IMDb meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 22 minutes, rated 5.4 by 144 cinematizens.
Genre: Bio-pic and Disappointment
Verdict: Read the books.
Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), just wanted to fly, and fly he did. In 1908 he saw his first airplane and seldom had eyes for anything else after that.
Bruno Ganz plays Saint Ex, as he was called even by his sisters. He had a vexed relationship with Consuelo and that is the focus of this film where she is played by Miranda Richardson as a selfish, manipulative, petulant woman with no interest or activities of her own part from making him miserable. Blame the screen writer.
Ganz and Richardson were enough to capture my interest, plus the prospect of some flying sequences. But alas, the actors have little to do, though they try their best to make the most of it, and the flying sequences. Well, what flying sequences? We had a better flying sequence against a green matte in Amsterdam once making a tourist video. What we see here is clumsy, patently fake, and all too much like a school play.
Moreover the story dwells on ‘The Little Prince’ from go to whoa as his alter ego, though in fact he tossed that off in a few weeks while travelling the United States to raise money for Free France. It was not a lifetime preoccupation as implied here.
By concentrating on ‘Le Petit Prince,’ the story elides and ignores most of his career as a world travelling aviator, international journalist, and published novelist. Occasionally some passages from his elegiac prose are narrated, and that is the best part of the film because it communicates a feeling for the sky, the wind, the earth below, and the eternity of the stars. But alas, there is too little of that.
Try ‘Southern Mail’ (1929), ‘Night Flight’ (1931), ‘Wind, Sand, and Stars’ (1939), and ‘Flight to Arras’ (1942).
This is the last photograph of Saint Ex.
It has Ganz declare in the last scene that he is a ‘fighter pilot.’ Not so, he flew reconnaissance and the Lockheed P-38 he had was unarmed, despite appearances in this movie, to make it lighter for distance and speed. It was also a notoriously difficult plane to fly even for pilots trained in its peculiarities with youthful reflexes, unlike the forty-four year old St Ex. Did he have a self-destructive streak? Perhaps.
The archival interviews with people who knew him are informative, though at the end when the credits roll the camera work on some of them is demeaning and gratuitous. Really!
There are no linked critics and no user reviews on IMDb. Never before have the opinionators failed to fill a vacuum on the IMDb. However, all was not lost because the entry on Amazon for the DVD is accompanied by some idiotic comments, including one that has Saint Ex dying to prevent Charles De Gaulle from making France socialist. Don’t believe me. Look for yourself. It restored my faith in the endurance and proliferation of human idiocy.
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