Strike out

Coming-of-age Quebec baseball drama
Un été sans point ni coup sûr is compelling but doesn’t hit home

by MALCOLM FRASER

Adapted by screenwriter Marc Robitaille from his own novel, Un été sans point ni coup sûr is a coming-of-age drama set in a small Quebec town in 1969. The Montreal Expos are making their debut, and 12-year-old Martin (Pier-Luc Funk) is in the throes of baseball obsession.

His hopes of gearing up for his own baseball career are crushed when he doesn’t get picked for the local team, run by hard-ass coach Turcotte (Roy Dupuis). But in a fit of paternal indignation, his father Charles (Patrice Robitaille), who previously disdained his son’s athletic endeavours, decides to start up a B-team featuring Martin and other local misfits.

The set-up has a lot of potential, and for a while it looks like it could be a fun kids’ film, a Bad News Bears meets La Guerre des tuques. Unfortunately, director Francis Leclerc tries to pile on too many subplots, secondary characters and themes. A brewing conflict between Robitaille and his free-spirited wife (Jacinthe Laguë), a baseball-whiz girl next door whose father has a mysterious past, and a rivalry between Robitaille and another baseball dad are all introduced, developed up to a point, then summarily dropped.

An effort to tie the film’s events into the social changes of the times is similarly underdeveloped, and ends up coming off half-baked. And a recurring fantasy sequence where Funk gets wise baseball instruction and life lessons from the Expos’s Mack Jones (Phillip Jarrett) is pure cheese.

It’s unfortunate, because the basic story is compelling enough on its own, and the cast is solid—Funk nicely captures the young outsider’s melancholy, Robitaille subtly embodies the complex, well-written character of the father, and the always reliable Dupuis is great as the uptight but commanding coach.

But the plethora of undeveloped ideas is matched by an uneven tone, as if the filmmakers couldn’t make up their minds about what kind of feel they wanted, especially compared to Léa Pool’s Maman est chez le coiffeur, another recent coming-of-age ’60s period piece, with its strong aesthetic and tight narrative focus. To top it off, the soundtrack is full of predictable and overplayed songs of the era. As strong as this film’s good points are, when measured against its flaws, it adds up to mediocrity.

Un été sans point ni coup
sûr opens this Friday, Aug. 1

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