A renowned filmmaker, Jacques Baronski sees his life turned upside down by the arrival of Fred, his son, whose existence he was unaware of. The teenager, passionate about cinema, meets Roxane, a movie star and his father's partner. He falls madly in love with her.
Tony Gatlif is par excellence the French director of the outcasts ;himself a gypsy, many of his works deal with the gypsies life,his best "Korkoro" (2009)depicting the -too often forgotten- genocide of this people in WW2 .
Tom Medina, in the eponymous movie ,is par excellence the outcast : he is on parole from a reformatory ,that's all we know about him.
So it was only natural that the illegitimate son,unknown to his dad, appears in one of his works ; Fanny Ardant could have been a wonderful modern Phaedra,had she been given a good script to work with ;unfortunately ,apart from good romantic scenes (few and far between) ,notably when they fly a kite on the beach, the film is a spate of clichés, and it slowly but inexorably, becomes a big bore .The motorbike could be a transparent equivalent of the sea monster that claims Hippolytus' life : it becomes a melodramatic tear-jerker scene .Had they developed the mother's character -who appears in flashbacks - it could have justified the father/director's frames of mind .It remains a missed opportunity ,which may interest Ardant's completists ,but only them.
