Notre Jour Viendra (Romain Gavras, 2010)

Our Day Will Come occupies the same social milieu of a bleak industrial Northern France that Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine have mined with some success, and its initial tone is the same blend of comic-tinged drama revolving around a pair of loser protagonists too. Furthermore, like de Kervern and Delépine's trademark pieces, it develops into a road movie, with the logical corollary of having to live in Pas-de-Calais being that it's somewhere to escape from as soon as possible. In this case the duo get additional impetus to run off from a sense of being persecuted for being ginger, so Ireland becomes their promised land.
The problem that road movies can often run into is that the aimless journey itself can start to mirror narrative lack of direction, and Our Day Will Come falls prey to this weakness as the wit runs out of steam. It then veers off towards a vague existentialism, but doesn't quite manage the poignancy of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which it's heavily influenced by, having neglected to make its principals likable. Vincent Cassel may be a heavyweight actor given the right part, but he brings too much spiky baggage to the role of the enfant terrible psychiatrist, and overacting manically doesn't make the character any more endearing.

5/10