I Want to Go Home

To make a movie inspired by comic strip art has been a long term ambition for Renais; sadly, fulfilment of the dream seems too have come to late. Scripted by Jules Feiffer, this is a predictable tale of a boorishly xenophobic American cartoonist (in Paris for an exhibition of his work) and his estranged daughter (an unforgiving Franco-phile academic), who belatedly make friends thanks to unwitting intermediary Depardieu, a Sorbonne genius with a characteristically French love of pulp art. If it's meant to be funny, moving or an essay on the gulf between American and European mores, it fails; worse, however, the central characters are all so downright egocentric and unpleasant that they virtually drive you screaming from the cinema.