With L'Aventura, out this Wednesday, July 2, Sophie Letourneur continues her naturalistic exploration of family life in a summer comedy starring actor-singer Philippe Katerine. The film, presented at the ACID in Cannes, depicts a vacation in Sardinia that is as banal as it is chaotic.
A family outing filmed like a personal diary
After Voyages en Italie, which explored the intimacy of a couple on a childless getaway, Sophie Letourneur extends the experience by adding a family dimension. This time, the couple Jean-Phi (played by Philippe Katerine) and Sophie (played by the director herself) take their two children on a trip to Sardinia. While Sophie and the children take the night train, Jean-Phi crosses France alone by car, before reuniting on the ferry that will take them to the Italian island.
The daily life of the trip is narrated by Sophie's 11-year-old daughter, Claudine, who documents the vacation using her smartphone. The recordings become the common thread of the story, between swimming, 3-year-old Raoul's tantrums, pizzas, arguments, jealousy, and parental fatigue. An accumulation of trivial, unfiltered moments, where tensions coexist with boredom and tenderness. A deliberate directorial choice, as Sophie Letourneur explains in the press kit: "This is not spectacular cinema, it is life as it is, with its hollows, its bursts, its silences."
Sublimated reality or assumed boredom?
Inspired by audio sequences captured in 2016 during her own vacation, L'Aventura plays with temporalities and points of view. The film is punctuated with recorded scenes, memories, and even Super 8 family films from the director's father. This is a way for Letourneur to blur the lines between fiction and autobiography, like a filmed logbook.
Philippe Katerine, as a whimsical and offbeat father, infuses the film with a salutary whimsy. But the radically realistic undertaking can be disconcerting. The abundance of scenes focused on everyday worries—particularly Raoul's whims and needs—can provoke both amusement and weariness. A criticism the director seems to anticipate through her own dialogue. When a character asks, "Do you think anyone's interested in all this?" she replies, in Sophie's voice, "It's fascinating."
Between a mock documentary and a family comedy, L'Aventura is part of an intimate and artisanal vein of French cinema. A personal project that captures humanity in its simplicity, even if it means confronting viewers with the question: should we film everything about ordinary life, even the things we'd prefer to forget during the holidays?
