Laure Calamy shines at the center of Caroline Vignal’s charming French comedy “My Donkey, My Lover & I,” in a performance that earned her a Cesar Award for best actress in 2021. The original French title of the film is “Antoinette dans les Cevennes,” or “Antoinette in the Cevennes,” a reference to the film’s inspiration, the 1879 book by Robert Louis Stevenson, “Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes.”
In 1878, seeking distance from an affair with a married American woman, Stevenson set out on a 12-day hiking trip in southcentral France with a donkey named Modestine to carry his belongings. His published travelogue is one of the first works to feature hiking and camping as a recreational activity, and his journey has since inspired many copycats to take up the Stevenson trail and retrace his steps, as our heroine, Antoinette (Calamy) does.
However, it’s not distance from a lover, but proximity, that Antoinette seeks when she books a last minute six-day hike with a donkey on the Stevenson trail. A fifth grade teacher, she’s been having an affair with Vladimir (Benjamin Lavernhe), the father of one of her students. When she finds out their lovers’ retreat has been jettisoned so that Vladimir can hike in the Cevennes with his wife and daughter, Antoinette impulsively follows suit, with vague intentions of spontaneously running into him.
