Sebas­t­ian: The Adven­ture Continues

Despite the infer­ence of its title, you real­ly don’t have need­ed to have con­sumed any oth­er Belle & Sebas­t­ian sto­ries – through books, TV, films or oth­er­wise – in order to swift­ly attune your­self to the worka­day wave­length of Chris­t­ian Duguay’s super-sat­u­rat­ed night­mare, Belle & Sébas­t­ian: The Adven­ture Con­tin­ues. Note that this is noth­ing to do with the fey Scot­tish indie pop com­bo, but a insipid adven­ture yarn inspired by the char­ac­ters of Cécile Aubry’s mas­sive­ly pop­u­lar 1965 nov­el about a tou­sle-haired scamp named Sébas­t­ian and his trusty Pyre­nean Moun­tain Dog, Belle.

The first shot of Sébas­t­ian is from the van­tage of his scabbed-up legs, the cam­era pan­ning up to reveal that he’s about to sled down a snow­less moun­tain­side for sheer shits and gig­gles. Though he’s quick to place him­self in mor­tal dan­ger at handy ten minute inter­vals, it’s lucky the anthro­po­mor­phised Belle is con­stant­ly by his side, there to pounce lest the lit­tle one acci­den­tal­ly veer off a cliff.

Helped lit­tle by the whiny, shrill per­for­mance by Félix Bossuet as our knee-high hero, the film takes us on a jour­ney across the Alpine region of France in the peri­od imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing the ces­sa­tion of World War Two hos­til­i­ties. The boy and his dog are search­ing for Angeli­na (Mar­gaux Châte­lier), a woman who brought the boy up like a son and has gone miss­ing since the trans­port plane bring­ing her back home crashed into a for­est. Despite every­one believ­ing her to be dead, plucky Sébas­t­ian retains hope and refus­es to accept it, quick­ly escap­ing from his elder­ly uncle César (Tchéky Karyo) in a bid to bring his sur­ro­gate moth­er back to safety.

And if that doesn’t sound rou­tine enough, it only gets worse as the film’s sec­ond phase com­pris­es of a series of increas­ing­ly sil­ly action sequences involv­ing for­est fires, aer­i­al stunt manoeu­vres, explo­sions and pre­car­i­ous cliff-side shim­my­ing. There’s zero feel for the charm of the text or a desire to build the char­ac­ters to more than set-piece link­ing devices. Even the very young might feel short changed by this one.