When I was in grad school during the period I was attempting to get a Ph.D, I had to show some mastery in a language other than English, at least to be able to translate something. That meant taking a single undergraduate French class, a small seminar where I and about a dozen or so people sat around a table with a French-born professor and mostly spoke that language. I did…OK. I actually impressed my professor despite my rather shaky memory of the language, to the point where she almost failed one early essay until she realized who wrote it. After that, she actually frequently offered me encouragement, saying I had impressed her with how quickly I remembered my high school French. Regardless, during that class, we watched three different French movies. Two had been remade as American movies, and the one that hadn’t was a comedy from 1990 titled Tatie Danielle about a rather horrible, manipulative old woman who moves in with some younger relatives in Paris. I watched that and, while I found it rather funny, I somehow knew exactly why that one didn’t have an American remake. I didn’t think it would translate well.
The point is, I saw that my Fill-In Filmography also contained the 2015 French comedy with the translated title Microbe and Gasoline, and it was on Paramount+, so I am guessing it probably won’t be getting remade in America either. I am absolutely fine with that.
French teenagers Theo (Theophile Baquet) and Daniel (Ange Dargent) are best friends at school, but they don’t really have any others. Both have nicknames they don’t care for. Theo is something of a natural mechanic, and because of his smell, is often called “Gasoline”. Daniel is somewhat small and young-looking for his age, so he’s “Microbe”. Daniel is a budding artist with a crush on a classmate, and his mother (Audrey Tautou, AKA the only member of the cast I recognize) is maybe a little too emotional sometimes but at least his family loves him. Theo’s parents are both verbally abusive and make his life miserable. By chance, Theo and Daniel find a working lawnmower engine at a local junkyard, and Theo figures he can use that so the boys can build their own car and go on a road trip to the center of France, namely to a summer camp Theo remembers having a good time at as a small child, using that motor and whatever other junk parts they can scrounge together.
They do hit something of a roadblock when the boys realize that anything they put together they cannot legally drive on the roads, and it won’t go very fast anyway. The more artistically-inclined Daniel then has an idea: disguise the car as a small house and, if there are cops nearby, just park on the side of the road and pretend it’s a cottage or something. With that in mind, the boys head off on their road trip and have a few nice adventures along the way before returning to their home town. Writer/director Michel Gondry set the movie in his childhood home of Versailles, and there’s a sweet tone to most of the movie. The boys do basically lie to their parents in order to make their getaway, and that does have some repercussions when they return home, and since this is a French movie, well, no Hollywood ending for these two.
That said, this is still something of a sweet movie. Daniel’s problems at home are nowhere near as bad as Theo’s, but there isn’t really any moment where the movie throws that in Daniel’s face. If anything, the boys’ eventual conflicts with each other are born more from their personalities and personal hang-ups, like whether or not Daniel is easily persuaded or Theo’s attachment to what looks like an old Michael Jackson Thriller-style jacket. There’s also the fact that these are two very young boys on their own with only what resources they could get their hands on before they hit the road. The car doesn’t always want to go up hills, prompting one of them to always get out the back and push, and Daniel’s efforts to just get a haircut go wrong in ways he certainly didn’t see coming.
If anything, given my love for Gondry’s English language film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I think I was expecting something a bit more whimsical than this. It does have one bizarre sequence when the boys fly home and Daniel appears to doze off and dream weird stuff during the flight that isn’t really explained, but at the same time, I didn’t think it had to be. Essentially, this is a story of friendship and the bond the boys forged even before they went for their ride as their class’s social outcasts. They revel in their freedom, talk about girls and their own problems growing up, or even just wonder if the dentist that seemed to be offering them a place to stay was a torturer or not. They’re still a little childish in the way they see the world, but they’re not quite children. Ultimately, it was just a bit delightful.
Grade: B
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