Cowboy Camembert

Gisèle is a cowboy. She has been a member of a Western Club in the seaport town of Dieppe in Normandy for years. She wears a Stetson and only ever listens to American country music. The approximately 60-year-old, quite the chubby and lively lady, with short silver hair, is on a road trip through the Canadian province of Alberta with her daughter Candy. They have set out to visit the grave of her husband. Candy is an artist, whose academic teacher is appalled by her kitschy pictures, which are collages of Canadian landscape photos and Caspar David Friedrich motives. It is suggested that she still needs to find her style – and so why not in Canada? The two women cross the northern Canadian prairielands pulling their trolley suitcases and giving the impression of two ciconiiformes. The landscape here is actually reminiscent of western scenes, in spite of the fact that we are in the northeast. Candy takes the lead, sporting a buffalo-horned fur cap and a black flowing gown, which contrasts splendidly with her red suitcase. Her mother follows suit, in a brown cape and color-coordinated brown Stetson hat (under which she is wearing a second, turquoise one). She is carrying a wreath with a blue ribbon on her right arm and has her suitcase in her left hand. The pair rent a pickup truck and go north, not west. When the two of them meet Jacques, an American actor of Native American heritage, the pair becomes a trio. Whether it is an infernal one remains to be seen, on their long trip along the Last Chance Road (as was the original title, which was subsequently changed) in co-directors Cédric Tanguy’s and Nicolas Bellenchombre’s bizarre, funny and touchingly tragi-comic road movie. (Internationales Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg)