KEEP YOUR CHIN UP

REVIEWED - EXILES/EXILSA sceme in this enigmatic French road movie finds the female lead dancing with orgasmic fervour to the wailing and drumming that accompanies an Algerian Sufi ritual. Building gradually from agitation to hysteria, the sequence is shot in one eye-wateringly lengthy single take. Tony Gatlif, a veteran director of Algerian origin, whose work here secured him the best director gong at Cannes, revels in such bravura (borderline meretricious) flourishes.

Elsewhere the hero jangles through a square gleaming with a thousand discarded bottles. In another exquisite moment the lovers chew their way through the fruit on a tree, then the leaves, then each other.

It's elegant stuff, infused with the same exotic foreignness that energised all those Michelangelo Antonioni films with bourgeois twits pottering about mysterious deserts. Sadly, Exiles never finds a way to combine its impressive components into a coherent whole.

Following two young slackers, both of north African descent, as they make their way from Paris to Algeria, the film probably has something to say about post-colonialism, cultural imperialism and the way immigrants idealise their country of origin. If so, it speaks in such a quiet voice the messages are barely audible.

Exiles, cut to a promiscuously eclectic soundtrack, is mostly taken up with strolls and meanders in search of local colour. Gatlif and cinematographer Céline Bozon display a good touch for framing landscape; while rarely gripping, the film is always a pleasure to look at.

But, though Lubna Azabal is excellent as the vivacious Naima, the main reason to watch Exiles is for the magnetic performance of Romain Duris. Something of a star following The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Duris - brooding in manner, hooded of brow - is already established as this generation's Jean-Paul Belmondo. We may need to bring back Cinemascope to do proper justice to his chin, the mightiest in popular culture since Desperate Dan's.