Of the semi-New Wave of French film-makers in the early eighties, the case is there to made for Jean-Jacques Beineix as its most outspoken, if not its most talented exponent. (He is often written-up alongside the likes of Leos Carax and Luc Besson, despite being over ten years their senior). He arrived big in 1982 with the screaming, stylish Parisian opera-thriller Diva, and went on to give us the film that launched a thousand student bedsit posters in the eternally popular Betty Blue. It is maybe charitable to overlook Roselyne and the Lions and Moon in the Gutter as 'interesting'.

What Beineix always offers by the bucket-load is virtuoso style, and in that respect there will be few films easier on the eye this year than IP5. In it, reckless graffiti artist Tony (Olivier Martinez) hits the road, travelling from Paris to Toulouse to find a young nurse (Geraldine Pailhaus) with whom he's fallen in love. He's accompanied on his journey by young black rapper Jockey (Sekkou Sall), progressing through a series of stolen cars until in the back of one they find Leon (Yves Montand), and join him on a quest into his past that ultimately has repercussions for them all.

This was the veteran Montand's final film, and director Beineix has been somewhat unfairly accused of hastening his demise by having him stand in a torrential downpour and bathe in an ice-cold lake. Whatever the truth of that, it is certainly the late idol of French cinema that holds most of the attention here. His striving to rectify the mistakes of his early life (he is searching for the Island of Pachyderms, and this is the director's fifth film -- hence the title) at least have a kind of resolution and sense that are badly lacking in his two travelling companions -- Martinez's pursuit of Gloria being partially undercut by something of a vacuum where Pailhaus' performance is concerned (although to be fair, the part is severely underwritten), and Sall's rather ludicrous search for snow which, it's easy to feel, is gifted to the production solely to allow for the mountainous climax.

There is a meandering quality to IP5 that is all too familiar to viewers of Beineix's earlier works, the feeling that the more it moves toward a resolution, the more it tries hard to look at things, the more flatulent it becomes. Isolated scenes work well -- a rooftop fireworks sequence, Montand's paean to the "lustral rain" of the forest, the cumulative effect of a tragedy waiting to happen while Martinez creates his final work on a roadside billboard -- but elsewhere (particularly Montand's urging that they indulge in tree-hugging) it collapses into a farcical essay in eco-awareness that fights hard -- and fails -- to suppress laughter.

In the end the sense is there of Beineix being unwilling or unable to rein in his excesses, and certainly the film seems deeply uneasy outside of the towns and city. Shorn of a good fifteen-twenty minutes then it would be all the leaner and fitter. Unfortunately, if these things run true to form, then in a couple of years we'll have IP5 -- The Special Edition, with an extra hour of those tree-hugs and Sall's frankly embarrassing rap posture.