French Film Fesitval 2020 Preview

FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL 2020

A few notes on included titles I’ve managed to see.

Le mystère Henri Pick - Luchini, Cottin.

Director Rémi Bezançon’s Le mystère Henri Pick  / The Mystery of Henri Pick is one of those ultra civilised French movies with a couple of recognisable stars and picturesque scenery all aimed at an audience not unlike the women’s book club that becomes part of the onscreen action.

Arts TV personality Fabrice Luchini (think Waldo Lydecker without the murders) humiliates author Henri Pick’s widow on air when he says that the book they are considering couldn’t have been written by her semi literate pizza cook husband. Fired over this, he sets out for Crozon in  distant Finisterre to prove his claim and encounters the dead cook’s daughter Camille Cottin. “You turn a blind eye to the beauty of things.” They partner in his search with examination of clues like the new ribbon in Pick’s preserved typewriter and some subdued will they or won’t they. This leads to a museum of rejected manuscripts base on an actual Quebec institution.

A feature production, charming people, rugged locations and sophisticated motivation - the whole art cinema package, even to having Hanna Schygulla bit parting. It’s delivered agreeably enough.

The combination of the always admirable Roschdy Zem (also in Rebecca Ziotowki’s  Les Sauvages included in the event) and director Arnaud Desplechin looked promising. A departure for Desplechin, Roubaix, une lumière (Oh Mercy!) is a nocturnal policier set in his home town, the grubby city between Lille and the Franco-Belgian border, the poorest commune in France, with 45 per cent of its population living under the poverty line. There  Algerian Commissaire Roschdy in his element investigating a Xmas Eve slate of crimes and non crimes.

Roubaix - Zem.

Derived from a TV documentary, the piece takes its time (two hours worth) dissecting a racist insurance scam which it’s perpetrator brings into the station, a girl runaway, arson and rape in with a visit to Rochdy’s home community (“Your uncle was a prince” he’s reminded) to wade through before attention settles on the murder of an old woman which takes him to the run down home of lesbian couple Lea Sedoux and Sara Forestier.

Instead of shoot outs and chases it features Rochdy’s interrogations with side kick Lieutenant Antoine Reinartz having to keep up with his more experienced superior. It’s convincing. Performances are superior and cars prowling round the orange sodium lamp streetscape give atmosphere but the film is finally only passably involving.

Director Bertrand Bonello is maturing and with Zombi Child and his Nocturama he’s moving into a characteristically French cycle - the cinema of outrage. Think  Clouzot’s Le Courbeau, Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes and the Gaspar Noé Seul contre tous / I Stand Alone,  though Bonello’s films are as different from those as they are from one another.

There is a narrative buried in Zombi Child but more importantly it’s the most substantial study of voodoo that the movies have come up with. Separate stories merge into something

which is of a piece though it doesn’t follow any familiar pattern.

We follow black Haitian student Wislanda Louimat joining a prestige French girls boarding school on the basis that her mum got the Légion d'honneur for her work in oposition to the brutal François "Papa Doc" Duvalier regime. Her pale, uniformed school mates, who sway in rehearsed wave response to the head mistress’ instructions, regard her with some suspicion. However virginal Louise Labéque befriends her and wants her accepted into their secret sorority. Anticipate an exotic Mean Girls or a female Dead Poet’s Society. We feel some concern for the newcomer’s fate among the snobby sisterhood who take candlelight meetings after lights out. Claiming to be the grand daughter of a Haitian Zombie doesn’t seem to fit into this scheme.

Meanwhile we get what prove to be flashbacks to the nineteen sixties and the fate of

Mackenson Bijou drugged and buried alive by a rival - hearing the dirt being thrown on the coffin he is being buried in. Much sobbing and ritual chanting. Bijou makes an unexpected return. You can forget the likes of Black Moon (Roy William Neill 1934), I Walked With a Zombie or Lucio Fulci.

Zombi Child - Louimat & Labéque

The film’s focus however proves to be on Labéque, her desire settled on Sayyid El Alami the shirtless moto riding hunk who has lost interest. She picks up at the news that her chum’s aunt is a “mambo” and starts hitting the cash dispenser. When we get to the (impressive) spirit evocation, the demon proves scornful of all this white bread activity.

The films achieves strange on multiple levels not least by fielding a present day that seems to belong to the past and a period fifty years back that is alarmingly modern. It’s mix of Euro Art movie, horror film and quasi documentary has upset not a few commentators. I was intrigued.

I commented Les hirondelles de Kaboul / The Swallows of Kabul, directed  by animator

Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec and actress  Zabou Breitman when It showed in the Persian Film

Festival and it looks like getting the wider release it deserves.

It offers parched, hand painted images of 1998 Kabul under the Taliban where the streets

fill with Kalash wielding soldiers and blue burka women, Mohsen a young man voiced by

Swann Arlaud passes the stoning of a woman convicted of licentious living. Children are

climbing onto a parked tank to watch and Mohsen finds himself joining in the brutality.

Full of self-reproach he comes back to wife Mussarat (Hiam Abbass no less) desperate at being confined to her home in his absence, drawing on the wall and playing an English language song about burkhas, on the cassette machine. Mohsen warns her that the music can be heard in the street or by their Religious Observant neighbour. Across town there is another homecoming. Hard man jailer Atiq (Simon Abkarian) has limped back to Zunaira  (Zita Hanrot) his  nurse wife who is now dying of cancer. They are aware that the regime they serve is incapable of providing them happiness.

The plot develops into shock value melodrama distanced by being presented in pale water colors and the fact that Afghans are speaking sub-titled French though none of this stops what we are seeing being disturbing. This one registers its indignation - not what you expect from a widely distributed animation. The style alone would get attention, though the undetailed faces don’t stand up to the close-ups they occasionally get. I might watch it again. Don’t ask me what the swallows signify. 

André Téchiné’s Hôtel des Amériques was always a handsomely made film - Bruno Nuytten on camera, Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko design, Philipe Sarde score it now has acquired a nostalgia patina which compensates for it’s conventional Boulevard feature romance plot.

It’s mad love again. When neurotic anesthetist Catherine Deneuve come close to running

down Patrick Dewaere, they end up spending the night together. He decides she’s “la plus

belle dame du monde”,  quite plausible in 198l. However she is still obsessed with the memory of the dead engineer-lover whose house they visit. Patrick gets through to Catherine but but starts neglecting her under the pressure of the gap in their social status.

(“It’s proof love can end”)

This plays parallel to the conversion of the Biarritz beach hotel into a tourist trap.

The films is too long and confused but does have the odd striking moments - the train window view superimposed on the ball room’s painted trees, the striking close-up of the keys still under the step of the dead lover’s house.

Jacques Demy’s Peau d'âne / Donkey Skin is always greeted with affection even though the tireless efforts of wife Agnes Varda to keep their work in the public eye have made it one of the most accessible items in the movie repetoire. I liked her stories of fans trying to make the cake that Catherine Deneuve at her zenith sings the recipe for here. The film is back again hopefully in it’s stereo restoration. There should be more of that.

Peau d’an has Demy’s  personality stamped all over it - fairy tale for grown ups (think the less succesful Pied Piper), all sung film (Parapluies de Cherbourg), distancing adult elements - here the incest plot to go with Jacques Riberolles’ singing serial killer in Demoiselles de Rochefort or Montand’s deadbeat dad in  Trois places pour le 26. Mag Bodard threw a barrel full of money at it and the costumes, jokey colour settings and cast dazzle, backed by one of Michel Legrand’s most humable scores. Even with all this I’ve always felt that fey wasn’t Demy’s best register - not that that’s likely to keep me away.

Also on view Ludovic Bernard’s 10 Jours Sans Maman,  a French version of  Ariel Winograd’s amusing 2017 Mamá se fue de viaje with Frank Dubosc in the Diego Peretti role.

   

Peau d'an - Marais, Deneuve.