Saint-Ex

A biographical reverie on the life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-44) that makes a virtue of a limited budget. The flying shots are clearly studio jobs, but lit so that they convey the romance of the air that utterly seduced Saint-Ex from childhood on. Mixing interviews with family, friends and fellow writers with imaginative re-enactments of key moments in his life - the death of his boyhood friend (to become the spectral Little Prince), the postal delivery runs over the stormy Atlas Mountains, the crash in the Libyan Desert, the courtship of the Argentinian Consuela (Richardson) and their turbulent marriage - the essay concludes that the writer/aviator (Ganz) never really grew up. The best scene has the imperious Consuela ('I'm bored. Astonish me') persuaded to kiss Saint-Ex during an engineless free fall.