On the Wandering Paths

Pierre, a writer, wakes with half his body broken after falling from a high building. The doctors are not sure he will walk again. When he recovers he makes himself a promise: to cross France from one end to the other on foot, using only the emptiest paths. The walk takes four months. Denis Imbert directs. Jean Dujardin plays Pierre. The source is Sylvain Tesson's book of the same name, about his own accident and the walk that followed it. The structure matches the walk. Nothing happens, the objective is simple, and the only thing there is is distance. Flashbacks show Pierre's old life: drink, nights, self destruction. The walking is not exercise but penance. The real location is the belt of officially very sparsely populated country that runs from the northeast of France to the southwest. These regions are outside tourism and the film shows them deliberately: closed villages, abandoned farms, roads nobody uses. Dujardin plays it almost without speech. There is little dialogue, and the character's interior is given through the way he walks. Who it is for: viewers who like walking, quiet recovery stories, and rural France. Who it is not for: genuinely nothing happens. For anyone wanting narrative tension two hours is a long time.