4L

Jean Reno,Jeannie Tirado,Hovik Keuchkerian,Susana Abaitua

Tocho is a rude in bad manners Basque who works in Bilbao's docklands as night watch. Tired of his bored and routine life, a letter from Tombuctu, Mali, forces him to make a radical change: leaving his job, Tocho travels France for meeting Jean Pierre, a lifelong friend, estranged of their youth days. There Tocho tells Jean Pierre that Joseba, their other lifelong friend with who they three traveled from Spain to Tombuctu years ago to sell race cars and who he established there in Mali ten years ago, is dying. Reluctant, Jean Pierre accepts Tocho's plan to travel Mali to meet Joseba before it be too late. They two visit Ely, Joseba's newly adult daughter to ask her of going with them. Despite the bad and absent relation between Ely and her father, she decides to make the journey in the hope to fix her disastrous life, but instead to take a flight from Spain to Mali, Ely reveals Tocho and Jean Pierre her biggest secret: a 1982's Renault 4 modified as race car from the first days of Paris-Dakar Rally, that Joseba acquired years ago previously to moved Mali. After to test that it's in perfect conditions, the three down to Cadiz to cross in ship the Strait of Gibraltar, arriving Ceuta. Therefore, the travel starts to give bad signals from the beginning: Tocho despises openly Ely by her rebel attitude, while Jean Pierre rediscovers his sensibility to desert and heat. For more complications, Tocho's decision to accept Soriano (a Spaniard street drug dealer who lives in the city) to travel with them to Tombuctu ends with all arrested in a custom control. Free after a treat with the cop, the group leaves behind Soriano and travels by the Sahara to the next custom, where get to cross it after a long wait just to learn time later that a young black stowaway African named Mamadou is hide in the car. With the water consuming slowly and Jean Pierre each time more ill, the situation worsen in unexpected ways after to be robbed by a Tuareg named Akly at night after to meet him this same evening, forcing them to visit Alain's house, an old illegal trader who has old unfinished business to solve with Jean Pierre. With Joseba as narrator of his thoughts about life, death, world and people, the travel changes Tocho, Ely and Jean Pierre, rediscovering the pleasure to be alive and the second chances.—Chockys