A young man, Olivier, meets Theo right before he plans to go on a long journey and they decide to leave together. On their way, they pick up Tatiana who is also a traveller with no clear destination in mind. Their journey becomes one of exploring their own identities and meanings in life before anything else.
The characters of ‘The Big Dipper’ are trapped in between the seductive beauty of their journey and their inner contradictory emotions of meeting and facing their own selves. Their trip together is a initiatory journey to finding themselves, to accepting themselves and most of all to facing themselves.
Theo looks by far the most problematic character in ‘The Big Dipper’. Him leaving Olivier and Tatiana in the middle of the journey is before everything else the sign he has learned and accepted his ‘destination’ and therefore he understands this is now a road he has to cover alone. Olivier and Tatiana might have not reached that point in their journey yet.
The scene of Theo being searched by Olivier and Tatiana and them meeting on top of the hill while he is just about to embark the new stage of his journey is memorable. They don’t stop him and he doesn’t return to the group, they just wave joyfully at each other. It is one of the best scenes in the film: the two comrades staying behind know that Theo is the first in their group to have spotted his ‘destination’. The scene is also the proof of the mutual arrangement they have agreed on and about which they are all aware of and have accepted. Alexandre Boutin’s film is a road movie as well as it is a cult film. It is definitely a film psychologically very rich. It requires deep empathy on the public’s side but has an outstanding ability to provoke one’s thinking and force oneself to put themselves in the characters’ shoes in order to decipher emotions.
For its subtlety and mastery in drawing youth psychologies, TMFF has awarded Alexandre Boutin’s ‘The Big Dipper’ the 2nd Place for Best Film Of August 2016.
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