Have you ever been out on one of those perfect bike rides when everything seemed right and you kept pedaling and pedaling and suddenly discovered you were either way far from home or just plain lost?
Then you can identify with Laurie, the heroine in the French Canadian movie “2 Seconds.”
Laurie is an accomplished downhill racer who loses her sponsor after spending too much time (hmmm, about 2 seconds) behind the starting gate when it opens. Fired, she returns to Montreal to live in her brother's apartment and get a job as a bike messenger.
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Never quite fitting in with the messenger clique, she spends hours on her bike, losing track of time and ending up far from her destination. Eventually, she befriends a grumpy old former Italian bike racer who runs an extremely unfriendly one-man bike shop.
Despite his nettlesome exterior, Lorenzo and Laurie become fast friends, sharing a love for bicycling. One of the best scenes in the movie is the two of them sitting in the cozy workshop comparing war wounds, which sets up a twist at the end.
While the movie isn't strictly about bicycling — love and loss are major themes — the bicycle is surely the main prop. The opening scenes of downhill bike racing are awesome, and there's lots of footage of Laurie cycling around the city night and day.
The most profound effect on me, however, was viewing Laurie's habit of cleaning her bike off at the end of the day and watching Lorenzo tinkering in the bike shop. It motivated me into the garage the next day to clean a winter's-worth of road crude off the frame, chain, derailleur, pulleys, etc.
Released in 1998, the movie is mostly in French (French Canadian actually, which I'm told is slightly different that classic French), with English subtitles.
Doe-eyed Charlotte Laurier plays Laurie and Dino Tavarone is Lorenzo. The film was written and directed by Manon Briand, who won awards for the film at the Montreal World Film Festival. It might be hard to find at the local video store; I got it through a mail-in movie provider.
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