THE RAGE OF PARIS.

Being in Paris one more time suggests that it remains ground zero for movie enthusiast activity as it always has been in my experience and probably was back into the twenties and the days of Louis Delluc and the gang.

You can’t get away from movies in the city. Things like the new masonry where Tom Cruise had the pursuit car rammed at La Tour de Nesle for the Mission Impossible film or the Canal St. Martin tour, where they still play a sound track extract from eighty year old Hotel du Nord,  are there to remind you.

Anyone would expect the Cinémathèque Française in a Frank Gehry building at Bercy, next to the Finance Ministry, with it’s forty plus screenings a week to be a category killer. There is stiff competition however.

Pathé poster display.

While I was there the Les Halles Forum Des Images followed this year's Étrange Festival with a night with Raoul Servais introducing his short films and his 1994 feature Taxandria. Fondation Jerome Seydoux-Pathé, offering it’s foyer exhibition of vintage cinema promotion material and a schedule of silent movies with piano accompaniment, ran a nice series on early women film makers. I caught an Alice Guy program of work from 1911 (a pro. early western called Greater Love Hath No Man) to 1916 (The Ocean Wall). This was a great record of the advance of film technique of the day. I had high hopes for Germaine Dulac’s 1916 La Cigarette with an eighteen year old Andrée Brabant in the lead (museum curator Gabriel Signoret suspects his younger wife of infidelity and elects an eccentric form of suicide) but that must have been noveletish even in its day. The film still remains an informative coda to Dulac’s more mature work.

Bercy managed to consume most of my time and I’m going to give that separate coverage but even without that there was enough activity to keep the most determined film freak busy. That’s quite apart from the multiplexes and art cinemas running new French material and subtitled foreign films or foreign cultural institutions. The battle for version original has long since been won there.

In Paris I tend to let the new French films go knowing that a good slice of them will turn up here in the French Film Fesitival with sub-titles. However I did take in some new product - mainly on planes where they also come captioned.

Quentin Dupieux’ new Au poste is a handsomely made twist piece which extends star Benoît Poelvoorde’s line of cutting edge comedies.

 The tone is set without any explanation as the cops drag away Grégoire Ludig from conducting an open air orchestra in his bathers. In a windowless office under the all lights ceiling, shoulder holster wearing commissaire Poelvoorde interrogates him, taking his deposition on a manual typewriter. Behind them subordinate Marc Fraize has a healed over eye socket as a result of a birth defect, adding to the off kilter menace of the situation.

Au poste : Poelvoorde & Ludig.

We soon get the lethal set square, a corpse in the cupboard, Anaïs Demoustier, turning up as the deputy’s wife while the now increasingly nervous Ludic describes the night of finding his neighbour’s dead body and Benoît & his people keep on manifesting in the flashback visualisation to the point where Ludic tcalls out “commisseur” when he stops seeing him.

Great gags include cigarette smoke issuing from the old wound in Benoît’s stomach or Ludic so disturbed that he eats the offered oyster like a biscuit, to the cops’ amazement.

Cast and film makers are right on top of their game. Unfamiliar imagery and long takes show case them effectively. Poelvoorde makes an authoritative center, promoting director Dupieux to main stream after a history of strange movies featuring Eric & Ramsay and a homicidal car tire among others. Michel Hazanavicius does a walk on as a gendarme and Alain Chabat provides cries of terror as he did  in the director’s last movie. Only the ending lets down all this build up.

One agreeable surprise was Tout le monde debout / Rolling to You made by one Franck Dubosc who I’m not aware of having seen though he’s been an actor since the eighties appearing in Iznogoud and as a continuing character in Coronation Street (!)

Here Dubosc is a Sports Shoe Magnate, marathon runner and a serial seducer first seen
presenting himself as the customer the Asian girl airport driver with the name board is supposed to be picking up. She’s surprised, expecting an Ivorian. He tells his doctor friend Gérard Darmon she was won, bedded and dumped in a weekend. Dubosc’s mother dies (wrong funeral jokes) and he’s sitting in her wheel chair while clearing out her apartment when neighbor Caroline Anglade comes in in her shorts and low cut blouse. She thinks he’s handicapped and he figures he can use that, getting invited to her country house for the weekend.

However it proves to be that Anglade is trying to set him up with her sister, wheel chair bound Alexandra Lamy. The pair are attracted but the deception makes any relationship impossible despite a trip to Lourdes where our hero plans on standing up miraculously restored (remember Federico Luppi in 1981’s Tiempo de revancha?) till severe Curé  François-Xavier Demaison spots his worn shoes.

Tout le monde debout : Lamy & Dubosc

The balance between outrage comedy and rom com is exceptional and the cast are spot on including Elsa Zylberstein as Dubosc’s neglected P.A. and Claude Brasseur as his dad. The film is compared to the Nakache-Toledano  Les Intouchables but it really is closer to Nils Tavernier's 2013 De toutes nos forces / The Finishers or the Farrelley’s Special Olympics film The Ringer.

 

Ex G.P.Thomas Lilti's new Première année is his third medical film. It's ambitious and a mixed success.

The documentary background is imposing -  cattle call medical training with hundreds of jeering students in lecture halls and exam. rooms after they have been presented with eighteen inch piles of duplicated notes - and intimidating with details on the failure rate and the beginners getting an awed glimpse of third year students actually assisting at a surgical procedure.

Less successful is the central friendship of first year students William Lebghil fresh from school and third time repeater Vincent Lacoste facing his last chance to be a doctor. They study together, argue and visit one another’s families in the breaks until Lacoste has a stress induced break down and Lebghil has to leave his functioning study group to pull his associate through the training.  The ending is ingenious but not convincing.

The film is full of nice touches like the demonstration of blood flow by calling in the concierge to participate in a dramatisation or the half romance with the girl student, living in the same building, which remains peripheral to their study agenda. The ‘scope filming is superior.

Rue Champollion served up a nice copy of One Hour With You with The Smiling Lieutenant also on show. I was confronted by Jeanette MacDonald on all sides this trip. Alexi German’s son’s film Dovlatov, about a writer at odds with the Soviet literary establishment, was long and miserable as well as being overshadowed by the similar 2016 Andrej Wadja Powidoki / Afterimage but despite it’s non  commercial subject it was doing first run business in several cinemas. The same was true of equally non mainstream Chang-dong Lee’s  Beoning / Burning but I’ll look at that in coverage of the director’s Bercy retrospective.

The big hits seemed to be English language movies. The BlackkKlansman looked like their most widely shown film. That I did enjoy but the film that particularly got my attention was the first English speaking film of Jacques (Un Prophète, Dheepan) Audiard, The Sisters Brothers, a blood-thirsty Euro western.

John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix are a pair of murderous psychopaths who we kind of warm to. They take their unreliable firearms on a new assignment for glimpsed distant Commodore Rutger Hauer and track down industrial chemist Riz Ahmed (as one Hermann Warm - the designer of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Passion of Joan of Arc? - is it a word game like the film’s title) Jake Gyllenhaal has had a chance in life and comes round to Ahmed’s vision of an ideal society which will always be denied the boys.

Sisters Brothers : Phoenix & Reilly

The Sisters Brothers

The cast are all right on top of their game. I rather like Phoenix explaining that he wasn’t a western fan and he had to come to terms with using hand guns plausibly to go with the film’s other disciplines.

There’s lots of shooting and riding in the Spanish and Romanian countryside before a curiously innocent ending. The piece pulls off that rare trick of being acceptable as thick ear entertainment and something more character based and thoughtful at the same time. Set in 1851, it’s imagery is earlier than the traditional westerns which gives it an unfamiliar lever on plausibility. The closest thing I can recall is Dirty Little Billy.

The Sisters Brothers has now opened abroad but there’s no indication that it will play here after the unwelcome precedents represented by the minimal releases of The Bone Tomahawk and Blackthorn.

Well, old hands tell me movies are losing ground in Paris. The invaluable Pariscope has folded. Cinemas have closed and whole areas of film activity have gone - skin flicks, gay films, neighborhood houses showing Euro trash spy films, westerns and cop movies. It’s hard to imagine even the adventurous left bank art houses running an untranslated Daniel Schmidt small gauge drama, the Doug Fairbanks Case of the Leaping Fish as feature or a program of Julien Duvivier’s son’s short films visualising the psychedelic effects of drug misuse, like the old days.

If I wanted an incident to dramatise this, sure enough came my visit to the Champo. I’d had trouble there before with advertised films not showing up but for that they put notices in the show case. I asked to see their Alberto Sordi re-issue and the box office lady punched me out a ticket for the auditorium showing Thelma and Louise. I asked for my money back and she refused. I demanded to see the manager and I was told he wasn’t there. I came back the next day and was told he was only available by appointment and I asked for an appointment and was told he didn’t make appointments. I didn’t think that was funny in “Catch 22” and this stuff was eating into my Paris time.

Barrie Pattison - 2018