On My Way is a French version of a Lifetime movie that only works if you like Catherine Deneuve. On My Way is a rambling story about an older woman, a widow, who suddenly realizes her life is a hot mess and abandons her routine for a road trip with no destination except cigarettes and hopefully happiness.
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Deneuve lives in a small town in a house with her mother and runs a restaurant that is going bankrupt. She finds out that her lover finally left his wife for a woman younger than her. She leaves work to get cigarettes and will be right back. Ha, classic! She basically realizes that her personal and financial life is crap and says fuck it.
Initially On My Way feels like a series of dramatic exercises inspired by the writer’s wish list of ridiculous scenarios that the writer wanted to see Deneuve in. On My Way meanders with no destination other than away from home. Deneuve chills in a rustic home with an old man who rolls her a cigarette. Deneuve has to deal with a sloppy drunk couple at a cafeteria and gets cursed out for trying to be a Good Samaritan. Deneuve parties in a bar full of rowdy patrons that rely on a smuggler for cigarettes. Deneuve has a drunken one-night stand with a younger man/criminal and wakes up with a hangover. Deneuve spends the night at a furniture store thanks to a security guard who didn’t want her outside in the rain because she is broke.
On My Way begins to focus when her estranged and somewhat bitchy daughter guilts her into taking care of her grandson so she can go to work. Deneuve can barely execute this task, arrives late after her daughter has left and for the child of a single mom, her grandchild is a brat who doesn’t get what I have no money means. There was a moment when I thought that On My Way was going to turn into The Vanishing, but that would spoil the tone of the film. Deneuve finally decides to go to a beauty queen reunion so she and her grandson can have fun on someone else’s dime despite her initial reluctance to attend the reunion.
Deneuve finally confronts why her life turned out so bad. She was a beauty queen and abandoned all hopes of having a better life when she lost the love of her life in a car accident. She never really dealt with that trauma and revisiting the point in time when her life took a disastrous turn sets her on a clichéd path to love and financial solvency that was fairly predictable once the esteemed, money bags paternal grandfather who does not get along with Deneuve (initially) appears on the scene.
I’m American. The last time that we had a woman up to shenanigans on a road trip, it was Thelma and Louise, they were not as old as Deneuve when she made this film (69), and they became outlaws and died. Unless you are Susan Sarandon or Diane Lane, grandma isn’t pulling guys except for laughs at her expense. Despite the filmmakers’ overarching intentions, On My Way is a slight movie without a consistent, comprehensive plot, but I still enjoyed it. Also I will put up with contrived BS if it is a foreign film, especially if it is French and stars a legendary actor. Still I’m hoping that in France, it is precocious and not regular for grandsons to ask their grandmothers if they had sex recently.