Already in 1995 Jean-Jacques Annaud (“The Name of the Rose”) made the first feature film in IMAX 3D format. The brilliantly illustrated “Wings of Courage” told the real story of a French airmail pilot who crashes into the Argentine Andes and has to walk through the extremely inhospitable terrain in the direction of civilization, while his colleagues tirelessly try to find him. One of the seekers was the later bestselling author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the creator of the modern fairy tale “The Little Prince”, which has become world literature.
For his adventure drama “Saint -Exupéry – The story before the little prince“Director Pablo Agüero (“ Dance of the Innocent ”) combines the events from 1930 with fictional elements. He presents Saint-Exupéry's experiences these days as direct inspiration for his most famous bestseller. It succeeds in narrative only bumpy and never really coherent. However, the film is very special visually and atmospheric. So if you are thinking of looking at “Saint-Exupéry”, you should not wait for the streaming or home theater evaluation, but rather enjoy the work on a large cinema screen.
Embarks on a dangerous rescue mission: pilot and “Little Prince” author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
1930: The young Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Louis Garrel) or Saint-Ex, as everyone calls him, perceived his childhood dream and has become a pilot. As such, he now works alongside his mentor and best friend Henri Guillaumet (Vincent Cassel) for the aviation company Aéropostal in Argentina. The transport of letters and packets in the immediate vicinity of the Andes is life -threatening – not only because of the weather, but also because the competition through the cheaper railway is becoming increasingly threatening for the company and the men have to take considerable risks to be faster than the trains.
The crow flies over the mountains is of course significantly shorter than the route of the tracks, which have to avoid them spaces. With their rickety propeller machines (type: Latécoère 25), however, the planes cannot climb higher than 4,000 meters, otherwise the engines will expose them from the sky due to lack of oxygen. Which is why you also have to bypass the sometimes much higher summit chains. One day Henri tries to search for a safe route through the mountains and crash in the middle of ice and snow. Although nobody knows where the crash occurred exactly, Saint-Ex decides to search for it-by Henri's desperate wife Noëlle (Diane Kruger) by radio from the Aéropostale base. Can his lively imagination help him to save the friend contrary to all probability?
A bumpy script stands in the way of the great pictures
It is commendable that Agüero tries to deliver more than a neat to deliver the individual points of the Wikipedia entry through the author and passionate pilots-he himself calls the film on a text board a tribute. Due to the concentration on a single episode from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's crush, which lasted about a week, but by alluding to not showed some prior knowledge of his career and his literary work, it is also required beyond “The Little Prince”. In France, where the man is a mythically revered national hero, not least because of his patriotic death as a member of the exile forces during the Second World War. In large parts of the rest of the world, however, these marginal remarks are simply risen over the heads of the audience.
Anyone who knows “the little prince” will be able to know knowingly at least in the relevant references in the form of individual quadruples, figures or drawings in the young adventurer's notebook – even if they often construct or chunky and not, as well as intended, play poetic. Again and again it is too obvious what fact and what fiction is, which means that the actually urgent search for the lost friend hardly absorbs trip, but even comes to hold several times. At Agüero's breakthrough film “Eva Doesn't Sleep”, which describes the bizarre Odyssey of Eva Perón's body that lasts 24 years, the connection of such elements came even more smoothly. Here, however, an over-the-top and long-length scene in a “Cabaret” night club looks like a foreign body in the middle of the Patagonian pampas and bothers both the story drain and its atmospheric substructure.
Does not look very similar to his real model, but can still convince: Vincent Cassel as Saint-Exupéry's friend and mentor Henri Guillaumet.
The big plus points of the film are his visual implementation and the acting achievements of the main actor trio. In the first part, Vincent Cassel (“Black Swan”) and Louis Garrel (“Die Dreamer”), who, by the way, hardly or do not appear to their real role models, almost like or do not even resemble their real role models, almost like the title heroes of the comedy action classic “The daring men in their flying boxes”. Diane Kruger (“Inglourious Basterds”), on the other hand, has a significantly recovered part as a voice of reason between the two, but can really turn up emotionally at the end.
All three obviously enjoy the opportunities for expressive, rather barren, almost theater -like scenes. The film may also look like it does for budget reasons. But this is precisely-enriched by the flight pictures of camera math (“Portrait of a young woman in flames”), which are as good as Monochrome-the emotional effect of the whole much more than Agüero's awkward script twists. So we manage to almost completely swallow the many discrepancies in the narrative. But just almost. Too bad.
Conclusion: Three first -class stars and an impressive look can only to forget the narrative weaknesses. With a better script, there would have been a lot more in here.