My Donkey My Lover & I, As French As It Can Get

My Donkey My Lover &  I

Director Caroline Vignal Writers Caroline Vignal Cast Laure Calamy,Benjamin Lavernhe,Olivia Côte Plot Antoinette, a school teacher, is looking forward to her long planned summer holidays with her secret lover Vladimir, the father of one of her pupils. When learning that Vladimir cannot come because his wife organized a surprise trekking holiday in the Cévennes National Park with their daughter and a donkey to carry their load, Antoinette decides to follow their track, by herself, with Patrick, a protective donkey.

Rating: ** ½

My Donkey My Lover &  I Movie Review: Antoinette  Lapouge  is  the  kind of clumsy, tactless  heroine whom the French like to  put in uncomfortable  situations. She  is  prone to fits   of mortifying  impulsiveness .And in  the oddly entitled  My Donkey My Lover &  I —no, they aren’t calling the lover a donkey, there  is actually a donkey playing one of the main characters—when we  first meet  Antoinette she is making  out with one of her  kindergarten student’s father in  the classroom.

 If you think that’s as  inappropriate  as  her  conduct is  going to get,  you are wrong. It gets  worse and worse. Her  lover Vladmir(Benjamin Lavernhe) is a much-married man with a wife and a daughter  whom he takes on a vacation at a scenic  resort known for its donkey trekking.

 In a face-palm action of desperation Antoinette  follows her lover to family holiday.What  follows could have  all been very  predictable and horny. Horny, it is. Once at the holiday resort  Antoinette makes  out with her lover right under his  family’s nose. She is disgusting in her carnal urgency,  pathetic in her futile  efforts  to win him  back and  embarrassing in her intrusions into her lover’s  family vacation.

Miraculously the  film allows  Antoinette’s clouded judgement to  remain untouched by extraneous  intervention. It is  as though she  is  the  master  of her own destiny,  no matter how twisted.  In the hot pursuit of her two-timing lover the  plot is often prone to bouts of moving  introspection, lighting up  Antoinette’s trekking  time  with  tons  talk time with her  stubborn donkey.

 My Donkey My Lover & I delivers  the  expected,though in unexpected ways. It is spiked and  smooth simultaneously. While Antointee thinks(pretends?)  nobody can see her  adulterous moves she is also a very selfaware  evolved human being who  knows  the mess she has gotten herself  into.

 In the end her  friendship with her travelling -companion donkey seems not only pre-destined  but also moving.Laure Calamy(already a star in Call Me Your Agent)  provides her character  with a rare empathy.No matter how goofy her  moves Antoinette never appears  undignified.She may be  in a situation that most educationists  wouldn’t wish on their worst enemy. But Antionette knows how to make lemonade when life serves her lemons.

Her confrontations  with her lover’s sensible  sharp practical   wife(Olivia Cote) make Antionette  look misbegotten . But her mistakes are hers to make. She  never disowns  then. Even in her worst moments Antionette is selfaware.  Having a donkey for company needn’t be  an exercise in stupidity. What  if the donkey is far more intelligent and sensible than the human it must bear?