French Film Festival 2016

The 2016 French Film Festival

This one  remains a big ticket scene here - forty eight movies. On the plus side the booklet and celebrity comment trailer were nice this year but visiting film makers were sadly missed. You can query some choices, opening with the inoffensive Rosalie Blum when they had material like Dheepan and Le Tout nouveau testament in their line up,  and they don’t seem to learn. Philippe Garrel’s drear Les amants réguliers held the Academy house record for walk-outs, but they went ahead and programmed his new L'ombre des femmes / Shadow of Women while omitting material like Clément Cogitore’s admired Ni le ciel ni la terre.

In a previous post I covered Arnaud Desplecin’s My Golden Days / Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse account of Mathieu Almaric’s past triggered by the discovery of his passport, given to a Jewish refugee years before, and Michel Gondry’s endearing Microbe & Gasoil with the kids hitting the road in the home built timber car.  Since then Jaco Van Dormael’s great  Le Tout nouveau testament has been up for the Oscar it should have had. The copy in the festival appears to have been slightly modified since the Paris opening. It totally overshadows the other Benoit Poelvoorde movie, Jean Pierre Améris agreeable enough Family for Rent /Une Famille a Louer with isolated rich Benoit hiring Virginie Efira’s battler family to give him the common touch. 

le tout nouveau testamant - Poelvoorde

Also excellent is Stephan Brizé’s The Measure of a Man / La Loi du marché which kicks off with scruffy, fifty something Vincent Lindon being told he’s wasted him time doing a crane driver course as his benefit entitlement ran out, and follows his struggle to survive among the working poor with the plot taking an unexpected twist when he turns up as a security man at the giant Hyper Mart.

The film is compared to the Dardennes but it connects back earlier, to seventies German arbeiter films like Schneeglöckchen blühen im September or Ken Loach’s hymns to the Unions.  Here the focus on the personal is greater and more effective. Convincing minimal production values. Mainly first time actors and technicians producing a grainy long lens look, with some scenes a single take.

Director and star have built up a body of these (Mlle Chambon, Quelques heures de printemps) but this is better.

Also superior and also unexpected is Xavier (Quand j'étais chanteur) Giannoli’s Marguerite with Catharine Frot coming back gangbusters as an heiress who sings worse than Florence Foster Jenkins without anybody being game to stop her giving recitals. The actress has nailed a spot among the notables of French cinema here.

The dark, detailed bad taste - good taste privileged class settings contrasted to the lively decadence of the arts community, all realised in unfamiliar Czech filmed production values, create a kind of early Twentieth Century Sunset Boulevard 

The most imposing scene comes when the mean spirited anarchists have Frot  perform at the Cabaret Marot, where she does the Marseillaise, complete with rosette, trident and three corner hat, behind the sheet on which they project (untinted 16mm.!) battle atrocity footage for an audience of bearded nuns, politicians and affronted soldiers. They can’t match this in the finale they construct. Appealing Christa Théret (Déa in the Depardieu Homme Qiu Rit) seem to have a monopoly on sympathy.

Then I got two exceptional movies in a single day.

Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan has raised controversy on it’s home turf by the contrast between its depiction of grubby hostile France and sunny welcoming Britain. It’s one of a handful of films which tackle the refugee experience with conviction, whether you put it in with outsider views like Dirty Pretty Things or Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma or participant cinema like La Pirogue and the Hong Kong film where they train the leads with street maps of Hanoi to pass themselves off as Vietnamese refugees.

Jesuthasan Antonythasan ; Dheepan

Here we kick off in a camp where Kalieaswari Srinivasan searches among the refugees for a nine year old girl needed to complete the family listed on the dead  man’s passport they plan on using. The translator coaches leading man Jesuthasan Antonythasan on the back story he has to invent to be plausible for the interviewing authorities and the newly blended family are accepted as immigrants to France. There Antonythasan becomes janitor to a run down housing project, witnessing the violent behaviors of  gangs that he dismisses as less dangerous than the ones they knew in Sri Lanka - an observation that motivates the savage climax - the girl in the seat next to me was near hysterical watching that.

Paralleling the real life experience of it’s lead, the film uses non pros and a few familiar faces like Vincent Rotttiers, with unobtrusive film craft.  It appears to have a straight forward narrative but also runs on a complex, conflicting perception of their reality by the characters - bogus father, mother, daughter, gang leader wearing a home detention bracelet and Tamil Tiger general. It may be considered Audiard’s best work to date.

You could not get a more different film to Samuel Bentechrit’s Asphalte / Macadam Stories.  Bentechrit has been off the radar since his passably eccentric black and white J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster - that’s a translation of the opening line of Goodfellars incidentally. His two subsequent movies have gotten little attention but now he’s back gangbusters.

We kick off with another dilapidated housing  project, with a couple of skin heads lounging at the entrance, and get into a meeting with the Body Corp, where Gustave Kerven (Aaltra, Dans la cour) gets a laugh by just sitting there. He’s the only one who doesn’t want to pay for a new elevator because he’s on the second floor. He’s excused with the proviso that he can’t use the new lift. Impressed by the chairman’s exercise machine he gets one which puts him in hospital, to be sent back in a wheel chair. Kerven’s enforced nocturnal life style brings him into contact with night nurse Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi.

Meanwhile director Bentechrit’s son, as an abandoned teen, finds ex star Isabelle Huppert moving in next door and the space station insets lead to an escape pod landing astronaut Michael Pitt on the roof in front of the bemused skin heads. He shelters with Arab mother Tassadit Mandi who pretty much steals the picture (she’s also glimpsed briefly in Dheepan) turning him out in her imprisoned son’s Marseilles soccer shirt and feeding him couscous, without them having a common language.

Notice that three by four, the old Academy frame, is creeping back - Imax films, Carlos Reygadas and Grand Budapest Hotel. They use it here for the body of the movie, the image only going into wide screen for Huppert’s video audition, where her performance is modified under Bentchiret the younger’s direction - a considerable set piece in itself.

This one is pretty much unique though it’s been compared inadequately to Woody Allen and Jim Jarmusch. It’s enormously enjoyable and likable.

Belle & Sebastian : the Adventure Continues was better than it needed to be for  a sequel to a popular kids entertainment spun of the book by Cecile Aubrey, once H.G. Clouzot’s Manon.

In the picturesque alpine settings of the first film (the Nazis have gone home) Gramps Tcheky Karyo is raising orphaned Felix Bossuet when the plane bringing aunt Margaux Châtelier crashes into the burning forest. The pair seek out grumpy WW2 survivor pilot Thierry Neuvic who doesn’t like dogs, eyeing Belle the giant white Pyrenean.

Their adventures include the plane crashing, Belle fighting an agro bear which could have strolled in from The Revenant and Neuvic using dynamite to blast a path through the fire, the way he learned from WW2 Americans.

Impressively filmed scenes of Alpine life, great air to air material (it looks authentic) and the depiction of the forest fire would all be notable in a production aimed at any age. The cast are all more than equal to the task. We can chalk this up to strong production values and the injection of  Cristian Duguay jobbing director of the surprisingly accomplished Wesley Snipes Art of War. Pity the kid film conventions bend plausibility. Someone should have given that brat a good thumping every time he put someone’s life at risk.

Throw in  Franck Ekonci’s Avril & le monde truqué  from the Persepolis lot, which establishes a fascinating animator’s premise - after the assassination of Napoleon III, the war of 1870 never occurs and the world remains in the steam age, so that in 1947 Paris is a soot blackened low rise metropolis with wood burning automobiles and steam cable car cables. Intriguing to compare this to the cartoon Paris sky lines of  Gay Puree & Monstre á Paris.

The second half strays from this great exposition, which is unfortunate. Figures are closer to bande desiné than the digital detail we get now days. Marion Cotillard and Jean Rochefort do voices.

Rosalie Blum itself an eccentric French small town comedy, from Jean Paul Rapeneau’s son Julien, with Rapeneau jnr.’s brother doing a pleasant score, defies expectation. 

Balding Kyam Khojandi has loser stamped firmly on him.  He bikes around the small town streets he knows blindfolded, having inherited Salon Marchot, his dad’s hair dresser business. This comes with  mean widowed mum Anémone who manages to blight his life in most known ways. “Up tight old ladies quickly become bitter.” His unseen lives-in-Paris girl friend hasn’t been around for a while and his hearty cousin is scornful.

In the neighborhood store small store he is so struck with the belief that owner, mousyNoémi Lvovsky is familiar that he starts stalking her - to the Japanese movie, the local Centre Penitentiaire, her church choir practice and the bar where Luna Picoli-Truffaut sings in English and plays guitar.

He’s beginning to enjoy this but strange things start happening to him. Then Lvosky ‘phones to make a hair appointment. We think this is the point where she is going to take off those ugly glasses.

Here the narrative switches to unemployed and aimless niece Alice Isaaz who shares the flat of a wannabe street entertainer with his own pet crocodile, and events start to take shape.

This all holds up nicely until it’s twisty construction gives way to romance melo. Good local atmosphere and appealing leads, who register above the demands of the slight, agreeable material. Pity it loses drive when the trick double narrative cuts out.  

Christian Vincent's L'Hermine / Courted is a presentable French ‘scope A feature with “ten up” (his sentences) judge Fabrice Luchini wracked by flu but still conducting the trial of surly Victor Pontecorvo, accused of stomping his seven month old to death. One of the selected jurors turns out to be Sidse Babett Knudsen (After the Wedding), the nurse he came on for after his hospitalization.

This gets to be two movies wrapped in with one another. The court material outlining unfamiliar French legal rituals is intriguing - the judges and lawyers assembling at the court door to make an entrance, the Juge d’instruction in with the jury during deliberations and Luchini, fresh from doing one of his Racine style interventions in the case,  entering the jury room to dismiss the notion of certainty and saying that a trial is to assert law. This can stand with the best of André Cayatte’s legal dramas. Think Gabin in Le verdict.

However the mature age romance complete with lingering fades on Knudsen and glimpses of their home lives has the conviction of a TV soapy despite the excellence of the performers.

One disappointment I did catch was actor Clovis Cornillac’s director debut Un peu, beaucoup, aveuglement / Blind Date  which labors to make a silly premise into another endearing rom com.

Cornillac and Melanie Bernier have apartments either side of a wall which transmits any noise. They battle (she wins with an amplified metronome) reconcile and become lovers without physically meeting, before her big piano competition.

The people are appealing and the filming is glossy. The audience seemed to swallow it all.

L'attesa / The Wait soon gets to the half close up of Sicilian mother Juliette Binoche with the sound of hammering - crepe being nailed over the mirrors where the family have gathered for a funeral. Binoche’s son’s French speaking fiancée Lou de Laâge is driven in and the film gets to be about the two women (“Sono suo madre”). Language switches from Italian to French as Juliette delivers the film’s central lie. They stress the contrast of the pair - Lou swimming in her scanties which Juliette refuses. “I’m used to seeing some parts of my body only in the dark.”

Two strong lead performances, great images and a remote link to Pirandello but does it have to be so boring?

Director Piero Messina was an assistant on Il Grande Bellezza and he wants us to know it, with significance writ large - for openers the somber lit Christ on the cross which foreshadows the Madonna we see being trucked in for the Sicilian religious festival, with the penitents in KKK hoods. However he film is really a clearer demo of the lingering influence of Antonioni with static, still photo like insets - the pink inflatable mattress blows about the courtyard of the so nice beige wall villa, the distractingly appealing meal run up from home made carob flour pasta, two glasses on their sides roll on a table, a helicopter scoops water out of the lake, the distant hair pin bends with no traffic on them.  It’s even got a missing lover - I mean - Jeez.

Director René Ferét’s last film Anton Tchékov 1890 also has high seriousness stamped all over it. Hollywood gave up on these Great Artist bios in the fifties after Moon & Sixpence, Song to Remember or  Lust for Life - all right maybe Amadeus. I think of Bright Star as the tail end of the Ken Russell comet.  French film makers hang in there Guy De Maupassant, Camille Claudelle, Renoir and the rest.

Anton Chekov 1890 joins the tradition - weighty themes (should Nicholas Giraud/ Tchékov serve humanity as a doctor or writer?), men in frock coats and beards, classical music, sustained shots of writing long hand on brown paper, and (very little) nudity - which will look good in the trailer. They even provide a walk on Leon Tolstoy.

The opening isn’t bad with  the film’s two familiar faces Philippe Nahon and Jacques Bonnaffé appearing at the provincial home, where the family has to shut up religious dad doing prayers at meals. However it doesn’t get any better. Married Jenna Thiam joins sister Chammah’s literature classes to get it on with Giraud but that, like his friendship with hair cut short for lice Shikhalin Pentitentiary Island teacher Marie Féret doesn’t go all that far. When his formerly dissolute brother dies of TB Giraud undertakes his “devoir” to the icy prison island where he witnesses flogging, meets murderers and tends the ill (“Il faut agir”) coming back to write “The Seagull”, for which we see him giving not particularly helpful stage directions to the cast.

Craft aspects are good. Ferét achieved his aim in making a Chekovian art movie. It’s a bit much to expect an audience to enjoy the result.

Claude Lelouche is the great survivor of French film and, despite aberrations like his dippings into mysticism, he’s provided an enormous amount of quality entertainment.  Hopes were high for the new Un + une in which the shape of  his Un homme et une femme can be vaguely seen.

Zylberstein and Dujardin : Un + une

It kicks off with ‘Scope shots of pilgrims river bathing at Benares and shifts into a girl’s failed Indian Dance audition and a non sequential coverage of a Silver Store robbery and chase intercut, the two becoming the subject of a B&W "Juliet & Romeo" production by Rahul Vohra an Oscar winner art film director, who hires in French movie musician Jean Dujardin to score it. Elsa Zylberstein shows up sitting next to Jean at French Ambassador Christoph Lambert’s diner and we get to the concept of her spirituality against his pragmatism, with Elsa off to enable her to have a child after being hugged by famed woman  healer Mata Amritanandamayi Devi.

Jean is diagnosed with the life threatening tumor and follows to the healer, catching up with Elsa a  rail station and traveling by train, bus and small boats through all the scenics. The leads are ultra charming but  all the will they or won’t they strains patience.

Coda has Jean encounter Elsa on the so nice Seine house boat. The film stops at the start like Toute une vie.
 It comes arrives full of set pieces like Dujardin asked by Zylberstein how he’d put music to their real life encounter and his suggestions being used as the scene runs or action broken up with unexpected flashbacks. Technically exceptional - great scope images, Francis Lai score, the monochrome film in a film getting video vignetted into subsequent action. It’s kind of like thumbing through a glossy woman’s magazine for two hours at a time.

Julie Delpy was such an endearing presence in  that it would be nice to find her films as director were equally appealing - or at least better than the new Lolo.

It starts out as another glossy rom com (bring back Annie Giradot or Michele Morgan!) with long divorced sophisticated Paris designer Julie on holiday in Biarritz, where she gets to meet local Danny Boon when he dumps the giant tuna caught for the barbecue that night in her lap. They make out, with her seeing him as a hoon fling only to find herself jumping on him at any opportunity and the pair setting up together when he moves to Benugravelle in Paris with an impeded view of the Eiffel Tower.

So far so so with the talking dirty with friend Karen Viard the best element.

However the film takes a right turn with the introduction of  Julie’s nineteen year old son Vincent Lacoste, who turns out to be a “vrai psycho” sabotaging mum’s relations with men since he was in kindergarten. I didn’t like this format all that much in Tanguy a few years back

George Coraface shows up briefly as Viard’s Greek squeeze. The talented cast deserve better material. Best element is location filming with material shot in the Pompidou Centre, Place de la Republic, Paddington Station etc.

At fifteen bucks a time for largely unfamiliar material, mistakes rapidly become expensive for the viewer and I only sampled about half of what was on offer but that did suggest that new French film remains the most approachable of current national cinemas and one spiced with innovative and accomplished material. A bit of civilisation in our movie going is welcome.