Thursday, May 5, 2016

This 'Sky' falls and fails

French director Fabienne Berthaud's foray into the American west results in the muddled, off-kilter Sky, a road movie in which a dissatisfied wife (Diane Kruger of Inglourious Bastards) attempts to redefine herself. In the early part of the movie, Kruger's Romy is traveling in America with her French husband (Gilles Lellouche). After a drunken evening in a saloon, Lellouche's character tries to rape his wife. She responds by bashing him in the head with a lamp. Believing him dead, she takes off. Romy later learns that she hasn't actually kill her husband. Relieved, she again takes off on her own. Eventually, she meets Diego (Norman Reedus), a park ranger and stoic westerner who says he only has sex with hookers because he's not interested in emotional involvement. Despite this, Romy latches onto Diego, and decides that she loves him. All of this unfolds against a backdrop of characters and landscapes that evoke Berthaud's idea of the West, which -- in sum -- is all twang and no guitar. If this is the West, friends, it may be time to start looking for a condo in Bayonne. That's Jersey.

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