(The jokes are there, but prove either too broad or too French to translate.) Passed over by Cannes in a year crowded with Gallic gems, the unassuming pic should do fine at home, but won’t get much farther than Podalydes’ easily distracted character does.Īt 50, Michel (Podalydes) has spent the better part of his life daydreaming about the death-defying runs of classic airmail pilots, as described in “The Little Prince” author Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s other novel, “Night Flight.” Buying into the romantic notion that men come to know their true character when braving the dangerous skies on solo runs, Michel dons leather jacket and white flight scarf when riding his scooter home to his comfortable west-of-Paris home (in the Celle-Saint-Cloud suburbs), whose every wall is decorated with vintage airmail memorabilia. Not so much a midlife crisis as the sort of middle-class indulgence afforded to white men with no greater dramatic problems to concern them, Podalydes’ patience-straining excursion amounts to an uneventful kayak ride downstream, rendered in the gentle, sunny style of an Alexander Payne movie, minus the laughs. In “The Sweet Escape,” French comedic filmmaker Bruno Podalydes has mastered the look of a man with his head in the clouds - a vacant-stare dreamer grounded by his dead-end desk job who resolves to set off on a solitary voyage of self-discovery.

Sweet sixteen movie china recap