As always I’ll never really know about this lot. Fifty titles at those prices makes an
impossible target. There are times when you wonder are these really the pick of the year’s
offering? I was well on the way to regarding the event as a way to throw fifteen dollars a
movie into the void. Then it came good. I got two exceptional films in the same day.
Loin des hommes/ Far from Men starts off predictably with Vigo Mortensen as the Post WW2 Algerian school teacher saddled with the job of taking murderer local Reda Kateb (Zero Dark Thirty) to the gendarmerie, a day’s march down the desert road. Oh no - more growing mutual respect! Well they do go that way but, as they fill in the two central characters and the pair get involved with local militias and the French army, it becomes clear that this is something more thoughtful and impressive than we are used to. Great‘Scope images. Angela Molina doing a walk-on.
Then they slapped on Diplomatie/ Diplomacy, the enduring Volker Schlondorf’s film of the hit play about the Swedish Consul Nordling talking General Dietrich von Choltitz, German occupation commander, out of leveling Paris, as the Krauts lose WW2. This delivers two great parts to André Dusolier and Niels Arestrup, who come through brilliantly. Factually suspect but dramatically superior, introducing elements like the story of Abraham and Dusolier’s rousing hypothetical. All the reviewers seem to have forgotten René Clement’s 1966 version Is Paris Burning? The actual “Paris brûle-t-il?” ‘phone call doesn’t even figure here.
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| Arestrup: Diplomatie |
Melanie Laurent is staking out relationship cinema with her second feature as director Respire/Breathe covering a teenage school girl friendship that goes South in soft ‘scope close-ups. David Bailey, Les amitiés particulières and the current stressed family cycle swirl around. It takes a while for any narrative to form and the ending is a lurch into melo but Laurent is feeling her way towards something substantial.
Someone must have thought that if people were prepared to watch decadence for 142 min. in La grande bellezza, they could take a hundred and fifty of Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent, glamor with a sprinkling of nudity and luxury historical reconstruction - actuality and fashion in a split screen. You’ve got to wonder about a film where the clothes are the best element. Gaspard Ulliel and Jeremy Renier deserve better.
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| Loin des hommes; Kateb & Mortensen |
Le Dernier Diamant/ The Last Diamond is probably the best of Eric Barbier's glossy thrillers. Bérénice Bejo demonstrates that she can do the whole glamor star thing to the point where we feel someone more charismatic than the glum Yvann Attal should be squiring her through this twisty, polished heist piece about stealing a legendary cursed yellow diamond. Pretty good and would be better without the limp ending.
Bejo's The Artist co-star magistrate Jean Dujardin and gangster Gilles Lelloche compete in being lantern jawed as opposing hard men in La French/The Connection big budget, long crime piece in an attractive seventies Marseilles setting. At regular intervals someone gets whacked loudly but that only momentarily gets back wandering attention.
Lisa Azuelos’ elegant Une rencontre/ Quantum Love /Chance Meeting
is determinedly female & determinedly escapist. Mature author
Sophie Marceau and lawyer Cluzet get along a treat, leading to a variety
of fantasies of which the most striking has them naked together in the
bed he is sharing with Azuelos, doing double duty playing his wife.
Beautiful people, beautiful homes and locations - the Paris bridge with
the lovelocks, London red busses. After you realize it’s all froth,
attention wanders.
Tonie Marshall has done better than Tu Veux out tu veux pas/ Sex Love & Therapy where relations councilor Patrick Bruel hires Sophie again to sit in on his sessions and we get a lot of will they or won’t they. I was thinking of setting up cloud funding to buy her new underwear after she showed up a second time in those same black scanties.
The cast made Anne le Ny's On a failli être amies/Almost Friends seem like a good proposition. Nice titles, sharp bright colours, attractive settings and personable players deserve better. Emanuelle Devos and Roschdy Zem are pretty much indestructible but the good living fantasy they are involved in is unworthy of them. Divorced Karin Viard is a Skills Assessment officer handling a batch of new unemployeds from the closed local factory. Uneasy among them is Devos, who turns out to own an epicure restaurant with husband Roschdy. She keeps on breaking out in an unexplained rash. The two women involve each other in webs of deceit which aren't all that amusing, involving or plausible.
Welcome relief came with a germphobic (think Danny Kaye in Up in Arms) Danny Boon
in his own Superchondriac, a very funny farcical piece placing him again opposite Kad
Merad and our first glance of the winning Alice Pol. Think The Interview without the
edge but funnier gags.
It will be interesting to see which of these return for a theatrical run at popular prices and which ones spiral off into movie limbo.
