Photo Richard Wong

FILM FREAK ABROAD 2016.

I guess I’ve got to count this year’s trip to Europe as a success. I didn’t ride taxis. I didn’t have a meal in McDonalds and I didn’t take any selfies of myself with a 12th Century Madonna. I also didn’t encounter a single refugee, though I did have a sudden unexpected eye movement finding my lady friend engulfed by Romanian pick pockets.

As far a films go the results were mixed.

Paris as an ever renewing source of vintage American movies is a well known phenomenon but the same thing is true for their Italian films. Rue Champolion has for years had re-runs of Italian sex comedies of the seventies. By and large these are not funny and not sexy as poor Laura Antonelli struggles with her indignities, though Luigi Commenici’s Mio Dio, come sono caduta in basso! /Till Marriage Do Us Part did manage a nice joke strip tease in period costume.

However the choice is widening.

The Cinematheque’s crime movie season provided  Daniele Vicario’s presentable il passato e una terra straniero of  2008 where lawyer Elio Germani's meeting with a woman triggers the flashback of his being sucked into the lower reaches of society. More curious was a three cinema opening of Antonio Pietrangeli’s first movie Il sole negli occhi / Empty Eyes fifty three years after it first appeared. The director went on to make Adua e le compagne / Hungry for Love so I was curious enough to investigate. Pietrangeli’s film however proved a formula weepy about poor young Irene Galter ill used in the big city. The real streets, homes and the local dance hall showed the realist tradition but the plot was from stock with the society of her fellow maids the only mildly innovative element.

Cinema Zero's tote bag."Ce la forza sia con te."

Pick of the batch proved to be Anna Magnani, Toto and Ben Gazzara in what may be Mario Monicelli’s best film, the 1960 Risate di Gioia (Tears of Joy) with Toto getting roped into blonde movie extra Anna’s plan to join the New Year celebration, where they don’t want her, and the pair trapped in Ben’s scheme to mount a major scam before the night is out and his criminal associates close in on him. After unfamiliar plot developments in real settings there’s a startling scene where Gazzara turns on the pair who have woken up to him at last and declares that at least he works at his scams. Otherwise he’d be as pitiful as they are.

A beautiful sub-titled digital copy did justice to Leonardo Barboni’s wide images. It’s sad to think that a film as remarkable as this vanished after a brief first run dubbed as The Passionate Thief in the English language market. It left me frustrated at not being able to get to the other unfamiliar titles in La Filmotheque’s twenty plus schedule.

Film maker introduced screenings are a near daily occurrence in Paris and not just people promoting their new product. Jean Sorel was fronting a selection of his movies from the sixties. Only clashes in timing kept me away. I did however get to marvelous animator Michel Ocelot’s session with a kid audience (we were the tallest ones they had) for his new production Ivan Tsarévich et le princesse changeant - actually three new episodes to his animated series where the silhouette voice actors argue about he plot before we get the story segment. Colour and design are again brilliant and it was interesting to see Ocelot working the children’s question and answer session (“Quoi - vous n’avez pas vue Kirikou?”) till it got stretched to the point where they wanted to get the pastries in the foyer.

 

Michel Ocelot animation.

 One tiny asked him why he worked with black (silhouette)  figures and Ocelot answered that it had been an economy move at first but he persisted because it boosted the use of imagination. I’ve heard a lot less informative exchanges among big people at the Sydney Film Festival.

Mainly I let the new French product slide by on the principal that it would be offered at the French Film Week - and with sub titles - but I did knock out  Bernard Bonello’s Nocturama which may be the first of the inevitable movies on the Paris bombings. No one seems to worry about the fact that the terrorists are the good guys in this one. Not a great film but it does field a few great images - the group filmed in the nose cone of the driverless train as it emerges from the Metro tunnel to show the La Defence arch on the skyline or the face of the golden statue engulfed in flames. Ma loute is the new Bruno Dumont movie with its celebrity stars Fabrice Luchini, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and incredibly Juliette Binoche transformed into grotesques, as the action comes to focus on the cross dressing daughter of the big house making a couple with the brutish fisherfolk family’s son. If Camille Claudel 1915 and Flanders which Dumont also made with  producer Bouchareb are off kilter, this one is totally dotty and not in a good way.

Joachim Lafosse’s L'économie du couple / After Love is a slick relationship piece with the marriage of the comfortably off couple disintegrating. It showcases now hot star Bérénice Bejo opposite busy writer-director-actor Cedric Kahn. I might have liked it better with translation.

 

Pick of the bunch was 2014’s Mon pire cauchemar a reworking of the Theodora Goes Wild formula with slobby Benoit Poelvoorde getting mixed into chic Isabelle Huppert’s life. The switch of audience sympathies between them is more deft than anything I’ve seen in director Anne Fontaine’s other work. This is the kind of picture that wows the sub-titles crowd who should have been offered it by now.

Unfamiliar vintage French cinema is always turning over there. The ever intriguing Le Desperado was doing Raimu & Pierre Fresnay which gave me  a chance to see Jean Delannoy’s 1953 La Route Napoléon with Fresnay heading up a P.R. operation reconstructing the Emperor’s return from Elba with a garish caravan of sponsor labeled vehicles diverted from the chateau the bailiffs had sealed and having to set up in a small village well away from the original progress. This one should have been funnier.

 The kind of film I’m more interested in seeing in Paris is the European made in English language movie. Think Mateo Gil’s Blackthorn, the Matieu Almaric-Arnaud Desplechin  Jimmy P. : Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian or Pupi Avarti’s Bix. These never seem to get significant distribution in Australia and are often  excellent. Accordingly I homed in on Soy Nero a Germany - France - USA - Mexico co production from Iranian director Raffi Pitts, which claims to discuss the green card soldiers, foreigners promised nationality for fighting with US troops and then deported. This one opens out into the whole  question of nationality, with Johny Ortiz born in the US to illegals and accordingly not recognised, meaning he has to smuggle himself back into his country of birth. The second half, about his time fighting in Iraq, is another movie but ingeniously echoes the US material.

It will be more than revealing to see which if any of these make their way through the distribution mechanism to Australia.

 B.P.