It's fitting that Isild Le Besco, the outlaw heroine of Benoît Jacquot's New Wave-inspired lovers-on-the-lam movie À Tout De Suite, logs time as an art student, because everything about her is a blank canvas, eager to take the paint. When her smoky doe eyes—Jacquot, who discovered Le Besco for Sade, makes films as monuments to strikingly beautiful women—catch handsome dark-skinned Moroccan Ouassini Embarek, she seems immediately prepared to jump off a cliff if it pleases him. And that's more or less what she does in the aftermath of a botched bank robbery, which sends them fleeing through France, Morocco, and Greece. Jacquot has cited Bonnie And Clyde and Badlands as touchstones, but he focuses so intently on a passive heroine that his film lacks the propulsive energy of those and other crime-genre classics. For Le Besco, the whole affair seems like a vacation adventure turned sour, and À Tout De Suite falls with her spirits.
Well-photographed in a grimy black-and-white video that could pass for celluloid, the film opens with Le Besco and a friend, both unmotivated art students in their late teens, hooking up with a seamy would-be gangster type in order to get closer to Embarek. When asked about the large cash-roll he always has on hand, Embarek refers vaguely to dealings in real estate, but his criminal ambitions are soon revealed when he and his cohorts take hostages in an attempted bank heist. After a standoff with police, Embarek and a partner (Nicolas Duvauchelle) manage to make it out alive and call Le Besco for temporary safe harbor, a request she all too eagerly obliges. With her girlfriend along for the ride, the foursome doctor up some passports and hit the road, landing in Tangiers for a blissful period of sunning and spending before the authorities intensify their manhunt and the money runs out.
Based on true events, À Tout De Suite reveals the seductions of criminal life to be something like Stockholm Syndrome for Le Besco, whose malleability makes her equally vulnerable to love, lawlessness, and treachery. Le Besco's willingness was key to Sade, in which she played one of the Marquis' voluntary playmates, but it also makes her less accessible than previous Jacquot leads like Virginie Ledoyen (A Single Girl) and Sandrine Kiberlain (Seventh Heaven). She acts almost like a mood ring for the entire movie: blissed-out and sexy when things are going well, near-catatonic when the sobering reality of her situation finally catches up to her. And what was once an exhilarating New Wave throwback loses steam with every pout.