In “Finally”, Kad Merad plays an adventurous trumpeter who ends up losing us on the way

MOVIE THEATER – “Life has no meaning but direction” assures Michel (Michel Boujenah), the best friend of Lino (Kad Merad) in an imaginary pleading from Eventually, which hits theaters this Wednesday, October 13. Unfortunately, the sacrifice of meaning for an absurd musical road movie does not prevent Claude Lelouch's latest film from going in circles.

The 87-year-old director takes us in medias res into the story of Lino, a hitchhiker who, after throwing his phone into a river, tells strange stories to the drivers who deign to make room for him in their cars. He presents himself alternately as a loose loanee who has become a sex addict and suspected of rape, a porn director on the run or a philosophy professor accused of murder.

In a very archaic representation, clumsy at best, of the absurd, the situations are enough to make one's teeth cringe, all having a link with sexual violence. A feeling of unease is somewhat defused when we learn that the character of Kad Merad is a prestigious Parisian lawyer who transposes the story of his clients into reality.

Lino suffers from fronto-temporal degeneration, also called “the madness of feelings” by his daughter, played by Barbara Pravi. He decided to go on a trip through France without warning anyone, neither his daughter nor his wife, the film star Léa Massaro (Elsa Zylberstein) with whom he lives a passionless couple.

An incomprehensible musical Tour de France

Lino ventures to the four corners of France, from Mont Saint-Michel to the Pont d'Avignon via the 24-hour circuit of Le Mans, even meeting by chance the trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf, composer of the soundtrack. But we don't really know what this tenor of the bar is looking for, any more than what Claude Lelouch is trying to show us.

The stages of the road trip follow each other without links, a succession of meetings with a gallery of secondary characters: François Morel as a Norman breeder, Clémentine Célarié as a second-hand dealer from Béziers and Lionel Abelanski as a hunting psychologist. Only the peasant woman Manon (Françoise Gillard) succeeds in having an impact on the life of the traveler, who between two trumpet tunes ends up completely losing his mind. To the point of meeting Jesus and his apostles, then God himself.

He then begins a new way of the cross, this time in his family memories. Elsa Zylberstein is allowed a few lines and Michel Boujenah a handful of jokes. Boazh Lelouch (Claude's grandson) is content to be the son seeking to work in the cinema, and Barbara Pravi the daughter wanting to be a singer. Like yet another reminder that the absurdity of the film merges with reality.

A constant mise en abyme

Eventually abuses this mechanics of the absurd, by constantly playing on self-referencing. What if “the worst is never disappointing” according to Lino Massaro, the director did not hesitate to multiply the tributes to the best of his filmography. The main character is named after that of Lino Ventura in Adventure is adventure (1972) by Claude Lelouch. The fool's game continues when the Franco-Italian actor is presented as the father of the lawyer, the result of a union with Françoise (Fabian), his playmate in Happy New Year (1973) of which archive images are used.

The director continues to play on this string when he makes people sing “Adventure will always be adventure” to Barbara Pravi or when Kad Merad says he made “Into Each Other” with reference to Each Other (1981).

A mise en abyme which continues in that most of the characters – except the Massaro couple – keep the first names of their actors: Michel (Boujenah), Sandrine (Bonnaire), Barbara (Pravi), Françoise (Fabian), etc.

In the last act of his 51st feature film, Claude Lelouch makes Lino say “In the end, it’s better to be in trouble than to be bored.” After watching, we see that we can do both very well.

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