A BIG BOLD Beautiful Journey: banal and tearful (critic)
Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell travel in time thanks to a mystery GPS … but the road movie barely started that its concept falls dry.
Twenty-one years after its release, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, from the duo Michel Gondry / Charlie Kaufman, won his (deserved) stripes of Grand Ciné. The proof: he never ceases to make little ones and influencing pop culture, Everything Everywhere All at Once in Past Lives, passing by the album Eternal Sunshine by Ariana Grande. A BIG BOLD Beautiful Journeysigned Kogonada (After Yang), is the latest offspring: a romance based on wacky SF and memory trips, where a man and a woman having met at a wedding (Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell, both very well dressed), revisit key moments in their lives by opening magic doors They, thanks to the magic GPS of a mysterious car rental agency …
The film does not even make the effort to “sell” its concept, to give it the slightest poetic logic, starting from the principle that it is pretty pretty for us to want to follow the characters in these sketches who all reveal themselves on the finish quite banal and tearful, small advertising bubbles with prefabricated emotion. Charlie Kaufman, definitely visionary, has already produced the feel-Bad version of this film, in 2020, with I just want to end, another couple road-movie that ended up in existential nightmarish labyrinths. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a variant full of vibrant colors, overplayed cute and forced smiles. Which one is really the most nightmarish of the two?
From Kogonada. With Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Phoebe Waller-Bridge … Duration 1h48. Release on October 1, 2025
