The Volcano — Characters & Cast

To reach his daughter's wedding, and — just as urgently — to arrive as the good parent, the one who was there, in front of the one who wasn't.

Begins as the parent who stayed — a driving instructor who raised his daughter after the marriage ended, and who has organised his sense of grievance around that fact. The journey strips the martyrdom from him: forced to improvise, break rules and depend on the woman he blames, he loses the comfortable role of the wronged party and has to meet his ex-wife as a peer rather than a verdict.

To be present at the wedding of a daughter she has not fully earned — and to refuse to concede a single point to her ex-husband on the way.

The veterinarian who quit the marriage soon after the child was born, and who has spent years constructing a defence for it. Thrown into forced proximity with Alain, her brisk self-justification cracks under the sheer duration of the trip; the closer she gets to the daughter she left, the less her explanation covers. Widely singled out by critics as the film's strongest performance.

None — and that is the point. Its indifference is what makes the couple's fury at circumstance so funny.

The film's third protagonist is a volcano that never appears as a character. It erupts, closes European airspace, and thereafter dictates every decision the humans make — an antagonist with no motive, no negotiation and no dramatic arc, whose sole function is to keep two people who hate each other in the same vehicle.