Another French Film Festival, this one the thirtieth, taking up a month and getting through fifty plus movies at more than six hundred dollars if you
really work at it. This year it managed to generate half a dozen films I
wouldn’t have wanted to miss.
Particularly there was Le grand bain/Sink or Swim directed & co-written by actor by Gilles Lellouche. I've been looking for this one since I saw Lellouche spruik it on FrenchTV's Vingt Heures which SBS broadcasts in its early World Watch programs.
Le Grand bain is a film about a misfit team who go in for men's synchronized swimming which has been compared to The Full Monty (which Lellouche points out he's never seen all the way through). He's not an Esther Williams fan either. It’s closer to Jon Turtelaub's 1993 Cool Runnings, the Jamaican bobsled team movie.
The French movie arrives the same time as Oliver Parker's British Swimming With Men both derived from the championship the Swedes carried off and Dylan Williams 2010 documentary Men Who Swim covering that.
Hangdog Mathieu Amalric tears off the phone number for a men's synchronised swimming training at the local pool. This ("Women play soccer now") ingeniously eliminates most of the set up and lands us smack into the middle of the stories of his equally dysfunctional team members being lackadaisically coached by Virginie Efira between her AA meetings.
Included are Guillaume Canet, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Philippe Katerine, Balasingham Thamilchelvan and Benoît Poelvoorde who is standing in the back row face obsured in the team photo on the poster despite his celebrity status. The all star cast also runs to Marina Foïs.
Then they discover that with this fledgling sport that all they have to do is register to become Team France. "We were a crap warmup act and now you want to put us into the world championships" They fall into the hands of Arab martinet trainer, wheel chair-bound Leïla Bekhti (Un prophete), who slaps them and abuses them ("forty three seconds - I have little girls who can do forty three seconds") into exhausting training routines. They have to carry her on their runs. A cheer goes up when Cantet snaps and hurls her, wheel chair and all, into the pool - political correctness takes one for the team. It is a surprise measure of the film's skill that everyone becomes more sympathetic after this.
The actors can be spotted participating in the competition routine and they trained with Olympic swimming coaches. It would be interesting to know how much was doubled. The parallel development of the personal stories, a great routine cross cut to the number "Physical" as they each work out in their business settings, the camper van trip to Norway, the daunting spectacle of the other national teams, their dawn celebration and the reaction of their tormentors are made to pile on top of one another to provide an irresistible buzz.
Swimming With Men has a lot of equivalents - Rob Bryden for Cantet - but the French film outclasses it. I realised why at the end where Jim Carter turns round and says “Do you have to be so (expletive indistict) negative” to his team at the point where the Frogs are radiating delight in their film. The film is coining it in its home market and deserves to do the same thing here. In his first full feature, Lellouche has pulled off a coup.
Not offering the sunny chic of Paris, the setting is closer to the ugly back blocks that Benoît Delépin and Gustave Kerven show us in Le Grand Soir, Mamuth and their new I Feel Good (title in English) another highlight of the event, a new Grands Boulevards release. The makers have extended their uncomfortable take on the French scene to include super star Jean Dujardin, here first seen marching down the highway in spray tan and white towling bathrobe to village Emmaüs de Lescar-Pau, a recycling centre that acts as a sheltered workshop featuring a mural of its founder Henri Grouès L'Abbé Pierre. For the purposes of the story it’s run by Dujardin's bedraggled sister Yolande Moreau.
As he avoids work and chats up the operators, Dujardin formulates a business plan. He will run “I Feel Good” tours where takers
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| Dujardin : I Feel Good |
travel to a Bulgarian clinic for cosmetic surgery. Among his customers is nearly unrecognisable Lou Castel (I pugni in tasca) who stomps on a robot vacuum cleaner and with whom Jean engages in a catch the other’s spit training session to prepare for his career as a soccer star.
Travel in a truck with airline seats takes them on cultural side trips to the Ceauçescu palace in Rumania and an isolated, decaying Soviet-era modernist ruin stadium which is a bit much for Moreau still treasuring her Communist parent’s ideals. The last leg is in a car made over to stretch limo by second hand door panels which the owner is in the process of painting up for weddings as he waits for the group.
The surprise ending is in character with the grotesque body of the film.
Not unlike Le Grand Bain the film is uneasy watching in the early stages. Dujardin’s character is a hundred percent free of winning traits, which makes the sympathy he generates a tribute to the actor and the makers. As much as the performers it is the grotesque Emmaüs village which generates fascination, piled second hand articles stacked under the titles, a row of out of tune pianos or the wide shot showing a building tipped over on its side.
Anything by animator Michel Ocelot is an event and we got his Dilili à Paris. Ocelot has moved on from the African traditional art model of his Kirikou films and the Arabian Nights and set his current offering in La Belle Époque rendered in realistic photos which carry a buzz from their familiarity. They are not however today's Paris but the pre-WW1 era of Art Nouveau, colonial expansion and elegant fashion. The stone work is fresh, the painted surfaces new and the traffic is drawn by horses.
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| Dilili à Paris - Michel Ocelot |
Onto and into this Ocelot has placed his new characters centering on Kanack pre-teener Dilili (voiced by Prunelle Charles-Ambron) who leaves her protector's lavish Paris home to explore with her new friend, cycle cart delivery boy Orel (Enzo Ratsito). However the villainous nose ring wearing Bad Masters are kidnapping little girls and have their eye on Dilili.
Our leads enlist the great names of the day in an orgy of name dropping. "A tune Satie!" and Orel dances with M. Chocolat. An attack by a rabid dog means rolling down the Sacré Coeur stairs to Louis Pasteur's clinic where Marie Curie is in attendance. There's time to visit Rodin's studio and meet Camille Claudel and chat with the Impressionists posed in front of their canvases - a young Picasso. Toulouse-Lautrec rides their tricycle. Sarah Bernhardt's jewels are menaced and her brusque chauffeur looks like going over to the dark side. It takes a trip in soprano Emma Calvé's swan boat to foil the heavies' submarine - a non-stop parade that doesn't even pause when Oscar Wilde enters the frame. Of course we did go on a journey like this one in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.
It's a letdown when the action detours to wind up the kidnap plot. Ocelot’s ability to produce stunningly vivid colour and recognising him at work in a new, even more involving environment is a pleasure I would urge on anyone. It's disappointing that an artist of his talent hasn't achieved the status of Pixar or Miyazaki. This one was shuffled off to a few kiddie shows.
Hervé Mimran's new Un homme pressé shows the rich Fabrice Luchini lead as a hard charging auto executive who has his way over the new proposed electric car model. He has lost contact with his teenage daughter Rebecca Marder through neglect. It takes all the Luchini charm to make this guy acceptable.
After a bad night, he collapses on the way to work and it’s only the prompt action of his chauffeur, actor Gus, in driving him to the hospital that saves him.
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| Un homme pressé - Marder, Luchini. |
Now we get into the story. Still in denial, Luchini is made to realise that he has lost his control of language, this with a major address to an executive meeting in Geneva coming up - jokes like him greeting people by saying goodbye and other malapropisms that must have given the sub-titlers' nightmares. His ordering a turd from an unfazed waiter at the
corner cafe defeats them. Luchini recruits a hospital speech therapist, Leïla Bekhti again, full time and starts to develop drills to restore his lost vocabulary. Bored with the kids’ picture books she uses, he moves them to the Jardin des Plantes menagerie.
Drone shot downwards on a speeding express train and we get a King’s Speech scene in Geneva where he manages nicely with minimum aid from Bekhti, sitting next to him with prompt cards. This makes the company stock lift by two points which delights him only to finds his younger rival is dismissive of such a paltry gain and has given him ten minutes to clean out his desk.
At which point the film starts again as Luchini settles in to sort out the relationships with his daughter (that doesn’t go too well) and Béhkti, before his European hiking tour accompanied by his faithful dog - much stamping of his passport and alpine scenics.
They manage to graft a happy ending on all this. The central performance is superior but when they’ve set up support players so well, it’s unsatisfying to not find their stories given an outcome.
Pierre Schoeller’s Un peuple et son roi / One Nation, One King must have had its eyes squarely on a future of classroom shows. The French Revolution narrative is inevitably predictable, the contrast between the lives of the poor as represented by nameless oprphan Gaspard Ulliel, first seen in the stocks for chook theft, and the Versailles court. Marie Antoinette is a bit part here. The trailer makers get it pretty much right when they but Ulliel’s recolection of the encounter with the monarch “He touched my head” with Adèle Haenel’s seeing the sun in the formerly dank alley way revealed by demolishing the Bastille “It touched my face.”
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Un peuple et son roi - Zïa Hegelin |
Schoeller’s lot have managed to re-vitalise anticipated scenes, as with the round the clock
orations of the Assembly called upon to pass judgement on the king, using star actors to pick out important characters, Louis Garrel as Robespierre or Denis Lavant as Marat. Sending the king to the guillotine is an impressive, grisly spectacle. This they put against the life of the ordinary people - the nice, sunlit morning with ex Dardennes’ star Adele Haenel naked with Ulliel or the details of blinded uncle Olivier Gourmet inducting him into the searing work of a glass blower.
All in all this is history made painless and then some.
Not the least interesting feature of the French Film Festival is that we can see the children of the Children of the Cinémathèque making exceptional films. Now there’s a contrast to the Australian scene.
Put alongside his De toutes nos forces/The Finishers, Nils Tavernier's new L'incroyable histoire du facteur Cheval / The Ideal Palace repeats his Don Quixote thing - crazy fixations become admirable.
As Nineteenth Century Drôme area single parent postman Cheval, a barely recognisable Jacques Gamblin, is painfully withdrawn. Two things however change his life. When they extend his run, he passes a widow, the normally glamorous Laetitia Casta and, one thing after another, they end up married. When their baby arrives, despite some “I don’t know what to do with children” he and daughter Zelie Rixhon become devoted.
Next up he spots an odd shaped rock and is soon putting it and more like it together in the space that used to be Casta’s vegetable garden. Inspired by his undelivered scenic postcards and his background as a dough kneading baker, he mortar and wires together an exotic decorated stone “palace.” As Gamblin ages, the structure grows. By the time he’s got a postal service medal for trudging five times round the earth in thirty-two kilometer a day sections, the edifice has stopped being a source of mockery and has become a wonder that attracts ticket buying tourists and press photographers.
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| L'incroyable histoire du facteur Cheval - palace. |
This is played in scrupulous period detail and subdued colour with the action pausing every so often for rural scenics. The climax comes with a music-backed drone camera circling the extraordinary structure and an imposing pull away - but that’s not all folks! The piece also runs to the granddaughter’s wedding held on the site continuing into a mystic, candle lit night. Their comment, that Cheval’s folly has outlasted most of the more rational projects of the day, does register.
Not to be out done, Romain Gavras has provided Le Monde est á toi /The World Is Yours where Karim Leklou’s ambition to operate an ice lolly franchise in Africa is frustrated by his mum, a well preserved Isabel Adjani, having blown the family fortune in the scams she runs with her shop lifter chums.
Lecklou’s only chance is to make a run delivering dope, along with Gabby Rose the pre-teen daughter of a gangster, to the luxury resort in the company of blundering associates and his bikini girl childhood sweetheart Oulaya Amamra.
The hard men don’t take him seriously and he loses the child and the payment to heavies, who know the pistol he’s waving is empty. His one hope is to call for the aid of his dotty mother and her equally out of it old associates including a shaven headed English speaking François Damiens and illuminati obsessed Vincent Cassel.
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| Le Monde est á toi - Leklou & Rose |
It all It all It It plays out in sun drenched pleasure spots that help the comic tone in which drug smuggling and ransom play out. The nicest scene has Leklou and young Gabby Rose comparing the dreadful situations their criminal parents have put them in down the years.
This one is being compared to Michel Ritchie and Tarantino but it has a Eurotrash caper quality of it’s own which has been rewarded by critics and box office.
Stephane Brizé’s At War / En guerre is an imposing, blow by blow account of workers at the French “Perrin Industry Factory” attempting to prevent the company shifting production to Romania. Through meetings, demonstrations and TV coverage, we are told that this violates an agreement the company made to keep the plant going for five years to get subsidy and that it is the only employer in the district which the closure will plunge into poverty.
After this and Brizés 2015 La loi du marché / The Measure of a Man a worn featured Vincent Lindon, the film’s one recognisable performer, has become the movie face of the French worker and he’s great at it. The film becomes his story. In all the scope and subdued colour confusion they manage to keep our attention on Lindon and it’s his frustration we share.
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En guerre - Lindon
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There is a split in the ranks with one faction trying to get a better pay out rather than maintain hold the line - “divide and conquer.” Lindon goes round the room pointing to older people saying “You will never work again!” They counter that he, on the point of retirement with his grand child born during the action, doesn’t understand their needs and his house is daubed with slogans after the long awaited meeting the chairman Martin Hauser who explains how much he loves France spending all the time he can at his Carmargue property.
He’s mobbed and they turn over his car - jail and no payouts.
The workers are invariably the good guys in these with the boss’ arguments given token airing. The scenario never changes - Cabin in the Cotton, Norma Rae, Christian Ziewer’s 1974 Schneeglöckchen blühen im September / Snowdrops Bloom in September, Ken Loach’s 1969 The Big Flame. This one is put together with close mobile camera drive and skill that Ken Loach never exercised and probably would have mistrusted. It at least tries a dramatic solution which is suitably shocking if unlikely to appeal to the makers of the films in that short list.
Vying for best in show we got Denys Arcand’s Canadian La chute de l'empire américain / The Fall of the American Empire, where we kick off with the breakup of philosophy graduate Alexandre Landry become van delivery guy and his long standing single mother bank teller squeeze, because he's "trop intelligent" busily dismissing for their character flaws the philosophers, artists and politicians their culture reveres.
It's not long before his intellectual stance is put to the test when an armed robbery goes
wrong leaving successive bandits dead and two bags full of money on the street. He loads
these into his truck and drives off before the cops arrive.
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La chute de l'empire américain - Arcand, Moriper, Girard.
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Having no idea how to deal with his sudden wealth, he phones round the call girl services and rejects the one who advertises her deep throat speciality in favor a girl whose alias is a reference to Racine. Good choice, as she turns out to be show stopping Canadian TV personality Moriper Morin. Her taking envelopes for her favorite charity and a neat trick mouthing a condom make her considerably more convincing than Klute’s Bree Daniels and the Pretty Woman.
Spotting TV coverage of the release of jailed biker Sylvain 'The Brain' Bigras (the only real link with Arcand’s earlier American Empire is the presence of now even more weathered Rémy Girard) Landry picks up the hard case leaving jail alone with his possessions in a paper bag and recruits him as technical advisor. An uneasy trust develops between the two. We notice that seventy-year-old Girard has no trouble in downing his decades younger associate.
The film becomes a semi-documentary on the nature and misuse of money, a companion to En Guerre which also uses the argument about the C.E.O. making two hundred and seventy-five times his worker's salary. We hear about police being eager because they get to keep half any wealth recovered to finance operations and the elaborate way money men have managed to overcome laundering regulations.
It is also a unique account of the regeneration of the leads under Landry's benevolent philosophy - which Girard is in his element explaining to the uncomprehending gunman left crippled by gang torture, like the the homeless associate fearing the oncoming winter who can't believe he has been saved.
There's the nice climax when they put in place the physical money distribution with the wife/customer slapping her spouse when he starts to count a million dollar pay out and a government official circumventing his own regulations. The last trace of the operation is made to evaporate as the teller girl dumps her adding machine in the charity bin a floor down, just before a vindictive police raid. A little cheer goes round when the mean cop duo surveilling the pair is gotten to join serving the meal in the homeless shelter.
This comes with a very Arcand moment when the cop stands looking out over the Montréal sky line vaguely understanding that the money he wants to recover is within sight without him being able to touch it, like the final silent montage of faces of the homeless Inuits we’ve seen on the streets previously.
Arcand has out lived John Trent, Gilles Carle, Claude Jutra and his other Canadian contemporaries, steadily adding to one of the most impressive filmographies of our time. In any functioning critical industry he would be celebrated for it.
Also Canada connected, and in English like long delayed The Sisters Brothers also on show, was The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir. What more suitable way to celebrate French Film than with a United States, Belgium, Singapore India co-production filmed in Mumbai, Brussels, Rome and Paris by Canadian director Ken Scott - in what appears to be 100 percent re-voicing.
We learn that it wasn’t till Tamil star Dhanush got to school age that he asked his laundress single mum with a sacred cow “Are we poor?” He inherits her ambition to go to a Paris represented by an Ikea catalogue.
On arrival he meets by cab driver Gerard Jugnot disorientingly speaking English, who runs a con on the taxi meter only to have our hero pick his pocket for the payment. Making a beeline for Ikea, he starts acting out married couple scenarios in the show room displays meeting fresh faced Erin Moriarty.
The plot gallops away when the wardrobe he sleeps in is packed for London on a truck with Barkhad (Captain Phillips) Abdi's Somali refugees and intercepted by British bobbies. Immigration officer Ben Miller doesn’t buy the lead’s story that he’s a tourist and shreds his fake bank note and genuine passport.
Our hero is added to a plane load of Africans who swear they are Spanish, flown off to Madrid from where he gets himself delivered to a Rome luxury hotel. Glamorous Bérénice Bejo greets him with a leveled pistol but soon cons an Italian producer into buying Dharushs' autobiography inscribed shirt, leading to him commandeer a wedding balloon to get back to Paris, only to have it deposit him on a freighter whose mean crew take his money. Abdi refugee chums aid the cash's recovery and our hero gets a lesson in real hardship from them.
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| Extraordinary Journey - Dharush & Bejo |
That one has actually made it to the multiplexes but rather than draw from this abundance the only other title so far being offerd is En liberté! / The Trouble with You, the Festival’s Opening Night, the kind of undemanding, glossy lightweight that Palace pick up for a local run. It even has the standard bearer for popular sub-titled fare - Mlle Audrey Tatou, now edging out of her jeune première leads.
So what’s not to like? Well actually quite a bit.
Star Adèle Haenel, has to tell the pair's young son Octave Bossue his late dad was a ripoux, a bent copper, and even the engagement ring she promptly flings in the loo was the product of crooked deals, like all the high price home comforts that surround her.
Pio Marmaï (Ce qui nous lie/Back to Burgundy) an employee given eight years for a jewellery store heist was actually fall guy in her cop husband’s insurance scam. He’s emerging from the cooler that day, a confirmed hard case.
Best of the film’s many running gags is his habit of pushing eye holes in the nearest bag to cover his face for convenience store stick ups. Haenel follows the trail of punctured bags to find him with cigarette smoke pouring from the improvised mask.
The climax has the video surveillance team unable to interpret the action on their screens as they watch brothel properties pressed into service in the up market jewel robbery. (“Is it performance art?”) Like the rest of the film, this is occasionally laugh out loud funny but mainly unsatisfying as Salvadori’s rom com sensibility fails to exploit the material’s outrageousness. Le Grand Bain leaves it all in it’s dust.
Looking at the rest in less detail La Promesse de l’aube was a must see because of the Ivan Mozjoukine connection. It’s actually the second film I’ve watched this year in which on-screen characters go to see him in movies and the idea that Romain Gary, whose quasi autobiography is the source, was Mozjoukine’s son gets some support here - Charlotte Gainsbourg’s mother character saying she acted with him, shown training the boy in the famous Mozjoukine stare and turning him out in a replica of his Le Diable Blanc costume. In Jules Dassin’s 1970 film of Promise at Dawn the director himself played Mozjoukine under the credit “Perlo Vita”, his Rififi alias. The end title photos of the real Gary show a considerable resemblance to the Russian star.
We see Gary beginning a life as or more extraordinary than his presumed dad - growing
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La Promesse de l’aube - Pirrre Niney, Charlotte Gainsbourg
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up as a Jew in anti-Semitic Vilnius and scenic Nice, studying in Paris where his first stories are published and joining the WWII French Air force being the last person without a promotion in the six hundred trainee passing out parade because the selection committee doesn’t want to cut him loose or promote a Jew. He’s transferred to Africa where he fights a duel before he flies in a bombing raid talking down a blinded pilot, going on to author novels including a slew that were filmed (from “Roots of Heaven” to “White Dog”), win the Prix Goncourt, (which is only awarded to anyone once) twice (shown in Laurent Heynemann’s Faux et l’usage de faux) and marry Jean Seberg with whom he made two weird movies.
I don’t know what drove Eric Barbier to re-make “La Promesse de l'aube.” Gary is certainly an extraordinary subject but I’m not convinced that his “Je m’etouffle" relationship with his failed actress, couturier, hotel proprietor mum is its most interesting aspect. The film is pretty heavy sledding despite being one where the lead is continually encountering topless young women. The admired aerial combat is more a display of David Danesi’s design than an exciting climax.
Another celebrity who fascinates French Film makers is Marguerite Duras - despite the awful movies she made in person. She was someone who had an absolute contempt for film form, convinced that audiences would watch anything which had her narration running over it - bits of her old movies, a shot of lawn roller.
Undeterred writer director Emmanuel Finkiel has now made La Douleur a movie of Duras' decades-lost diary of her years in wartime Paris. As in Hiroshima mon amour we get passion erased by time and relations with the other lot, though no one gets their head shaved in this one ... and we get lots of narration. Finkiel has come up with the innovation of having Duras the narrator appearing in the same shot, once defocused in a mirror, as Mélanie Thierry (Tavernier’s 2010 La princesse de Montpensier) playing Duras.
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| La Douleur - Mangimel, Thierry |
The plot has Thierry and her husband Emmanuel Bourdieu part of a WW2 Paris resistance cell. Understandably terrified of being penetrated, they discuss disbanding and are divided over the fact that German operative Benoît Magimel has taken an interest in Mélanie/Marguerite. Half are afraid and half speculate on whether they can play him. The most distinctive scene, which attempts Duras ambivalence, occurs in a cafe used by collaborators desperate for any news as the city’s fall to the Allies is anticipated. Mangimel, who still believes in a coming German victory, reads Mélanie a passage of one of her books that he has copied trying to be winning, while her narrator voice is speculating on whether she should deliver him to his death at the hands of the resistance.
There's a strong cast and high seriousness go with WW2 drab design (charcoal burning automobiles, dirty glasses in the collaborator cafe, period scanties) reproduced with desaturated colour where the reds of the gas flame or Thierry’s dress stand out in the greys and blue blacks of the colour scheme. They do produce an attention getting surface but they can’t make La Douleur hold attention past the Armistice.
In Safy Nebou’s Celle Que vous croyez / Who You Think I Am, Juliette Binoche is a glamorous, educated, beautiful woman who unworthy men keep on walking out on. The mature French actresses must have begged for the role.
Binoche plays a literature professor - Choderlos de Laclos, “Dolls House” and Duras (again) to give us a frame of reference. After a raunchy make out offering her body double (?) and younger lover Guillaume Gouix against the glass of a high rise window, he won’t answer the ‘phone, making jokes in the backgound and, to check on him, spurned Juliette creates a glamorous avatar half her age that she puts into the facebook page of Gouix’s bearded photographer flat mate Francis Civil.
All this is being told to stern shrink Nicole Garcia who sees through Binoche’s omissions - like the source of the photo and work-out video of the girl she used. The notion of Duras-style narration gets a great work out with Binoche’s voice-over switching imperceptibly from being her therapy session to a reading of Juliette’s autobiographical script.
Via the Net she and Civil fall for one another, meaning she has to invent excuses to avoid
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| Celle Que vous croyez - Binoche |
meeting in person, with the sat nav signal of him approaching her university work place or the tension on the train as she sits near him without identifying herself as his virtual squeeze. She strikes up a conversation on the basis that he was Gouix’ friend and commissions a portrait from him (nice sequence of Binoche posing).
Juliette achieves a cumupance that only the intervention of formerly stern Garcia can save her from.
Rip roaring melodrama and great star vehicle put together with complex film craft and a nice Paris background which they don’t emphasise (Juliette glimpsed in the nose cone of a Metro car) till we get the drone shot of her on the landing of the Pompidou center with the skyline behind.
I’ve already enthused over The Sisters Brothers and Frank Dubosc’s Tout le Monde debout / Rolling to You. Why they missed out on Benoît Poelvoorde’s Au poste or his other four new films could take some explaining. Place Publique was gone before I could get to it. I passed on new films by Ozon & Goddard and Claire Denis' High Life was yanked anticpating it’s run in the Sydney FF. That leaves us with the also rans.
Claire Darling is a substantial project - name stars, money on the screen, visualization of an ambitious concept where past and present, real and fantastic appear in the same frame ... and there’s Catherine Deneuve with her three score years and ten still carrying major projects while Brigitte Bardot has become an eccentric cat fancier and Jeanne Moreau is dead.
In Verderonne, a small village in the Oise, Deneuve’s Claire Darling wakes up in the decaying home filled with bric-a-brac collected over the years by her wealthy family. This is a film as much about things as it is about people - antique automata, Tiffany lamps, family portraits, a gold ring passed down among generations, a painting of water lilies given her by the devoted local curé, a chiming clock in the form of an elephant.
Deneuve lives alone and she’s more than a little dotty. She declares that the day is a Vide Granier garage sale - everything must go. The books she offers are stuffed with the currency notes Deneuve’s late husband Olivier Rabourdin’s hid there to avoid taxes, first greeted with delight, then dismissed when they turn out to be ancien francs no longer currency and then coveted again for their value on e-bay. This sense of fluctuating reality is the film’s essence. Neighbor Laure Calamy is appalled, 'phoning her one time playmate, Deneuve’s estranged daughter Chiara Mastroianni.
The back story is being filled in with scenes where Deneuve’s character, played by the elegant Alice Taglioni at different non-sequential ages, and her fantasies get mixed with surreal touches - a llama from visiting Circus Benzini runs across the road, its participants become mingled with a memory of a decades back children’s costume party.
So far, pretty good. Director Julie Bertuccelli stood out from the crowd with her Depuis qu'Otar est parti... a genuinely attractive film. We can forgive her The Tree. Everyone makes bad films when they come to Australia. Think Jackie Chan. However, here I feel myself sharing the dissatisfaction of the dismissive original language reviews.
In Eloïse Lang’s Larguées / Dumped, when their dad has a baby with his new wife, daughters Camille Cottin, first seen partying the night away at Le Grand Rex, and home body Camille Chamoux take their recently divorced mum - a remarkably well preserved Miou Miou to Réunion Island to cheer her up. Cottin slips a ten Euro note to her pick up Johan Heldenbergh to dance with Miou 2 but things don’t end there. Chamoux resolves to join in with would be comic results.
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| Larguées - Miou Miou, Heldenbergh |
People having a good time on screen doesn’t guarantee fun for the audience.
Photo de famille / Family Photo from Cécilia Rouaud covers some of the same ground. Siblings Cottin again, Pierre Deladonchamps and Vanessa Paradis who has a job posing as a gold painted statue on the Seine bank are brought together by the death of their grandfather. Parents Chantal Lauby and Jean Pierre Bacri no less are no help with deciding what to do with granny Claudette Walker.
It’s pleasant enough and fields nice colour photography of the scenery but remains unmemorable.
In his Guy, popular French TV star Alex Lutz plays a fictionalized version of himself as a rock star who is still hanging in there complete with fake fuzzy clips of his decades past videos. Tom Dingler discovers he’s the product of the star’s night with his groupie mum and presents himself as the maker of a living Camera documentary which we see being filmed with the dual tensions of Lutz’ financial responsibility for his new tour and whether the young man will fess up. Moments intrigue - moments.
We re not all that far away from François Damiens trying to get away from his stoic leading man image and his turn in Le Monde est á toi works nicely. I’m less convinced by Mon ket/Dany which he stars in, wrote and directed. Damiens sees himself as a Belgian Borat coming on as a low life who confronts people going about their real life occupations. This is apparently developed from a candid camera routine worked up on Belgian TV.
Most of the time it’s not funny and on the occasions when it is I felt embarrassed for the subjects (indicated by name titles) who have given their permission for the footage to appear.
Best element - after a couple of bank managers refuse his under documented personalised credit card scheme, Damiens sets out to flog it in Abidjan where a local businessman is nodding about his dodgy ethics until a phone call alerts him to the snipers on the roof about to arrest our hero.
The film’s planning must have been phenomenal with them taking multiple simultaneous views of their victims edited to give continuous flow and it would be hard to see who are the actors and who are the victims without the on-screen captions but I didn’t find it amusing.
Production values are just so so after all this chicanery.
And to disrupt all this respectability, the event fielded a couple of cut price exploitation
pieces, Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge and Dominique Rocher’s La Nuit a dévoré le Monde,
both nice exaples of their kind.
Revenge is an extension of the line of Angel of Vengeance and I’ll Spit on Your Grave. Effectively filmed in a landscape that could be Australia but turns out to be Morrocco, this one has party girl Matilda Lutz raped by one of her married companion’s hunting party chums at the isolated desert luxury pad. They attempt to dispose of her but she’s having none of that and the make up blood that they kept on running out off, flowing from Gladwrapped wounds into a pool on the floor announces that an assailant is lurking behind the door. Nicely made and driven by excess, this one is a contrast to moody La Nuit, a survivor in a Paris over run by zombies piece. Isolated Anders Danielsen Lie has only captive zombie Dennis Lavant (again) to talk to until Golshifteh Farahani (All About Elly) shows up.
Both these films are made on a fraction of the budget of the mainstream work and hold
attention better than most.
Which brings us to Bertrand Mandico currently subject of a Paris Cinémathèque retrospective. He appears in Yann Gonzalez’ ham fisted Un Couteau dans le cour / Knife & Heart which was on show. There hapless Vanessa Paradis is the same sex lover of a porno film editor who becomes involved in a giallo series of slasher murders. The heavy uses a switch blade dildo. The sort of who done it plot with the revelation from watching an old trailer in a flea pit re-issue house is secondary to the scenes of making their gay movies complete with a comic career fluffer who works for fun. Tacky, that one.
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| Bertrand Mandico'c Les garçons sauvages |
Mandico's own Les garçons sauvages/ The Wild Boys is what you might have expected from someone who has just seen the Aleksey Gherman Trudno byt bogom /It's Hard to be a God and went off and told his pop video mates, they could manage to do that - incorrectly, surfaces wet or clammy or sticky or covered with hair but that was as far as they got. Adding sex organs to rocks and plants and breasts and penises in places they shouldn't be shuffles between naive and boring.
There's a halfway plot aimed at the new "Me Too" audience (we can only hope they have more sense) about a group of early 20th century La Réunion Island (again) school boys who violate their lady art teacher under the influence of a diamante covered skull called Trevor (!) and are punished by their rich parents who consign them to a Hell Ship captained by Dutch seaman Sam Louwyck. The surprise ending is already undermined by noticing the presence of glamorous Vimala Pons and Elina Löwensohn but attention has already wandered before that becomes relevant.
Technically the piece has some interest. Shot in super-sixteen with the aperture plate noticeable, they do get a sharp image and go from monochrome to colour effectively but even here the arresting image of Louwyck's face as the rock wall is undermined by the wobbling second generation effects work.
Someone must think these are cutting edge transgressive art, despite the fact that the only
full frontals to appear in these films are in a co-opted cabaret act. This work is just a throwback to the “Underground” films of the seventies - not the sixteen mil. experiments of the previous decade but the cut price theatrical features that followed them, designed for the Gay Porn Cinemas then proliferating. Passing them off as works of art alienates the only audience who might take them seriously.
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