Case Départ opened in France on Wednesday this week, and the French film press have started posting their reviews online; naturally, it’s all written in French, a language I don’t speak nor read fluently, so the translations below are courtesy of Google, which further means that there very well could be some sentiments that are indeed lost in translation.
At the moment, thanks to French movie aggregator site, Allocine, of the 16 critics who’ve reviewed the film thus far, 9 of them give it a positive rating. It’s average rating is 3 out of 5 stars.
First, one of the good, from Nathalie Dassa who writes for L’Ecran Fantastique; she gave it 4 out of 5 stars: “Using comedy… Eboue and Ngijol avoid falling into the pitfall of clumsy French tall stories, and are able to shape their conversations so as to reach general audiences without forgetting to always advance the story. They thus manage to give some depth to the narrative in its most dramatic.“
And one of the bad from Jeremiah Couston at Telerama who gives it 2 out of 5 stars: “On paper, it holds up. On screen, the comedy aligns anachronistic gags and clumsy dialogue without any concern for speed or direction…“
None of the reviews I read were all that powerful, nor analytical, whether positive or negative; none seems to address many of the concerns several of you folks had about the film’s content. Although, as I said, I’m not a French speaker, so the translations I got from Google may not have been entirely accurate, meaning I missed something (or somethings).
You French speakers out there can be my guest and translate a few of the reviews for the rest of us, so that we can get some idea of how the film is being received over there. You can head over to Allocine to read them all HERE.
I should note that Allocine also lists general audience ratings of films; and for this one, the average audience rating is almost 4 out of 5 stars, so the audiences liked it better (although not by much) than the critics.
No word on whether it’ll travel west; although, as I noted in previous posts, there was some talk of a potential stateside remake.
