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Orly review
:. Director: Angela Schanelec
:. Starring: Natacha Régnier, Bruno Todeschini
:. Script: Angela Schanelec
:. Running Time: 1:24
:. Year: 2010
:. Original Title: Orly
:. Country: France
:. Official Site: Orly
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If you've been traveling to France, chances are you might be familiar with Orly, which is the Parisian airport that mostly focuses on domestic flights and that is used, here, as a setting for writer/director Angela Schanelec's film. Built around 4 vignettes featuring a series of characters heading for various destinations, Orly aims at making you experience the airport life, which often consists in banal discussions and anonymous encounters.
We first get to meet a woman reading a letter from her ex-lover. Then, we are introduced to a man and a woman, both in their late 30's, who after only a few minutes of conversation seem to be destined for a relationship. There is also a mother and her teenage son who, while waiting for their flight, share intimate secrets about some of their past relationships, which will reveal a few surprises. Finally, there is a young German backpacker-type couple, the young man finding himself attracted by another passenger.
Intimacy and travels seem to be recurrent themes in Ms. Schanelec's work, as her previous critically acclaimed film Marseille &#nsb; which, incidentally, is the town where yours truly is from &#nsb; can attest. While she is able to bring the senses of anonymity and isolation that are inherent to the few moments you can spend at an airport &#nsb; and trust me I have much experience in that field &#nsb;, she seems to limit her vision to a bittersweet representation, all of these stories dealing to some extent with doomed relationships. The filmmaker also fails at making you share the excitement and impatience that come with traveling. While I must admit that Orly isn't really a traveling hub for the most exciting destinations in the world, you will still find there a good amount of happy &#nsb; some might say annoying &#nsb; passengers en route for the holidays; and even if she doesn't entirely ignore them, Ms. Schanelec portrays them here as bored &#nsb; and somewhat lost &#nsb; figures, as the German couple can attest.
The fact that she isn't delivering an accurate depiction of the Orly microcosm, somewhat disconnects those 4 stories from their setting, the title of this film losing some of its relevance in the process while those shorts aren't strong enough to hold by themselves &#nsb; I'm suspecting that these 4 sequences come from personal experience and that the airport was used as a pretext to package them together, without having to link them or build them into full length narrative; if you want to see a better depiction of the lonely and sad sides of traveling, I would instead recommend seeing Jason Reitman's Up in the Air.
But maybe, the biggest problem in the first place is that she should have picked a better setting such as the Roissy Charles De Gaulle international airport, which would have brought a much-needed exotic tone that is strongly lacking here. Instead, we have the feeling to be stuck in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a connecting flight.
Fred Thom
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