Film about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Mail is more important than life": This motto on the door to Aéropostale's terminal describes the company's identity. The transport of letters and parcels by air over the Andes repeatedly claims lives. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Louis Garrel) is one of these daring pilots.

In the film drama "Saint-Exupéry," Argentine director Pablo Agüero recounts a pivotal week in his life in June 1930. Before Saint-Ex, as he is known, achieved worldwide fame as the author of "The Little Prince," he fulfilled his childhood dream of flying low over the mountains in shaky propeller planes.

The engines could only reach altitudes of 4,000 meters. To compete with the cheap railway, the men took ever greater risks on night flights. Among them was Henri Guillaumet (Vincent Cassel), Saint-Exupéry's best friend and, like him, a passionate pilot, idealist, and adventurer.

When Henri's plane disappears, his friend sets out to search for it in the ice and snow. No one knows where the plane crashed. From the Aéropostale station on the ground, Henri's wife (Diane Kruger) guides him by radio.

Between adventure film and fairy tale, Agüero stages a thrilling story about two aviation pioneers and an unbreakable friendship. He spent more than two years filming in the Andes and Patagonia. He moves in a dream world between fact and fiction, far from a chronological biopic. The film was also conceived as a "fairy tale in the spirit of Saint-Exupéry," says the filmmaker.

Again and again he intersperses poetic sequences into the plot, such as the encounter with a young girl who lives alone in the mountains with her animals, reminiscent of Saint-Exupéry's short story "Les petites princesses d'Argentine".

Here in the cockpit, Saint-Ex is constantly scribbling texts and drawings in a notebook. "To be able to write, you must first have lived," is his credo. Fragments of his adventures can be found in "The Little Prince." The narration at the end of the film reveals that the poet of the skies never returned from a reconnaissance flight on July 31, 1944, in preparation for the Allied landing in Provence.

In "Saint-Exupéry," you aren't swept into the realm of the "Little Prince," as the German title might misleadingly suggest. Furthermore, the narrative arc is a bit bumpy. But that shouldn't be too much of a problem: Breathtaking images of a hostile nature and the casting of Garrel as a gently naive dreamer offer cinema with heart.

And we know from “The Little Prince”: Only with this one can you really see well.

“Saint-Exupéry – The Story of the Little Prince”, directed by Pablo Agüero, with Louis Garrel and Vincent Cassel, 98 minutes, FSK 12