Lost in France

“I’ve said to you a few times: I don’t know why you’re doing this film,” says Stew­art Hen­der­son, direc­tor of record label Chemikal Under­ground and for­mer bass play­er of The Del­ga­dos. ​“I don’t fuck­ing get it. Mau­ron was great but it was just a mad trip. I would nev­er have put it up on a pedestal as being this defin­ing moment.” Although he quick­ly talks him­self out of his posi­tion, in this moment, sit­ting in a gar­den some­where, Hen­der­son deliv­ers a painful­ly astute crit­i­cism of Lost in France.

While Niall McCann’s doc­u­men­tary lov­ing­ly explores Glasgow’s vibrant music scene and the bands on Henderson’s influ­en­tial label, it is hob­bled by its fram­ing sto­ry: a 1997 trip to Mau­ron, France for a fes­ti­val of Scot­tish indie music, and a return jour­ney 18 years lat­er by some of its orig­i­nal par­tic­i­pants. The first expe­di­tion is breath­less­ly mythol­o­gised by atten­dees includ­ing Emma Pol­lock, Stu­art Braith­waite (Mog­wai) and Alex Kapra­nos (Franz Fer­di­nand), but they strug­gle to con­vey any­thing noteworthy.

By all accounts, the row­di­est moment occurred when one mem­ber of the par­ty went miss­ing on a fer­ry, only to reap­pear min­utes lat­er. A hun­gover foot­ball match is dis­cussed like it was Ozzy Osbourne snort­ing ants. It’s sig­nif­i­cant that no one actu­al­ly gets lost in France, lit­er­al­ly or figuratively.

Every­one inter­viewed is like­able and unpre­ten­tious, but it feels like being a plus one at the reunion of some­one else’s old friends. The film repeat­ed­ly stops dead to watch the group sift through old pho­tographs, try­ing to remem­ber what was hap­pen­ing in them. If you remove the notion that these peo­ple were in sem­i­nal bands, they could be any group of fortysome­things rem­i­nisc­ing about a boozy, youth­ful Euro­pean adven­ture – they’re enchant­ed not because of what hap­pened, but because they were 26 at the time.

A reliance on too-few inter­views (the vol­ume of beer in Alex Kapra­nos’ glass fluc­tu­ates con­spic­u­ous­ly) prompts much waf­fling: among oth­er non-rev­e­la­tions, we learn that music is ​“mag­i­cal”, ​“inde­scrib­able” and ​“can change your life”.

Gen­uine­ly inter­est­ing insights – Hen­der­son reflect­ing on the artis­tic impor­tance of the dole, RM Hub­bert talk­ing about chron­ic depres­sion, Kapra­nos answer­ing whether he feels guilty about becom­ing more suc­cess­ful than his peers, Braithwaite’s still-pal­pa­ble excite­ment at hav­ing his Peel ses­sion list­ed on Ceefax – are frus­trat­ing­ly infre­quent. Instead, we have to make do with a hand­ful of live per­for­mances, some love­ly archival footage, and much talk about a bus dri­ver whose name has been lost to time.