France – TLA Releasing (UK release 2 May 2011)
Rating: **
Siblings Léa (Léa Seydoux) and Mathieu (Théo Frilet) are hitch-hiking to the south with mysterious, brooding Sam (Yannick Renier), with whom they are both in love. Along the way they pick up directionless Jeremie, and gradually these disparate drifters bond, sharing their secrets, feelings and sexuality over the course of several hot summer days and nights in France.
Going South starts promisingly enough, with a coldly realistic scene in an obstetrician’s office blasted quickly away by a bold credit sequence that sees blocky yellow letters flash in front of Léa as she dances provocatively in a field to the tune of a rowdy Kasabian number. It’s an exciting moment that signals a tale of eroticism and youthful, reckless cool.
But it soon becomes a story weighed down by tediously self-conscious angst and existentialism. Familiar tropes are used to convey the mood: Sam carries in a plastic bag the gun with which his father killed himself; Léa is pregnant, pending an abortion; everyone smokes constantly and sports a devil-may-care attitude.
Director Sébastien Lifshitz certainly has a knack for this sort of dreamily contemplative set-up (Presque Rien, Wild Side), but with Going South he is hamstrung by a general aimlessness that unfortunately gives the viewer too much room to grow cynically weary of these incredibly beautiful and infrequently dressed people absorbed by fashionable melancholia.
What’s more, none of the characters are particularly sympathetic or even very likeable – one scene where everyone gangs up on the gay kid is just cruel and feels unnecessary. Further, Jeremie is a complete nothing of a character, Sam and Mathieu’s eventual tryst feels a tad tick-the-box, and when Sam approaches his destination everyone else drops out of the story altogether without so much as à bientôt (although Jeremie is hardly missed).
On the positive side, it is an exquisitely shot film, and the flashback scenes to Sam’s troubled childhood vibrate with an awful suburban nightmarishness quite from another film entirely. It’s just a pity that Going South is otherwise so shallow.
In fairness, the actors really are beautiful, so as long as you know what you’re getting into (maybe think of it as the film version of a Dazed & Confused spread?), there are certainly worse ways to spend 87 minutes.
Buy Going South on DVD at Amazon.co.uk
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