My Donkey, My Lover, and I (French title Antoinette dans les Cévennes) is a 2020 romantic comedy from France.
Laure Calamy stars as Antoinette, a French schoolteacher in her mid-forties. She is having a passionate affair with Vladimir, the father of one of her students—and Vladimir is married. The school year is over and Antoinette is looking forward to taking a vacation with Vladimir, until he gives her some unpleasant news: he isn't going on vacation with her. Instead, he's taking his wife and daughter on a hiking trip in the Cévennes mountains of southern France.
So Antoinette does the sane, rational thing: she follows them. With little planning, she finds herself in the south of France, taking quite a long, multi-day walk over the mountains and through the forests of the Cévennes, hoping to run into Vladimir. She is accompanied only by Patrick, a donkey, who is her pack animal as she walks some 80km or so of the Robert Louis Stevenson Trail
. Will Antoinette make it? Will she find Vladimir? Will she ever get Patrick, her stubborn, recalcitrant donkey, to move?
Tropes:
- Evil-Detecting Dog: Patrick, who has been completely silent throughout the film even as Antoinette was whipping him to get him to move, starts braying loudly when Vladimir—who of course is a user and a cad—comes walking up.
- Going to See the Elephant: Antoinette goes on a hiking tour of Cévennes, not to see the scenic beauty of southern France or anything, but to find her married boyfriend.
- Inspired by…: The director was inspired by reading Travels With A Donkey In The Cévennes and realising how much it resembled a Romantic Comedy.
- Lyrical Dissonance: The opening scene has Antoinette leading her elementary class, at a school concert, as they sing a very inappropriate-for-children song about a woman taking her lover to bed. The reason Antoinette picked this tune is that it's a direct message to Vladimir, who is in the audience.
- Meet Cute: The last scene has Antoinette meeting Romain, a handsome young man, when she dashes up to say goodbye to Patrick, now hauling Romain's stuff. After they see each other again, Patrick won't leave her, so she winds up accompanying Romain on a hike back the way she came.
- The Mistress: That's what Antoinette is, lover to a married man. She chases after him in a fit of jealousy when he goes on vacation with his wife and daughter.
- Off-into-the-Distance Ending: The film ends with Antoinette going off in the opposite direction, back the way she came, with Patrick and the handsome man who has rented Patrick as a pack animal.
- Ominous Owl: At one point Antoinette wanders off the trail and gets lost, and is wandering through the woods as the sky grows dark. The sight of an owl in a tree staring at her only increases her sense of terror.
- Piggyback Cute: After Antoinette goes out drinking with a bunch of bikers who were on the trail, one of them who has taken a shine to her gives her a piggyback ride back to the hotel (she's sprained her ankle). Then he decides to just carry her. Sex follows.
- Race for Your Love: Basically, this happens between a woman and a donkey. Antoinette, who has reached the end of her trail, wants to say goodbye to Patrick, but she's told that the donkey's already been taken away. She goes racing to find him, and catches up to Patrick, who is now hauling gear for a handsome young man.
- Scenery Porn: The stunning scenery of the Cévennes region of France is shown to maximum advantage, although Antoinette is usually too busy either screaming at Patrick or having sex with her lover to notice.
- Sexless Marriage: It turns out that Eléonore knows exactly what's gong on with Antoinette and Vladimir. She tells Antoinette that she and her husband don't have sex anymore, that her husband has a very high sex drive and used to try and screw her every single night and she didn't care for that, and she's grateful to Antoinette "and the others" for taking the pressure off her. (She doesn't sound very grateful as she says this through clenched teeth.)
- Shout-Out:
- At the top of a mountain, an excited Eléonore shouts "We are the kings of the world!", in English. She is of course alluding to Leonardo DiCaprio's "I'm king of the world!" scene from Titanic.
- There's a lot of talk about Robert Louis Stevenson's walk on the trail, and Antoinette is reading the French translation of his book Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes every night.
- Sleep Cute: With a donkey, as Antoinette's evening getting lost in the woods ends up with her sleeping out in the open on the grass, resting up against Patrick.
- Stubborn Mule: Antoinette, who is obviously ill at ease with Patrick, has enormous difficulty in getting the donkey to move. In one scene a highly agitated Antoinette starts yelling at the donkey to move, then lashes it with a whip, before bursting into tears and apologizing. She eventually figures out that the key is to walk alongside Patrick and constantly talk to him. (Eventually they get so at ease with each other that Patrick lets her ride him.)
