PROMISE AT DAWN (2017) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Eric Barbier
Charlotte Gainsbourg, Pierre Niney,
Catherine McCormack, Némo Shiffman,
Paweł Puchalski, Jean-Pierre Darroussin
A good-looking biopic covering the early life of novelist Romain Gary, from his childhood in Lithuania through his days as a struggling young writer to his service as an aviator in the Free French Forces during World War Two. Mostly it's about his relationship with his mother, Nina, a loving, demanding woman who drove her son to excel, and there are points in the movie where mother and son seem about equally unhinged. It's episodic and not quite as compelling as it maybe wants to be, but there's an exciting aerial combat sequence toward the end, and there's Charlotte Gainsbourg playing Nina, ambitious, domineering, obsessively devoted to her only child, and sometimes out to lunch. Charlotte Gainsbourg looking old and frumpy: That's something new in the world.
