En solitaire (2013)
Directed by Christophe Offenstein

Film Review

As directing debuts come few are quite as ambitious as that of Christophe Offenstein, a César-nominated cinematographer who has received numerous plaudits for his work, including several collaborations with director Guillaume Canet (Ne le dis à personne, Les Petits mouchoirs, Blood Ties).  With a hefty budget of 17 million euros, Offenstein finds himself helming a sea-based adventure-thriller, but despite his best efforts he somehow ends up drowning in an ocean of soggy clichés.  En solitaire delivers a minuscule fraction of what it promises, although the fault lies not in Offenstein's direction but in an infantile screenplay that stretches credulity to breaking point.

First the good points - and there are few.  François Cluzet is an admirable casting choice for the lead character, a roughly hewn Breton sea lover who is as at home on the billowing wave as a frog is in a lily pond.  The sequences depicting Cluzet's struggle against the elements are a visual tour de force (masterfully photographed by ace cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman) and are both viscerally exciting and intensely involving.  If only Offenstein had been able to sustain this level of excellence, and had had the courage to jettison the bulk of the anodyne padding that makes up most of the narrative, he would had a near-masterpiece on his hands.  Sadly, the film's title proves to be a terrible misnomer.  Cluzet appears alone on screen for little over ten minutes.  That leaves 86 minutes to be accounted for, and most of it is excruciatingly painful to sit through.

The film quickly starts to lose its bearings when the narrative splits and takes us off into the strained domestic life of the hero's girlfriend.  From action on the high seas to the tedium of sub-standard television soap, with the cliché count climbing ever higher.  It looks as if things may begin to pick up when Cluzet discovers a West African stowaway aboard his yacht, an event that puts in jeopardy his chance of fulfilling his life's ambition.  A vague memory of John Sturges' The Old Man and the Sea (1958) flashes across your mind.  Maybe En solitaire will turn out to be a similarly poetic odyssey in which a man's proximity to Nature allows him to discover his humanity?  No such luck.   By this stage, the ship is well and truly sunk and nothing on Earth will salvage it.

Despite Samy Seghir's engaging persona and François Cluzet's talent for introspective character development the interaction between their two characters just fails to ring true.  There is a half-hearted allusion to the topical issue of illegal migration, but this somehow gets lost amidst the tacky, totally predictable plot digressions that ensue.  En solitaire ends up as nothing more than the crudest of advertisements for the Vendée Globe competition, its few moments of excellence deluged into oblivion by a tsunami of breathtaking mediocrity.

Film Synopsis

Yann Kermadec's dream comes true when, at the last moment, he has to replace his friend, Franck Drevil, in a round-the-world yachting tournament.  Driven by a fanatical desire to succeed, Yann is ready to do anything to win the competition.  But his ambitions are threatened when he finds that a teenage migrant has stowed aboard his craft...