Deneuve shines in road movie 'On My Way'

The camera's love affair with Catherine Deneuve shows no signs of abating after five decades and more than 110 films. The 70-year-old queen of French cinema continues to enthrall in On My Way, a droll if minor dramatic comedy about a woman who goes out for a pack of smokes and ends up on an odyssey of self-discovery through the back roads and tiny villages of rural France.

Deneuve plays Bettie, a sixtysomething former beauty queen and restaurateur from a small coastal town in Brittany who has lived with her controlling, meddling mother since Bettie's husband Maurice choked to death on a chicken bone.

Frustrated at home and at work - her bistro, Auberge, is no gold mine - Bettie finds comfort in the arms of a married man. That is, until her mother tells her the guy's been cheating on his wife and his lover with a 25-year-old beautician.

One bright afternoon, Bettie leaves the lunch rush to buy cigarettes. It's no small task: Finding a shop in the boondocks that's open on Sundays is impossible.

So Bettie keeps driving. And driving.

After two days, Bettie agrees to drive even farther from home to pick up her tween grandson Charly (Nemo Schiffman) and deliver him to his paternal grandfather's house, a trip that takes her virtually to the other side of France. (Well, not quite, but a long way.)

A loosely structured, episodic road movie captured with verve, energy, and wit by director Emmanuelle Bercot (Backstage), On My Way is at its best during Bettie's pit stops, when she befriends a series of wonderfully quirky characters.

Played by nonactors, they include an elderly farmer who tells her how he gave up women entirely after his sweetheart died of tuberculosis half a century earlier; a group of middle-aged women drinking up a storm at a local party spot; a coterie of prim, vain, aging women at a beauty pageant reunion. Bettie even has a one-night stand with a lust-struck 30-year-old.

Yet, Deneuve's charm can't keep On My Way from faltering. At 113 minutes, it's simply too long, and it falls into a rut for much of its latter half.

The anarchic, and neurotic, energy of the first part gives way to a more sober, measured, predictable tone after Bettie picks up Charly. Despite Bercot's attempts to keep things fresh, the story relies on family-movie cliches.

Some viewers won't care about the plot's weakness: For Deneuve acolytes, simply to behold her divine visage on the screen is nourishment enough.

Directed by Emmanuelle Bercot. With Catherine Deneuve, Nemo Schiffman, Gérard Garouste. Distributed by Cohen Media Group.

Running time: 1 hour, 53 mins.

Parent's guide: not rated (adult themes, profanity, smoking, celebration of cigarettes).

Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse.

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