There’s no particular reason to expect bowling alleys and baby-making to sit well together. But the new French film Bowling brings the two together, efficiently if not in particularly inspired fashion, in an undemanding comedy that parses the differing temperaments of metropolitan Paris and phlegmatic Brittany.
Catherine (Catherine Frot), a human resources specialist, leaves her object d’art obsessed husband in their Paris townhouse to take up an assignment at the local hospital in Carhaix, an insular but unthreatening town in Brittany. Savings need to made: she is given to understand that her target should be the under-performing maternity unit, where midwifes have the temerity to address patients by their first names but fail to produce enough babies each year. (How this might be achieved is never made clear. Direct intervention, one suspects, would probably not be conducive to public order.)
Entertainment for this sophisticate is lacking, in the rugged and practical-minded north-west. But then she’s gang-pressed into joining the local bowling team by domineering Mathilde (Mathilde Seigner), joining jolly Firmine (Firmine Richard) and easily distracted Louise (Laurence Arne). The first two are midwifes in the under-threat maternity unit, the third pregnant with her first child. Needless to say, when they find out that the local unit is to be closed with maternity cases transferred fifty miles away, tensions rise, even whilst the team defend local pride by challenging for the regional bowling trophy.
Director and screenwriter Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar spares no effort in force-feeding the film with as many pertinent issues as she can plausibly embrace. Some stick, some don’t: the best parts of the film align with the dry humour that meanders across intermittently. (“Which would a Bretagne prefer, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s? The former, because he’d rather forget to pay for his drink than to spill it all”).
Bowling (2012, 90 mins)
Dir. Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar
Starring Catherine Frot, Mathilde Seigner, Firmine Richard, Laurence Arne
French, Heb/Eng subtitles.
