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MovieMail's Review
Mathieu Amalric won Best Director at Cannes for this tale of a touring burlesque show in France. It's lively, unpredictable and frequently moving, says Rob Mackie.
Best known here as an actor, for his remarkable lead performance in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and as a Bond villain in the disappointing Quantum of Solace, Mathieu Amalric is also a director, mainly of documentaries.
On Tour is not quite a documentary, but has the loose and improvised feel of one. Its topic is a touring burlesque show of which the short but highly charismatic French-Polish performer is tour manager. The film throws you into the middle of its events with little explanation, but it gradually becomes apparent that Amalric, who is co-writer, too, is returning to France from the US and seems to have many enemies and no friends. Battling his way through all manner of arguments and fist fights, it's hard not to root for his character, a chancer, but a plucky one. His troupe, apparently real-life strippers, are far from the sleek, sexy stage artists you might expect. Put bluntly, they are an over-the-hill bunch, all tattoos and false eyelashes, closer to Divine than Dita von Teese.
Amalric is in his element in a film that won him the best director award at Cannes. On Tour is never on a par with its thematic parent, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, but it's always lively and unpredictable, and occasionally surprisingly moving.
Actor/Director Mathieu Amalric won the Best Director award at Cannes 2010 for On Tour, a candid portrait into the world of the real burlesque.
Joachim, a former Parisian television producer had left everything behind - his children, friends, enemies, lovers and regrets - to start a new life in America. He comes back with a team of new burlesque striptease performers whom Joachim has fed fantasies of a tour of France and Paris!
Travelling from port to port, the curvaceous showgirls invent an extravagant fantasy world of warmth and hedonism, despite the constant round of impersonal hotels with their endless elevator music and the lack of money. The show gets an enthusiastic response from men and women alike. But their dream of a tour culminating in a last grand show in Paris goes up in smoke when Joachim is betrayed by an old friend and loses the theatre where they were due to perform. A quick return journey to the capital violently reopens old wounds.
