Sky

When Fabienne Berthaud’s “Sky” opens, we’re with a French couple in a black Mustang convertible flying across some cinematically over-familiar scenery in the American West. There’s desert, cactus, blazing sun and endless sky. Bad rock music blasts on the soundtrack. Her blonde mane flutters in the wind as she leans back in her seat. She has a camera and they sometimes stop for her to take photographs. He’s the kind of guy who thinks he looks tough, and no doubt does—on the banks of the Seine.

These first few minutes suggest a particularly risible kind of bad European movie: the kind where the characters come to the far West of the U.S. and encounter little beyond clichés and boorish melodramatic situations from the realm of cultural fantasy, much of it of course deriving from a lifetime of watching American movies. Are the French especially prone to this kind of unintended silliness? “Sky” almost seems determined to prove they are.

The thing is, it’s also the sort of awful movie that in some ways isn’t half bad. Its craftsmanship is solid throughout. The acting is decent, sometimes better. And it has the advantage of many road movies in that its constant movement, changes of scene and unexpected twists at least keep you awake. Better this, you think, than the same nonsense played out over Gauloises in a cramped Left Bank apartment.

The screenplay’s lameness, though, announces itself early on. In a scene that obviously references one in “Five Easy Pieces,” the couple are at a diner and Richard (Gilles Lellouche) grouses “no ice!” at a waitress who brings him a glass of water. It seems to take a long minute for the waitress to return with ice-less water. Then, put out that he can’t have eggs after 11 a.m., he morosely orders a club sandwich and later bitches to Romy (Diane Kruger) about the number of dressings he’s offered.  (She says she like the choice.) You think: is this the best they could do to establish the guy’s Gallic boorishness—blather about ice water and salad dressing?

Granted, his boorishness soon becomes more blatant. That night, Richard gets drunk in one of those archetypal roadside honkytonks that all movies like this have, and chats up two blonde women. Exasperated, Romy returns to their motel room. When Richard comes in, he tries to rape her. She smashes him over the head with a lamp and hits the road, sure that she’s killed him.

Thus does the road movie turn into a solo act. Romy overpays for an old clunker and soon ends up in Las Vegas low on cash. Taken in by a sympathetic aging showgirl (Laurene Landon, in a standout supporting performance), she gets a job wearing a bunny costume and selling photos to tourists alongside two Elvis impersonators. If that conceit sounds about as lame as ice water and salad dressing, well, so it is.