57000 km Between Us (57000 km entre nous )

Hell is other people – especially family, and especially when they have a camcorder in hand. That’s the message of Delphine Kreuter’s debut 57000 km Between Us, a caustic exercise that uses its rough-edged DV medium to revealing effect, re-tuning French bourgeois comedy for the digital age. Margot and Michel (Thomassin, Bongard) are determined to promote theirs as the ultimate happy family, obsessively documenting their lives on their website. Their teenage daughter Nat (Burgun) takes refuge from her parents’ neurotic narcissism by playing on-line games with Adrien (Bouvier), a teenage boy in hospital with a serious illness; she also indulges in more dubious role-playing with an older man (a brisk, vanity-free cameo from the ubiquitous Mathieu Amalric).

Meanwhile, logging onto Margot and Michel’s website are transsexual Nicole and her North African partner Khaled, who have unlikely history with the couple. So exclusively do these characters communicate with each other on screen that it can come as a shock when they meet in person, sometimes to spectacularly excruciating effect. Director-writer Kreuter shows an idiosyncratic sense of satirical mischief, and the film offers one of the most invigoratingly nervy uses of handheld DV imagery since the dawn of the Dogme movement.
Jonathan Romney

This film is nominated for The Sutherland Trophy.