Comment c'est loin (2015)

Comment c'est loin arrived in 2015 with modest ambitions: get two rappers to the end of a song. Orelsan and Gringe play versions of themselves, men in their mid-thirties who have spent a decade not finishing anything. Their producers want to meet. The clock allows twenty-four hours in Caen. The day unspools through kebab shops, half-written verses, drunk friends, and an accumulating sense that inertia has been mistaken for a career. The humor is crude, the structure is loose, and the film seems content to be exactly that.

On the question of social consciousness, the film is a barren field. Its non-white performers (Seydou Doucouré, Ablaye, Redouanne Harjane) drift through the story as friends, collaborators, and a fan who will not leave, none of them carrying a thesis. The women exist mostly as girlfriends who interrupt, and the film offers no corrective lens for that arrangement. Race, class, climate, and the body are absent from the menu entirely. No character turns to the camera to explain what we ought to feel. There is no lesson here, and no apparent regret about the lack of one.

This silence now reads as an artifact from a different era of French comedy. The film concerns failure, friendship, and the terror of the blank page, and it treats all three with a shrug. Its bawdy register will repel some viewers and amuse others, which is the ordinary fate of a stoner picture. It never instructs. For a movie about two men who cannot finish anything, that restraint is the one thing it completes cleanly. We are left with a record of a specific town, a specific friendship, and a specific hangover.