IP5 (Directed by Jean Jacques Beineix. Starring Yves Montand, Olivier Martinez, Sekkou Sall)

Yves Montand, as much a French national institution as a star, died a month after completing this film. Some say the arduous shoot killed him. Certainly he haunts the finished movie like a ghost.

He appears as if out of nowhere, rising up from the back seat of a car the two young protagonists have stolen, white, pale and mystically self-assured.

Poignantly, given his subsequent demise, he suffers a heart attack on screen and appears to be visibly shuffling off his mortal coil as the story progresses. Yet paradoxically his gaunt, spectral presence breathes life and humanity into what could have been an empty shell. He gives substance to writer/director Jean-Jacques Beineix’s style, and Beineix gives him a swan-song deserving of his status.

Beineix, director of the classics Diva and Betty Blue, appeared to lose his way with the confusing The Moon In The Gutter and Roselyne And The Lions, but he finds it again on the long and apparently winding road from Paris to Toulouse. This is not so much a road movie as an off-road movie, in which the heroes wind up trekking cross country. It is a journey from the urban to the pastoral, from brutality to humanity, with many diversions along the way.

One such diversion is the title. Don’t waste your time trying to work out its significance. The production notes suggest it stands for the five trees of the Isle de Pachyderms, where Montand’s mysterious drifter says he found and lost his one true love (although Beiniex denies this, but has offered no other explanation). It turns up as the first piece of graffiti seen on screen, a monumental work spray painted on a city wall by the handsome but rough-edged Tony (Olivier Martinez).

Although Tony is a street artist whose young friend and admirer Jockey (Sekkou Sall) compares to Michelangelo (the painter, not the turtle), remarking, “He did ceilings, you do walls,” he is no sensitive aesthete, given to headbutting, stealing, cheating and generally meting out abuse. After being spurned in no uncertain terms by a woman he loves from afar and whose home he has covered in graffiti in misplaced homage, he sets off to win her back with Jockey in tow.

Each of the characters has a holy grail – Montand to find his ex-love before he dies, Jockey to see the mountains – but Tony’s is the most desperate. He has no soul, as everyone keeps reminding him, the mystical Montand apparently perceiving this just by putting his hands on his chest.

Perhaps predictably, the relationship between the old man and the disturbed youngsters reveals to each the value of love, but Beineix and his superb cast thankfully avoid overt sentimentality. Montand may be a tree-hugging shaman, but he is also a vindictive old loser with a streak of malice in his heart. The film somehow combines the spiritual with the cynical, the new age with the new wave.

Beineix’s direction and eye for idiosyncratic widescreen imagery combines the breathlessness of the new, new wave (as he and his contemporaries Luc Besson and Leos Carax are sometimes known) with the technical assuredness of the Hollywood mainstream. The result is hip, stylish and moving, reviving Montand’s peculiarly old-fashioned Gallic romanticism with an inspired and contemporary edge.