One summer day, a post-feminist heroine gets lost in the woods and finds herself.
Caught between her ego and the world, Antoinette (Laure Calamy), the heroine of My Donkey, My Lover & I, resembles one of those Libs of TikTok schoolteacher-kooks who flaunt their private quirks, hellbent on indoctrinating their charges. At an afternoon recital, she shimmies into a silver lamé gown to perform an inappropriate pop song alongside her elementary-school class, before their bemused parents. One of the watchers is Vladimir (Benjamin Lavernhe), a student’s father with whom Antoinette is having an affair. When he tries to break off their planned rendezvous in the Cévennes mountains of southern France, Antoinette shows up at the destination anyway. That’s where she beats Vladimir to facing the consequences of their infidelity — and realizes her own indecisiveness.
Although My Donkey, My Lover & I (Antoinette dans les Cévennes) was made in 2020, before Libs of TikTok exposed school-teacher lunacy, writer-director Caroline Vignal proves prescient about the eccentricity that goes deeper than the profession’s nutcase radicalism. Unlike the Libs of TikTok, Antoinette isn’t political or deviant, but she’s certainly not a Hollywood standard-bearer like the heroines of Nomadland, Promising Young Woman, or The Worst Person in the World.
Vignal’s lighthearted approach emphasizes Antoinette’s winning eagerness, the wide smile and ample rump that make everyone call her pretty. Vignal also exults in nature’s openness and beauty (as photographed by Simon Beaufils) that manifests what some will recognize as movie grace. The film is based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s journal Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, from 1879, but Vignal updates his astuteness (“We’re all travelers in the wilderness of this world”) to achieve movie wisdom.
Antoinette first reveals her moral condition at a lunch among fellow tourists, including a woman named Claire whose gentle inquiry and piercing eyes are encouraging. Played by Marie Rivière, who was the unforgettable heroine of Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray (Summer), Claire says, “We don’t stand on ceremony. I love love stories,” prompting Antoinette’s drastic confession. Antoinette is saved from Libs of TikTok immorality by Vignal’s love of movies.
Trekking through the mountains with a donkey named Patrick, Antoinette coaxes the stubborn beast by venting her own dumb-animal feelings. From there the movie blooms. The spiritual metaphor of Au Hasard Balthazar, Bresson’s most sexually focused film, comes to mind, as does Godard’s early short All the Boys Are Named Patrick. Vignal’s character study is based in movies for the good reason that through those antecedents, Vignal finds the inwardness of the sexually confused, post-feminist generation that’s been so confounding lately.
Like Rohmer’s Rivière, Antoinette is both brazen and courageous but — significantly — without the cringe factor that made Shiva Baby a recognizable yet unpalatable portrait of modern wayward young women. Moral and psychological uncertainty are revealed through Antoinette’s unintended romantic quest. Some inspired moments result: Lost in the woods, Antoinette falls asleep and awakens, her head resting against Patrick’s belly, their closeness watched by a curious deer, a wing-flapping owl, a fox, and a gamboling hare. It’s a vintage Disney fairy tale made real. That’s when you know that Vignal has interpreted the dream roots of contemporary anxiousness — lost innocence and wonder.
Antoinette encounters Vladimir’s ultra-sophisticated wife, a female healer, and a burly, ardent biker amid the serene valleys, trees, sky, and cloud shadows that move her to inscribe “Love Exists” in a tourist guest book. But the dreamiest sequence of all discloses Vignal’s secret cinematic philosophy: We hear Dean Martin’s duet with Ricky Nelson from Rio Bravo. It’s a subliminal epiphany. That’s where Vignal’s American distributors got the slightly risqué English-language title. But Antoinette is capricious rather than malicious (imagine Annie Hall in the natural world). Her misadventures could initiate a series of comedies and proverbs about weaknesses and recklessness that the French understand but Hollywood and progressive media refuse to examine. By distilling the fantasy within sexual politics, Vignal sees something lovelier than any of today’s political perversions.
