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Laurence (Nathalie Baye) is being ferried to her job as a secondary school teacher in Lyon, France by her boyfriend Pierre (Gérard Lanvin) when, suddenly stricken, unable to face another day, she jumps out of the car and leaves him idling to walk along the river. There are specific reasons for this emotional disintegration, hinted at before and explicated afterwards, like the increasing apathy of kids toward education, the doubt that she can inspire them to learn, and the little pay she receives for trying to inspire them in the first place (as Pierre points out, only stupid jobs pay well). But there is also something universal in this desire to flee another working day. Who among us hasn’t wanted to pull our car onto the shoulder of the South Mountain Freeway in Phoenix one hot summer morning, and go start a new life, or pull the emergency lever on the CTA in Chicago one grey fall afternoon, climb out the window, and go sit and stare at Lake Michigan for a few hours? It was one of many moments watching Bertrand Tavernier’s 1980 comedy-drama hybrid (on the Criterion Channel though, alas, it has since stopped streaming) where I said to aloud to myself, “Is this my new favorite movie?”
Another moment when I suspected “A Week’s Vacation” might be my new favorite movie was when Laurence’s doctor doesn’t tell her to grin and bear it nor refer her to a psychologist but simply prescribed, like, you know, a week of vacation. I mean to a jaded American, don’t that just beat all? Ordering someone to go on holiday? Indeed, there is a surprising lightness to “A Week’s Vacation,” evoked in Laurence’s frequent laughter and smiles (and underlined in Baye’s effortless, virtually unnoticeable performance), and in so much immaculate French texture, all of which counterbalances her anguish. And yet, even if its episodic nature, of hangs with friends, a visit to her parents in the country, new acquaintances and unexpected encounters, seems readymade for a journey of self-discovery, the existential underpinnings quietly suggest something else. “A Week’s Vacation” is a slightly more French version of that old Onion article Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results.
Early on, Laurence notices an older woman through her window in an apartment across the way, one she does not know, has never seen, but occasionally glimpses throughout her week vacation, putting her in mind of being a ghost in her own life. And in so many long walks along the river, and in so many dreamy sits on benches where she watches the world go by, and in so many conversations where she proves as content to listen to others expound as expound herself, that’s often what she becomes throughout her mandatory seven-day respite. By movie’s end, the woman through the window is gone, why, where, who knows? It’s not a problem to be solved, and perhaps life might not a problem to be solved, just something to be passed through on the way to whatever may or may not be next.
