Well the French Film Festival, high point of the Art Cinema year, came back
again after a
plague break. I find myself considering it with some ambivalence. All my life
theatrical movie screenings have been the thing I looked forward to. However their spot is
gradually being usurped by the desk top. The experiences I share are more often film found on
line. Now I sit in a near empty auditorium at risk of my life watching a twenty dollar
(with piddling concessions) movies when I could be safe at home with a three dollar one from
the Taiwanese event.
How the theatre chains react to this situation is going to be crucial. People
used to say that there was nothing wrong with the movie business that better films couldn’t
fix. I’d like to think that was still true.
What could be more typical of the traditional Film Festival movie than L'adieu à la nuit /Farewell to the Night directed by André Téchiné and extending the line of
his 1998 La fille du RER / Girl on the Train and 1994 and Les roseaux sauvages / Wild Reeds, mixing issues with drama.
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| Adieu á la nuit - Deneuve |
A big French A feature with their great female star and an important subject, Adieu á la nuit raises hopes for a major Téchiné-Catherine Deneuve collaboration.
She’s gained the gravitas to carry one of these and still has the status to make it bankable.
Here mature Deneuve runs an equine center (harness racing, children’s riding
lessons) in with her cherry orchard in the South of France. The symbolism (?) of the
eclipse and the depredadtions by wild boor just protract what is a long and leisurely paced
film but things focus with the return of Kacey Mottet Klein, the grandson she has raised since
his mother died in suspicious circumstances and his dad took off to form another family
about which the boy has no curiosity.
Catherine finds the kid secretly praying to Allah on a rug in the field, his
return to the faith of their Algerian families coming as a surprise. She’s more at ease
with his pairing with winning Oulaya Amamra and surprised that he doesn’t want to take advantage of her indulgent attitude to the pair if they want to sleep together
in his separate flat.
Turns out his going off to Canada story is a front for the arrangements he’s
made to join ISIS in Syria, taking the girl along. Trouble is they are short on the costs
involved (they have to pay for their own Kalashnikov and weapons training). The young pair
collect his internet mentor Stéphane Bak for an induction session cross cut with the cheery
family gathering back at the ranch.
Klein resolves to steal the money and is amused and off put to find that it’s
Amamra quoting scripture become the arbiter of his actions. Catherine springs them and recruits returned ISIS fighter Kamel Labroudi (in Un prophete) on parole, seeking him out playing with his little daughter in the park, his court ordered ankle
bracelet visible. She forces a confrontation with the grandson but that doesn’t work out. "He won't come back" the veteran advises.
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| Adieu á la nuit - Kacey Mottet Klein |
This one could use tighter handling to justify its ambitions, with the thriller
elements (escape, chase, menacing fundamentalists) more involving than it’s core family
drama. There’s no uncertainty about where the makers stand but the young recruits are
treated with sympathy and some measure of respect. It’s a more mature work than a lot
of what we have seen from Téchiné.
The incidentals are superior- the horse training, the elderly land lord wanting
Amamra’s company, the mullahs counciling by facebook, nursing the aged patients in a
singalong, the winning hijab girl explaining that it’s easy to get multiple husbands among
the fighters. Production values couldn’t be beaten.
The festival also provided another run on Hôtel
des ameriques the 1981 (!) Téchiné-Denueve study of amour fou in Biaritz in which neurotic relationships and uneven pacing
are already present.
Dominik (Harry Is Here to Help) Moll’s Seules les bêtes /
Only the Animals is a handsomely mounted French thriller, contrasting poverty striken Africa and the snowy French countryside,
another Colonial heritage piece.
First up young Guy Roger 'Bibisse' N'Drin is cycling on an Abidjan road
with a reluctant goat strapped to his back but we shift into French dairy country in where travelling insurance representative Laure Calamy (Claire
Darling) is making it with edgy farmer Damien Bonnard (Dunkirk) who protests
“I only talk to the animals and my dog.” Her own dairyman husband Denis Ménochet (Inglorious
Bastards) is scornful but when he fails to feed his animals the plot thickens.
In episodes introduced by the first names of five of the principals, the story
weaves back and forward over the same first inexplicable incidents which finally fall into
place. The white car abandoned on the road in the snow belongs to the film’s most familiar
face Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who doesn’t get to speak till well after her body has
been found and hidden in a hay bale cave by Bonnard, drawing too much attention from his
dog. She proves to be having an affair with sexy waitress Nadia Tereszkiewicz half
her age whose video likeness is being peddled by the African stolen identity internet scammer
delighted to have gotten a taker so he can blow the money on his side of the planet
sponsoring rave parties. There he re-encounters his winning childhood sweetheart and as it
turns out the mother of his child but now the mistress of a French businessman visitor.
Calamities strike leaving young Gendarme Bastien Bouillon as baffled as
everyone else and then the cops burst into the grubby shared room from which 'Bibisse' N'Drin
is running his scam - but there’s more.
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| Seul les Animaux - 'Bibisse' N'Drin |
It’s curious but the Young Africans on about reclaiming colonial debt again
emerge as the most sympathetic characters, here battling poverty, first world imperialism and
what the high rise godfather describes as a destiny that demands a split of the take.
The rotation of it’s multiple characters shows considerable ingenuity backed by strong film making and the required quota of sex, violence and hostile fate, which would have got a less coincidence-heavy film over the finish line.
Michel (The Artist) Hazanavicius’ Le prince oublié / The Lost Prince is an
ambitious under -taking with elaborate fantasy settings and effects, a great cast and an
interesting idea. Unfortunately it doesn’t jell into the kind of Wizard of Oz hit they
obviously hoped for.
Single parent Omar Sy (nice to see him speaking perfect English in the new Call of the Wild) finds that as his daughter Sarah Gaye becomes a teenager, he is
marginalised in her life and in the bedtime stories he used to tell her where he appeared as the
Prince who rescues her from candy land perils by waving red swim flippers, his place taken
by Néotis Ronzon the so blonde boy in her class.
Unrecognisable Francois Damiens' El Farto, the black wearing heavy in the
dreams, guides Omar on a doomed attempt to kidnap the new prince and cast him into the
pit of oblivion, with the fast fading Oubliés, the see-through toy characters who once inhabited the girl’s dreams. Neighbour (she always carries round her door in
the limbo setting) Bérénice Bejo provides some comfort and when Gaye runs off to the misrepresented birthday party where the older kids deride her sketch of Ronzon,
they have to band together with the new prince to save the day.
Despite Sy’s indestructible charm, some of his scenes are embarrassing as much
for the audience as the characters. The design aspect has its moments. The knitted
elephant is a winner but there are off putting déja vus - the walking inflatable with the
goldfish inside like the manga Kimi to, nami ni noretara
/ Ride Your Wave and the ending repeating the last of the Toy Story films. Hazanavicius is trying to maintain his place on
the cinema’s cutting edge and watching him is not without interest.
Films about the group are a characteristic French product - people who chose to
spend their time together over the years. You can see the beginning in items like
Duvivier’s 1931 Cinq Gentlemen Maudits / Moon Over
Morrocco or 1936 La Belle équipe,
already different to celebrated Howard Hawks comrade movies like Ceiling Zero, Only Angels Have Wings or Red Line 7000 from the ‘States. Claude Sautet does one of
those in Classe tous risques (1960) before he makes the ultimate group movie Vincent, François, Paul et les autres in 1974 and they’ve been trying to get it right ever since.
Actor Guillaume Cantet joined in with his also all star Les
Petit Muchoirs in 2010 which I didn’t altogether buy.
Well M. Cantet and his celebrity cast are back again with Nous finirons ensemble / We’ll
End Up Together which picks up the first film’s characters ten years later.
François Cluzet is cleaning up his neglected coastal chalet when the gang arrive unsuspectedly to celebrate his
sixtieth birthday. Turns out there’s bad blood between him and Gilles Lellouche after
their last meeting. Some of the group have produced children who sit about texting,
bored with the whole thing. Benoît Magimel has come out and brought a boy friend. Cotillard
hair blonded manages to get attention with every appearance and Laurent Lafitte
finds himself on Lelouche’s pay role as assistant.
Turns out that Cluzet has split with wife Clémentine Baert and is turning the
place over to her (following a disaster with “the Trocadero affair”). After a bit of raised
voice dialogue they all move down the road reconciled but uneasy. When Baert shows up there’s
the usual friction but neighbor Jose Garcia shows an interest in her, changing the
dynamic.
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| Nous finirons ensemble |
This is a very long movie (134 min.) and it looks as if it will outstay it’s
welcome even with nice touches like the baby fingering Lelouche’s face or an outing to the
disco but a boating disaster snaps all the threads back together (didn’t we see this in Palm Beach last year?) with a superior action scene where local boat man Joël Dupuch comes into
his own.
Fielding the fresh French talent of the moment, Antoine de Bary’s Mes jours de gloire /My Days of Glory recalls the Truffaut Antoine Doinel films but this one is
more perverse and more probing as one time child movie star Vincent Lacoste finds his late
twenties slipping though his fingers without work, security - or sex - but as it rolls
on we finally get something substantial.
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| Mes jours de gloire - Vincent Lacoste |
He’s first seen calling out the fire brigade with a gas leak story to get into
the flat where he’s lost the keys. It’s not long before he’s locked out again. Moving in with
mum shrink Emmanuelle Devos and dad Christopher Lambert, whose major preoccupation
is mixing tomato and vodka, doesn't make things any more secure beyond giving
him the chance to pocket bank notes from mum’s purse.
His loser friends are no help and getting together with winning school girl
Noée Abita (in Le grand bain), when he's having
trouble getting it up, is bound to be a disaster - discussion about her first time ashamed of her small boobs. Erectile disfunction is impossible at 27 the cheery doctor prompts. Viagra
jokes and the scene with the chum’s tot enjoying Vince’s virtual reality porno follow.
Vincent loses the leading role in a life of De Gaulle to the fellow actor who
jokes about fear of nudity. They give Vince a make-up that makes him look like Adolph Hitler which they have him wear in the street.
Devos' reappearance gives the piece the extra substance it needs and then at the last minute they manage to turn it all around one more time.
First time feature director de Bary has expanded the film from the short he did
with juvenile of the moment Lacoste. The excellent performances and film craft make
it all kind of winning.
Vincent Lacoste is also in Christophe Honoré’s Chambre 212 / On a Magical Night but I was less enthused. It launches with fortiesish Chiara
Mastroianni refusing to be a Feydeau character and emerging topless from the closet in her
young lover Harrison Arevalo’s student flat as he makes out with his Asian fiancée Clara
Choï.
Greeted by a succession of younger men, Mastroianni wanders through the
streets. Husband musician-actor Benjamin Biolay learns about all this from her mobile which
he indignantly flings into the family wash – unreasonably the film suggests. After
their argument she moves across the road of designer Stéphane Taillasson’s giant
studio decor, to a hotel room where she can see into their flat over the Montparnasse seven
screen complex opposite. We spend the picture trying to recognise the display posters - Kiss Me Deadly included.
Through the night Chiara is visited by corporeal versions of her past
associations including Lacoste, twenty year old version of the husband, and Camille Cottin (again) who they desperately try to make glamorous though she’s only prepared to get
down to her scanties while Mastroianni and Lacoste go the full Monty. Cottin was the
piano teacher lover Chiara won him away from and she and Lacoste are quite happy to reconnect. She brings the twelve year old son they would have had if they
stayed together which understandably intrigues Lacoste but this turns into a life sized doll
when it looks as if Chiara will end up with the husband. The space fills up with mum
Marie-Christine Adam, granny Claire Johnston-Cauldwell and a squad of Mastoianni’s young
lovers. Lacoste punches out her cousin who he felt should have known better.
Things work out in the snow on the street below next morning in front of the
Rosebud (!) Cafe. The piece has a kind of big budget, studiofied Jacques Demy look but a
totally different feel.
All up it’s a bit tacky.
I’ve done better (a lot better) out of French Film Festivals but once again there's always the chance that, inhibited by the price, I missed the best items. Well we’re all
waiting to see what happens next and not just to foreign movie events.
Barrie Pattison 2020
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