Criticizing a film or filmmaker (especially of the auteurist bent) for committing crimes of fashion or perceived insularity from the world at large may be the analytical equivalent to fishing with cyanide bombs. Fair or no, it’s always easy to call out a movie if you think it’s hedging on politics, and right or no, you can almost always score some easy points with readers. In truth, the film that deals artfully and directly with contemporary political realities is certainly a rarity, and we inarguably need more, which leaves the critics with a quandary: In which cases is it appropriate to pull out the trump card, and in which do you give a film a free pass just because it’s great? I can recognize that Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl is an intensely personal, beautifully crafted film but simultaneously question whether its existence is more essential than say, John Boorman’s less aesthetically accomplished, but thoroughly engaged In My Country. In the mind of the cinephile, three packed screens of Argentinean ennui at the local multiplex would be a place beyond paradise, but does the world really need more of the former, or do we movie lovers just dream that it does? Simultaneously, I could look at Gus Van Sant’s utter lack of commitment to the hot button issues at the core of his Elephant, perhaps the sine qua non in recent cinema of gorgeous vacuity and argue that something like Hotel Rwanda, for all its clichéd disaster-movie hysterics, is ultimately a more vital, if less personal statement. But then, trying to predict what the world needs more of is a pastime better left to ideologues. For all our ingrained biases and personal convictions, I suppose oftentimes a critic’s reaction to a film may be based on little more than a matter of what you’re looking for at that moment when the projector lamp clicks on.

When I settled in for Benoît Jacquot’s À tout de suite the last thing I was hoping for was the lazy, half-conceived “homage” to the French New Wave wrapped in a black-and-white “Girls Gone Wild” narrative I got rooked out of $10.50 for. Jacquot’s latest is pretty standard l’amour fou fare—Lili’s (Isild Le Besco) a pouty, rich white art student, who falls for Baba (Ouassini Embarek) handsome Moroccan “real estate” dealer/self-appointed Robin Hood who turns out to be the criminal his black suit/black tie ensemble and nightclub haunts suggests. Seemingly only days after their initial liaison, Baba and a pair of accomplices rob a bank, killing a cashier in the process (predictably, the narrative skimps on whether or not Baba pulled the trigger, preferring to wallow instead in his more generalized guilt—they’re all killers). Lili agrees to hide the thieves in her family’s large, mazelike Parisian apartment, but it’s not long before they’re on a trip that takes them through France, into Spain, Morocco and then Greece; a whirlwind tour that starts off like vacation (at least according to Lili’s wistful voiceover)—flush with cash from the robbery, the group binges on clothing, fancy hotels, rental cars and sex—but turns ugly as their money becomes more difficult to launder. The holiday ends after Lili is stopped by customs in Greece and questioned, forcing her makeshift gang to desert her at the airport. Adrift, without money or knowledge of the language, she has a brush with white slavery, finds a job in a tacky tourist shop, engages in a lesbian affair, hits up a threesome, and finishes by calling daddy who brings her home to Paris to face trial (a two year conviction commuted to five years probation after a Presidential pardon). This last, most compressed (sadly, as it might have been the most interesting otherwise) section of the narrative doesn’t fall too far from the through-line of The Real World: Cancun except, given that it’s based on Elisabeth Fanger’s memoir When I Was 19, the proceedings maintain some tenuous link to a reality that Cancun willfully flouts.

Though Lili may sound a bit like the French Patty Hearst, her gang is no SLA, and director Jacquot steadfastly refuses any investigation of the racial or political implications of his tale, fully wasting an opportunity to truly nod to the legacy of the New Wave. Godard made mincemeat of similar material and turned it into the bursting-at-the-seams Pierrot le fou; Jacquot seems too concerned with finding the right medium close-up to show awareness of any of the realities beyond his narrow frame, somehow managing the neat trick of making a relative lightweight like Truffaut look like Chairman Mao in comparison. Cyanide bomb alert: Lili’s infatuation with an Arab in a film that’s allegedly set in a period that saw the end of France’s controversial colonial relationship with Algeria needs to do more to acknowledge these chacracters’ mutual fascination with the other and not drop the ball on a major opening into an exploration of the political realities of the time. Fumble it he does however, leaving his heroine to draw a crude sketch of an almond-eyed, haughty cheek-boned space alien, which she plasters above her bed and proceeds to moon over. “But it’s just a story,” someone argues. Well, perhaps, and though I’m not suggesting that chatter about race needs to be on the tip of everyone’s tongues as in Paul Haggis’s Crash, you’d think someone like Jacquot, who lived through the time, might want to bring some of that experience to the fore instead of stepping back and letting his Let’s Go Europe! travelogue unspool without incident.

I suppose if choosing to eschew color shooting in this day and age is a political choice (and it may very well be, albeit a weak one) we might have to give Jacquot some credit, but is this the only marker he recognizes of Sixties French cinema? Jacquot ignores the cardinal rule of the nostalgia trip that a film like Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (which seems more the frothy trifle on the surface) got right—recognize the qualities that made what you’re paying homage to special, and do it a little bit of justice. Though his photography is often attractive, his camera seems chained to interiors, and when the film does move outside he supplies us with grainy stock footage from the time—obviously a cost-cutting maneuver more than a true aesthetic decision. And his score, which is obviously meant to evoke the low-key policier menace of a “Dragnet” or contemporaneous thriller, it sounds more like the descent into the dungeon of King Koopa’s castle. The whole enterprise only retains some relationship to the New Wave through the mention of the same that critics must be copping from the press notes for politically and aesthetically, Jacquot misses the mark completely.

Though 20-year old Isilde Le Besco dominates every frame, she’s lucky that Jacquot’s antics keep some of the weight of the film from her shoulders. For the record, she’s a fine, fleshy ingénue in the curiously-attractive Ludivine Sagnier mold who shines at times, and even comported herself admirably through the course of Jacquot’s similarly milquetoast Sade. (She desperately needs a run-in with an Assayas or Noé to harness her ample talents, though teaming up with Christophe Ali and Nicolas Bonilauri who directed the truly bizarre Le Rat could prove intriguing.) While Le Besco is intermittently compelling, throughout À tout de suite, I kept asking myself: Does the director have any perspective on all of this? And who is this all supposed to please? Unless the youth of today are farther gone than I think (entirely possible) it’s certainly not going to quicken the pulse of the kind of twentysomethings who would have hung around the Cinémathèque Française, so perhaps Jacquot’s low blood pressure take on the material is meant to appease those who would look back on the Seventies with nostalgia. Either way, it’s worthless. But then, should I have expected anything less from France’s answer to Michael Winterbottom? Perhaps—Winterbottom came along and surprised me with the urgency of In This World, and the forthcoming 9 Songs sounds like an interesting step for a restless, growing-towards-unclassifiable filmmaker. Watching the movement of someone like Winterbottom into some shred of relevance leaves me to wonder why we’re watching Benoît Jacquot at all. Apologists might question my vitriol for a film so modest in intent, but it’s precisely this lack of ambition that makes À tout de suite so abhorrent. It’ll be taken all too seriously by some, thus drawing attention from more worthy films, and will allow the auteurist naysayers one more “I told you so”— for here we have yet another silly, useless film that wouldn’t even be worth half a nod if it came without subtitles.