L'Élan (2016)
Directed by Etienne Labroue

Film Review

If only its authors Étienne Labroue and Marc Bruckert had been able to come up with a more ample plot for this cinematic oddity, L'Élan could easily have been one of the cult fantasies of the year.  A madcap micro-budget fable (presumably on the theme of acceptance of 'the other' or a celebration of the individual), in which planet Earth is invaded by the most unconvincing alien imaginable (basically it's a tall man in a raincoat with a felt animal head stuck on his head), L'Élan is cutely weird for at least twenty minutes, but after this time the joke has well and truly worn thin.

So ludicrously cheap and off-the-wall is the film, and so indefinably odd is its humour, that it's hard to resist giving it a go, but the effort of sitting through what is effectively a short filmed stretched way beyond its natural length isn't rewarded by the content.  It's not the lack of budget that is the problem (I doubt whether the film cost more than a few hundred euross to make) but the fact that not enough thought went into the script.  Labroue and Bruckert have the germ of a brilliant concept here but somehow it just didn't receive the tender loving care it needed to turn it into a fully fledged feature film.  For all its likeable quirkiness, L'Élan is regrettably nothing more than a still-born foetus of a film.

Film Synopsis

When a strange creature suddenly appears in a small town in the west of France it immediately attracts the attention of the town's residents.  No one knows what to make of the curious being that is wrapped in a long brown coat and has a fur head shaped like that of a stag.  Could this be the start of an alien invasion?  A genetic mutation?  An undiscovered life-form native to Earth?  Or just someone having a lark?  There is no shortage of theories.  The ones who show most interest in this remarkable creature are a pharmacist, some trigger-happy game hunters and a self-proclaimed specialist in extraterrestrials...