Microbe & Gasoline

The spirits of François Truffaut and Louis Malle permeate Michel Gondry's curiously old-fashioned rites-of-passage road trip, except that it feels languid and wordy. Misfits Ange Dargent and Théophile Baquet pal up at the Versailles school where the long-haired Dargent is teased for his size and the quirkily self-assured Baquet for his odour. Without telling their parents, they head south after building a car using a lawnmower engine disguised as a garden shed, and have classic summer misadventures. They encounter a broody dentist and some American football-playing Korean gangsters before a romantic setback and a stop-off at a Romany camp nudge the pair a little closer to maturity. The contrivances stack up and the escapades amuse without enthralling because our teen heroes are completely resistible. Audrey Tautou has a poignant cameo and the production design is charming, but the magic Gondry tries so hard to inject is missing.