August 32nd on Earth

Denis Villeneuve’s debut, August 32nd on Earth follows Pascale Bussières’ Simone as she emerges from a car crash with a burning desire to have a baby – which, given that she’s not seeing anyone, prompts her to ask a friend (Alexis Martin’s Philippe) to be the father. Writer/director Villeneuve has infused August 32nd on Earth with an offbeat, surrealistic feel that, naturally, prevents the viewer from embracing the material, with the deliberateness with which the slight narrative unfolds certainly compounding the movie’s less-than-engrossing atmosphere. It’s just as clear, however, that Villeneuve’s stylish visual choices go a long way towards keeping things (relatively) tolerable, with, especially, a striking sequence set at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats certainly standing as an indicative example of Villeneuve’s penchant for memorable images. There’s ultimately exceedingly little to sustain the viewer’s interest for more than a few minutes at a time, however, and it’s apparent that Villeneuve’s freewheeling, French-New-Wave sensibilities are exacerbated by an ongoing emphasis on aggressively aimless interludes (eg Simone and Philippe are abandoned by a cab driver in the aforementioned salt flats, Simone and Philippe discover a rotting corpse, etc, etc). August 32nd on Earth, in the end, a sporadically intriguing yet mostly self-indulgent first film from a director who would go onto much better things, although the movie is, admittedly, a far sight better than one might’ve anticipated based on the oppressively off-the-wall opening stretch.

** out of ****