Synopsis
You can sail around the world without leaving your own backyard — that is the wager of Sailing Home (La Vallée des fous, 2024), now available to watch online on iFILM. This French drama from Xavier Beauvois centers on Jean-Paul, a sailing obsessive whose debts are piling up while his family quietly drifts away.
To pull himself together, Jean-Paul signs up for Virtual Regatta, the online version of the legendary Vendée Globe round-the-world race. But if he is going to do it, he will do it for real: he shuts himself away for three months aboard his boat, which happens to be parked in his Normandy garden. Outside there is lawn and nosy neighbors; in his head there is the open ocean, storms and millions of rivals. The fiercest storm turns out to be his own demons.
Jean-Paul Rouve carries almost the whole film, with the ever-charming Pierre Richard at his side. Beauvois has made a quiet tragicomedy about a midlife crisis where the funny and the sad sit side by side, and an imaginary voyage heals better than any therapist's couch. Stream Sailing Home (2024) online on iFILM.
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