Michel Vaillant is an incredible, artistic visual feast of a film. It is the sexiest film since Top Gun and it is at once shocking, surprising, heroic and humble. A perfect marriage of big Hollywood action and French artistic quality.
I am the photo editor at two major international fashion magazines and I went together with the head designer of one of them. We were on the edge our seat throughout the film, never knowing what would come next. We appreciated the sensuality of the under-lying love story. While you knew it was there, it was not focused on, there were no gratuitous sex scenes, in fact I recall only one kiss. But you knew it was there, you could feel it from the characters, in the looks, and in the intimacy of certain moments. Visually, this film is a masterpiece blending three distinct types of cinematography. The first being standard action movie at it's best. Fast cars and big explosions. The second being raw journalism, the kind of filming you'd expect if watching a car race on television and the third being incredibly artistic, turning a single moment into several minutes, or using ultra-high contrast grainy photography to convey mood and emotion. Further, the lighting and sound of the film cannot be ignored as it was superbe. The acting will not win awards, but the actors played their rolls perfectly.
They were sexy, but humble. Gentle and caring, quietly heroic. My only issue is their solution to the problem of the actor playing Steve Watson's inability to speak French. It appears they filmed him doing his lines in English and then dubbed it over in bad French. I would have been nice to have an actor who could have spoken a little better French, but it was not overly distracting to the film as a whole. And, they were sexy. They were the dream of what a race car driver should look like, act like. Not only for women, but for men too. Makes you want to go down to the track and cheer.
I cannot comment on the film's accuracy to the race world, but then again, it is a movie, adapted from a cartoon and to that end, it is phenomenal.
