The Waves

After his wife’s funeral, an elderly man decides, despite his own fragility and that of his car, to drive north from Valencia to Argelès-sur-mer, now a French resort but once the site of a camp for refugees from the Spanish Civil War. There are undoubtedly promising ideas underpinning this measured, mostly wordless road movie, but the execution’s often clumsy. The positioning of the camera and the editing sometimes seem arbitrary, the continuity could be better and the most imaginative moments, where the past literally invades the present, feel as if they’ve been lifted from the film of Theo Angelopoulos. Indeed, ‘The Beekeeper’ is simply the most obvious point of comparison in what may strike some as a charming but overly derivative film.