Review: Sky

Sky begins with a Parisian couple driving through the California desert. She is Romy (Diane Kruger), he is Richard (Gilles Lelouche). They seem in love, his hand cradling her face as welcomes the open air.

It isn't too long before the cracks in the marriage are visible. There's a separation that's palpable as they take their rest in one motel room after another, a testiness that twists the air as they stop at one diner after another. A night at the bar seems to offer relaxation until Richard becomes too drunk, flirts with some women and announces that his beautiful wife cannot have children. Back at the motel room, he drunkenly paws at her until she fends off the rape by knocking him unconscious with a lamp.

Believing him dead, she buys a used Plymouth and drives for several days before turning herself in and confessing her crime to a local detective (Joshua Jackson), who informs her that her husband is alive and well and recovering in the hospital. Yet something has stirred within her during those days - she bids farewell to her husband and hitchhikes to Vegas, where she's taken in by an aging showgirl (Laurene London) and is soon prancing around in a bunny costume surrounded by Elvis impersonators in the hopes of making money off of tourists.

Romy encounters Diego (Norman Reedus), who rightly mistakes her for a prostitute when he spots her teetering through the casino in her sexy blue bunny outfit. He only sleeps with hookers, he explains, no strings attached. A fortunate happenstance for a woman who professes to be done with love. Yet it's not too long before they're playing house at his home and having tense dinners with his brother Joe (Trevor Peterson) and his wife Billie (Lena Dunham), whose gift for fertility is in stark contrast to Romy's history of miscarriages.

Director and co-screenwriter Fabienne Berthaud may have meant her third feature film to track a woman's awakening into her identity, but Romy is too weightless a character to elicit any emotional investment from the audience. Kruger, who possesses one of the most enthralling faces in current cinema, is never less than watchable but she simply does not have the resources to pull off such an opaque character. Dunham somehow creates a more vivid, fully realised character in her limited screen time than Kruger does in the entire film.

Much of the film is comprised of random bits and bobs laced with Native American mysticism and painfully trite plot points. Berthaud also has a slippery grasp on tonality. Take the scene between Kruger and Jackson. Kruger plays Romy's troubled woman on the run as if she were in an Ingmar Bergman or John Cassavetes film. Jackson, on the other hand, delivers his lines with a certain deadpan inflection that makes one wonder if Berthaud had told him the film was a comedy.

With little depth of character, shaky turns of tone, loose direction and a regressive screenplay, Sky is nothing but a load of ambivalent meandering that is nothing so much as hogwash and hooey.

Sky

Directed by: Fabienne Berthaud

Written by: Pascal Arnold, Fabienne Berthaud

Starring: Diane Kruger, Norman Reedus, Joshua Jackson, Lena Dunham, Laurene London, Trevor Peterson, Q'orianka Kilcher, Gilles Lelouche