Film review: Au Revoir le Bonheur takes a warm look at one big family and a stunning summer house
Warmhearted without being cloying, Ken Scott’s latest film takes a charming trip to Quebec’s postcard-pretty Magdalen Islands
Rendez-Vous Film Festival presents Au Revoir le Bonheur (with English subtitles) at the Vancity Theatre at VIFF Centre on April 13 at 7:30 pm
CONTRARY TO ITS French title that translates as “Goodbye Happiness”, Au Revoir le Bonheur ends up delivering a great deal of charm and joie de vivre—helped enormously by its postcard setting on Quebec’s remote, windswept Magdalen Islands.
The latest film from French-Canadian director Ken Scott (Starbuck)—his first to be shot in Quebec in about a decade—explores family and fatherhood. It’s about four brothers who agree to put aside their differences after their father’s death, with a plan to gather at the family summer house and spread his ashes.
Au Revoir le Bonheur manages to be warm-hearted without being cloying. That’s because Scott, an alumnus of the Quebec comedy troupe Les Bizarroïdes, peppers the script with offbeat humour; a group of kids dropping their jaws at a tattoo parlour comes to mind.
Scott is helped by some adept comic acting, most notably Antoine Bertrand’s nostalgic, stuck-in-boyhood Thomas and François Arnaud’s Nicolas, a handsome but harried epicurean who we meet racing to four ex-wives’ houses to pick up each of his four kids. (There’s a fantastic sequence where he only realizes he’s on his cellphone, and that there aren’t enough seatbelts, as he’s getting pulled over by a cop. )
And this house on the Magdelan archipelago. With its breathtaking hillside setting, wrap-around porch, nautical antiques, and gargantuan wooden dining table, it becomes its own character in the film; it even comes with a vintage, silver-blue Comet to roar around the island.
Yes, this is light, crowd-pleasing stuff; it’s not going to tax your brain or sink you in family angst. The script occasionally feels more contrived than previous Scott outings, especially as the family and community set their sights on turning the massive house into a B&B-restaurant. Some scenes feel eye-rollingly forced—say, Nicolas taking over the local seaside eatery’s kitchen or a running joke about his lost luggage.
Still, there is a lot to adore about spending two hours with this kooky Quebecois family and their piles of children, slurping fresh-caught oysters, knocking golf balls off the towering red cliffs, and building sandcastles.
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