Bodybuilder (2014)
Directed by Roschdy Zem

Film Review

The main plot driver - an uneasy reconciliation between an estranged father and son - is a well-worn conceit but the milieu is one that most audiences will be unfamiliar with.  With two reasonably successful directorial offerings under his belt one a racially themed comedy (Mauvaise foi), the other a hard-hitting judicial drama (Omar m'a tuer) - Roschdy Zem ventures into fairly uncharted waters for his third feature, one that is set in the fascinating but mostly misunderstood world of professional bodybuilding.  His film is essentially a dramatised reworking of Bryan Friedman's 2007 documentary The Bodybuilder and I, the action shifted from Canada to the French town of Saint-Étienne.  It's an ambitious undertaking for a comparatively inexperienced filmmaker and whilst the film has some inescapable flaws it does provide a compelling insight into a world that for most of us is as distant and unattractive as the planet Neptune.

It was particularly brave of Zem to cast in the lead role a professional bodybuilder with no prior acting experience.  François Yolin Gauvin began his bodybuilding career at the age of 17 and over the ensuing four decades was crowned bodybuilding champion of France three times, whilst coming second on three occasions in the world championship.  Now 58, Gauvin still has a has an impressive physique (he looks oddly like a computer-generated hybrid of Arnold Schwarzenegger and French acting legend Robert Dalban) but, importantly, he has screen presence and an engaging personality.  The character that Gauvin portrays is so near his own that he doesn't need to act, and this adds greatly to the film's authenticity. Gauvin's depiction of an ageing bodybuilder constantly at war with his own body is by far the strongest element of the film, so much so that it renders most of the rest of the film pretty superfluous.

Playing Gauvin's estranged son is a young actor who will be familiar to French film aficionados, Vincent Rottiers.  Over the past few years Rottiers, who resembles a kind of demonically distilled James Dean, has pretty well cornered the market in French cinema with his brooding portrayals of alienated post-adolescent men.  In Bodybuilder, Rottiers once again turns in a faultless performance, convincing as a habitual tearaway who 'finds himself' through the overused contrivance of a parental reconciliation.  With a less capable actor, the Heath Robinson plot mechanics would have decimated the film's credibility to the point that it could well have been unwatchable.  Rottiers, helped by Gauvin and an equally committed supporting cast, anchors the film in reality and allows us to forgive, or at least tolerate, the ineptitude of the writers.

And it is on the writing front that Bodybuilder falls down badly.  Roschdy Zem and Julie Peyr's screenplay is strong on character but weak on plot, and some parts of the film are so unutterably contrived that you feel like walking away in disgust.  Take, for example, the opening instalment, which is there only to provide the clumsiest of pretexts for a troublesome son to be dumped on his absent father.  The film could only have been improved if this entire sequence had been cut and the reasons for Antoine's sudden arrival on his father's doorstep left unexplained.  The middle section is an altogether different kind of film, one that is predominantly driven by character interplay rather than borrowed, badly executed plot ideas.  This is where Zem's talents come to the fore, where the director engages with his subject at a basic human level, rather than being overwhelmed by it.

Zem deserves special credit for the quiet, respectful way in which he lifts the lid on the freakish mode of existence of the dedicated bodybuilder.  It would have been so easy to indulge in a futile quest to understand what motivates people to turn themselves into muscle-ripped living sculpture, but Zem avoids this and is content to play the role of the passive observer, showing how bodybuilders live, the agonies and ecstasies of their art and the incredible personal cost that this entails.  The film is at its most effective and poignant when it stays in hard-and-fast, Ken Loach-syle social realist territory, showing the everyday strains and stresses of being and living with a compulsive bodybuilder. 

Where it all goes badly wrong is when the narrative is driven off the tracks by repeated digressions into soap-style plot artifice.  This is sadly where the film ends up, with a resolution that is every bit as unconvincing and unsatisfying as the introduction.  For a film about bodybuilding it is ironic that it should lack both muscle and staying power.  What redeems this near fiasco is the raw authenticity of the acting and the valuable insights it offers into a way of life about which most of us are profoundly ignorant.  For those who haven't been able to watch Bryan Friedman's eye-opening documentary, Roschdy Zem's more overtly populist Bodybuilder is a fair substitute.

Film Synopsis

Antoine's frequent excursions into petty crime bring him into trouble not only with the law but also with a Lyonnaise gang who are now after his blood.  His mother and older brother have given up on the unruly 20-year-old and persuade him to go and stay with his father, Vincent, in Saint-Etienne.   It has been many years since Antoine last saw his father and he wonders if they will have anything in common.  To his surprise, Vincent now manages a successful gym and is busy training for a bodybuilding competition.  The father and son find it hard to communicate with one another at first - they are almost complete strangers.  Cautiously, Vincent offers his son a job, with the condition that he must make a determined effort to change his ways.  Antoine seizes the opportunity to reform himself and as he does so he begins to develop a profound respect for his father...