31 March 2022

Guillaume Brac's Le Repos des braves | Rest for the Braves (2016)

This is a documentary on La Route des Grandes Alpes by cycle enthusiast Guillaume Brac. At the end of June each year about sixty retired amateur cyclists journey across the Alpes from the north to the south, to the Mediterranean shores in Nice and Menton, where they relax for a day before returning home. The route starts at Thonon-les-bains by the Lac de Genève and runs for about seven hundred kilometers. The tour lasts for four days and accommodation is prepared for them to spend the night. Along the way (of the film itself) are clips of Bernard Thévenet during Le Tour de France of 1975, and the gruelling Liège-Bastogne-Liège cycle run in the snow in 1980.

At the end, when the cyclists take their bikes to pieces and take the coach back, one of them has half-written a song to his Philippe cycle to the tune of Les Charlots's 'Merci Patron', which the others sing the chorus to, and which is followed by Brassens singing 'Heureux qui comme Ulysse', a hymn to freedom, travel, and Provence.

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