A prize-winner at Cannes, Mathieu Amalric’s cheerfully downbeat tale is about a former TV producer touring an American striptease troupe around French coastal towns. His strippers are not golden lovelies but slightly past-it specimens of the game.
Amalric, a favourite star in France, plays the producer, who drives to Paris to organise a final date in the capital but fails to impress a powerful impresario and, after several misadventures involving his own children, reunites the troupe in an empty Bordeaux hotel.
On Tour is the opposite of sleazy, often funny and always heartfelt. Hollywood would have made a zappier movie but not one with so many elements of the truth. John Cassavetes’s Killing of a Chinese Bookie, in which Ben Gazzara
starred as a strip-joint owner, is surely the model to which this film aspires.
On Tour (Tournee)
Cert: 15
