Chichester Cinema at New Park
Mammuth
Gérard Depardieu teams up with subversive farceurs Delépine and de Kervern for a trouble-making road comedy about an old biker heading back to his past.
Mammuth is the story of a man, a mission and a motorbike. Serge (Depardieu) is an abattoir worker who retires only to find that he doesn't have a pension and needs to track down paperwork from his former employers. Hitting the road on his Mammuth bike, he has a series of variously humiliating and inspiring encounters - including a reunion with a long-lost cousin, the cue for one of the most outrageous sight gags in recent cinema.
Isabelle Adjani makes an eerie appearance as a woman from the past, while outsider artist Miss Ming makes her distinctly oddball mark. Above all, the screen is filled - and then some - by Depardieu, casting vanity, long hair and often clothes to the winds.
Reconnecting with the spirit of Bertrand Blier's ‘Les Valseuses’, Depardieu clearly hits it off a treat with the directors, whose anarchic cheek and up-yours radicalism are, despite a new-found lyricism, here in full force. Hilariously subversive. (subtitles.)
France · 2010 · Benoît Delépine/ Gustave Kervern · 87min
