Best known for his acclaimed 2013 film “2 Autumns, 3 Winters,” filmmaker Sebastien Betbeder has built a stable, yet under-the-radar career making underrated observational comedies, a trend that he continues with his latest film “Ulysses and Mona,” which just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. Featuring former soccer star turned actor Eric Cantona (“Looking for Eric“) as the titular Ulysses and Manal Issa as Mona, this low-key film follows a reclusive artist’s attempt to make amends with the family and friends that he has wronged. While uneven in parts, Betbeder has made a sweet observational comedy that recalls, but doesn’t exactly equal, the work of Sofia Coppola (particularly “Lost in Translation”) and Alexander Payne (“About Schmidt” specifically).
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Cantona’s Ulysses is an abstract conceptual artist who has gone into a self-imposed exile in a French Chateau. Playing tennis by himself and wandering through the halls, his suspended existence is interrupted by the arrival of Mona, also an artist and a fan of Ulysses’ work, who decides to seek the reclusive artist out. While Ulysses takes a while to warm to Mona, eventually he hires her as his assistant and they set off on a road trip together to visit a number of Ulysses’s abandoned family members, including his brother, his ex-wife, and his neglected son, as he attempts to make amends for a lifetime of putting his art before his life.
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What begins as a reservedly melancholic look into the after-effects of egotism eventually turns into an episodic road trip film travailing rural France, with a number of comedic run-ins (including, in a memorably funny sequence, a horribly botched robbery at a gas station). As Ulysses and Mona warm to each other, the film becomes more humane in its look into how a life can be so consumed by work that everything else is left behind. As Ulysses begins to atone for his previous sins, the film opens up his character, filling in the gaps of how he became so selfish. While Issa’s Mona exists, almost entirely, as the catalyst for Ulysses’s redemption, she becomes more rounded as the film progresses and Issa infuses her character with an infectious charm that makes one understand how she might be able to save such a cranky old man. Why she stays with Ulysses, outside of hero worship, is perhaps left a bit too underdeveloped, but Issa sells it.
Sometimes, however, Betbeder is a bit too reserved for his own good. While no one would claim “Ulysses and Mona” is a laugh-out-loud film, Betbeder can stretch his understated writing and directing to the breaking point, particularly in an odd dream sequence that directly references the 1968 Burt Lancaster film “The Swimmer.” Visually, Betbeder and his cinematographer Romain Le Bonniec shoot in Academy ratio, boxing in his actors in every shot and favoring little camera movement and relatively longer takes. Cantona and Issa respond by limiting their movements, creating an overall static feel to the entire film, which works for much of the film but occasionally creates an air of boredom surrounding specific sequences.
Needless to say, “Ulysses and Mona,” and Betbeder’s filmography generally, is not for everyone, as his particular brand of quirk oscillates between understated brilliance and annoying stasis. But, if the best that can be said about “Ulysses and Mona” is that it’s a sweet yet restrained comedy that features two brilliant performers and a number of memorable set pieces, I would call that a success. [B]
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