Let's get Past Jean Renoir.

Le domino vert - Darrieux

Despite being the most popular foreign language cinema in the English speaking world from the mid thirties on, our knowledge of French films is tilted and incomplete. I’m always curious about what lies outside the confined B.F.I., Criterion Collection, Mark Cousins coverage. Let's consider the titles that fill out the filmographies of  revered names and quite few more. You Tube offered a startlingly extensive chance to find out and, though their five hundred (!) vintage movie site appears to have vanished, there’s still enough left to explore - if you face up to soso, un-subtitled copies.

Film ininflamable!

UFA’s 1935 Le domino vert with direction credited to Henri Decoin and Herbert Selpin seemed a prime candidate. This is the simultaneous French version of Selpin’s German Brigitte Horney vehicle Der grüne Domino. Selpin  is remembered now as the director who died in a wartime 3rd Reich prison, when his criticism of the German navy upset Dr. Goebbels, though his splendid Hans Albers westerns Sgt. Berry and Wasser fur Canitoga are on the way to being the most entertaining German films of the late thirties. 

The French version, apparently filmed in Germany and using their top technicians, was a chance for the young Danielle Darrieux to do her so charming act again. She has a double role, starts off in a one piece swim suit tucking her hair into the bathing cap and graduates to the Green Domino columbine costume via a variety of smart modern and bogus period outfits. Charles Vanel comes on as the rugged sculptor, smashing a bottle against a statue in his glass walled studio, in frustration over the way husband Maurice Escande is treating Jany Holt and moves on to doing aged. His is the only substantial performance.

Rather than a fun romance, this one turns into a thinly plotted murder mystery. Young Darrieux’ uncle and guardian is asked for her hand, which exposes the secret that her dad is in jail for murder. In the chambers of Mâitre Henri Bonvallet, the old dossier is produced and we go into the flashback to 1914, which looks pretty much the same.

Well off art dealer Maurice Escande and blonde wife Jany Holt have agreed to go their own ways. We never get a good look at the painting Escande’s butler is carefully restoring but getting it locked away in the desk is a plot point.

When Darrieux’s mother Darrieux again comes into his gallery-book store, Escande is smitten and takes a horse cab to follow her to The Louvre, which happens to be shut that day. The pair hit it off and they go to the cafe where the sketch artist draws Danielle and the Master of Ceremonies introduces the Can Can girls who funnel up from the circular stage trap door followed by singer Lindia in a picture hat. This is the film’s most cinematic passage.

Le domino vert - Escande & Darrieux

Vanel takes a dim view of their kiss, silhouetted on the curtains at night and events come to a head when the couple, Holt, Vanel and the lesser characters converge on the Bal Masqué where the staging of the French cast’s footage is quite elaborate though we never see them in the same shot as the orchestra, presumably filmed for the German version.

Back in the (then) present, Darrieux manages to crack the case with the aid of suitor Daniel Lecourtois, getting the truth out of guilt ridden former maid Jeanne Pérez. Happy lakeside ending.

Stuck with a non event plot and undistinguished support, Selpin pours his efforts into the lavish ball room sequence. Did Decoin contribute things like the striking shot of Darrieux alone in the corridor?  He beat Albert Préjean’s time with Danielle and the pair were married and worked through a succession of subsequent movies together.

The technicians are on top of their game with the Otto Hunte-Schiller white painted doors, taller than the frame, a striking element. The one exterior of the speeding train stands out. Nicely lit & cut the production doesn’t seem to be able to manage fades. There is one murky chemical attempt and they give up on the hard edged wipes to black early on.

Le dessous des cartes  (Under the Cards) made by André Cayatte in 1948  is another forgotten  production with A feature talent going through their paces. This one belongs to the period where new director Cayatte was knocking out production line entertainments, before he got stuck into  his social interrogation movies,  think Gabin in le verdict or the alarming Nous sommes tous des assassins. It is a match with then contemporary thrillers like Fuga en Francia, Build My Gallows High and the Luis Trenker Barriera a Settentrione.

In the snow covered alps, Serge Reggiani is smuggling his rucksack full of bottled liquor past the frontier guards. “Je n’aime pas les gendarmes.” Meanwhile in the city, financier Enrico Glori has come under suspicion and does a runner. He arives at Édouard Delmont’s inn, where Reggiani is sparking Janine Darcey, the daughter of the house and Reggiani’s real life wife at that stage. We remember her with some enthusiasm from the Asquith French Without Tears - long time since that was about?

To avoid pursuit, Glori retains Serge as guide to cross the mountains. Walking with a stick, the city man can’t keep up (“je ne peux plus!”) and the two shelter in an (empty) mountain hut where Serge burns some abandoned timber to melt ice over the fire. Next day he points Gori towards civilisation, accepts his payment and starts back. However the fugitive is found hanging in the hut, at which point the film develops some traction. Widow, top billed Madeleine Sologne, discovers that his insurance won’t pay out on a suicide while agenda driven police inspector Paul Meurisse, totally in his element, is wheeled in to protect the interests of the influential people involved in Gori’s schemes. His arrival at the village inquest awes the locals and turns things around.

Like Monsieur la souris, the plot pivots on documents found on the dead man. Sologne shows up to look after her pay out and torpedoes the suicide theory at the reconstruction with the hanging dummy, demanding “Where’s the chair?” -  the one the dead man would have had to kick away. It looks like Serge will be done for murder. More interaction between him and Madeleine, of which Janine takes a dim view, and some cat and mousing between Paul and Serge, who stages his own reconstruction while the local authorities watch confused before deciding the self interested city policeman is a great detective - end of picture.

Madeleine Sologne.

Time and personal problems have not treated the star of L’eternal retour kindly and it’s a stretch to find Sologne’s blonded femme fatale an object of desire. The other leads are fine and the background registers, with Reggiani supported by a loud dog and a squad of kids who fall through the ice on the trough outside his jail cell, while there’s Tyrolean dancing at the Inn.

Cayatte handles the crime in the alps material with confidence - assured performances, unfamiliar setting and absence of process backgrounds. The only studio exteriors are for night scenes. Thirard’s camerawork is impeccable. There’s no editor credit and the film’s faults are in the script where five writers including Cayatte and Charles Spaak are involved.

 It’s always a disappointment to find so much French cinema is made up by films like this, where the talented people involved are spinning their wheels. Well, there are several hundred more. There’s always the hope that the next one will be like Macao enfer de jeu (gun runner Von Stroheim battles Sessue Hayakawa) François 1er (Fernandel in costume) or La terre qui meurt (drift from the cities). Even without, checking these out fills time nicely.

Barie Pattison 2022

Daleká cesta / Distant Journey / The Long Journey

Directed by Alfred Radok & Script & Mojmir Drvota & Story & Erik Kolár        

Vaclav Kutil    ....     associate production director
Milos Mastnik, Bohumil Smída    ....     production directors
Ferdinand Zelenka    ....     associate production director
 
Original Music by Jirí Sternwald
Otakar Parik    ....     musical director
Jirí Sternwald    ....     lyricist
         
Cinematography by Josef Strecha         
 
Film Editing by Jirina Lukesová
         
Art Direction by Frantisek Troster
Jan Pacak    ....     set designer
 
Costume Design by Jan Kropácek, Frantisek Mádl
    
Mojmir Drvota    ....     assistant director
 
Josef Vlcek    ....     sound
 
108 min.  Ceskoslovenský Státní Film/ Vyroba Skupina Rezac-Fabera-Smida  production
unit. Czechoslovakia: 1949.

With Blanka Waleská    ....     Dr. Hanna Kaufmann
Otomar Krejca    ....     Dr. Antonin Bures
Viktor Ocásek    ....     Engineer Kaufmann
Zdenka Baldová    ....     Mrs. Kaufmann
Jirí Spirit    ....     John [Honzik] Kaufmann
Eduard Kohout    ....     Prof. Reiter
Otýlie Benísková    ....     Prisoner
Bohumil Bezouska    ....     Young Jewish Man
Josef Chvalina    ....     Pepa Bures
Rudolf Deyl    ....     Jarda Noha
Jan Fischer    ....     Young Man
Zdenek Hodr    ....     Zdenek Klein
Karel Jelínek    ....     Brych
Marie Kautska    ....     Terezina's Friend
Eva Marie Kavanova    ....     Terezina
Josef Kollar    ....     Gestapo Agent 

Frantisek Kreuzmann    ....     Santrucek
Marta Májová    ....     Old Woman
Frantisek Marek        
J.O. Martin    ....     Karel Bures
Jaroslav Oliverius        
Jirí Plachý    ....     Abrahamovic
Sasa Rasilov    ....     Moseles
Ladislav Rychman        
Jaroslav Seník    ....     Beer
Sona Sulcova    ....     Ellen
Josef Toman    ....     Krejcik
Anna Vanková    ....     Margit
Frantisek Vnoucek    ....     Dr. Fried
Milka Balek-Brodská, Hermína Vojtová    ....     Wives
Prisoners Otýlie Benísková, Stefan Bulejko, Marie Buresová, Karel Effa, Oldrich Dedek, Antonín Jedlicka,
Anna Jirouskova-Tomanova, Vera Koktová, Milos Kopecký, Alexandra Myskova, Zdenka Procházková, Viola Zinková       

Alfréd Radok’s 1949 Daleká cesta / Distant Journey has finally reached us. It is considered a classic of the Czechoslovak cinema, which is remarkable as the film was virtually unseen for the first forty years of its existence. That story is revealing in itself. 

Between the end of World War Two and the establishment of Communist government was a brief  bright spot for Czechoslovak film. Their audiences had unrestricted exposure to foreign (that largely meant Hollywood) movies and their then most admired film dates from this period - Otaka Vavra’s Krakatit from the work of  Karel Capek, whose play RUR familiarised the word “Robot”.

Daleká cesta / Distant Journey

During this time, experimental theater director Alfréd Radok was preparing a two part film about the persecution of Jews before and during the war. Radok came from a part Jewish family and had escaped a World War Two labor camp. He had relatives who had passed through Theresienstadt where his eventual single film is largely set and partly filmed. An uncle had died there. Going into the facility for his production was reportedly a harrowing experiece.

Radok had chosen a big ask - the subject was extraordinarily sensitive and would draw close examination while at the same time he had to attract a paying audience to watch the film in Commercial Theaters as a dramatic entertainment - and he was working without precedent.

It’s Polish counterpart, Wanda Jakubowska’s Ostatni etap / The Last Stage set in Auschwitz had been made the year before but there is no evidence Radok had seen it. 

However he did draw on the newly accessible  American film, in  particular Citizen Kane with its use of so called deep focus, roofed sets and that film’s mix of staged material and actuality - seen here as vignetting propaganda news reel footage into Radok's dramatised scenes. The Anna Vanková camp femme fatale could have wandered in from the noir thrillers.

Krejca & Waleská

Distant Journey moves from a realistic depiction of WW2 Prague, where lead Blanka Waleská plays a Jewish doctor who is banned from practicing by her superior, anticipating the action of invading Germans.  This doesn’t prevent her marriage to fellow doctor Otomar Krejca, who will face the war with her.

To dramatise the account of this couple, Radok draws on his experience not in film but theatre - the devices of  expressionism, surrealism and symbolism. This is telegraphed by opening titles where menacing expressionist shadows fall on the grim brick wall.  We get the repeated “Zidi ven” graffiti, the closet emptying of  yellow star black overcoats, the iron cross found among discarded goods in the junk man’s warehouse.

When Distant Journey moves to Theresienstadt camp, theatricality becomes increasingly evident.  An outsize marionette is carried down the stairs, their orchestra turns out in the rain as a train pulls into the station and, in the scene that all the commentators remark, the camp’s women scrub the pavements preparing for an inspection, while behind them a girl’s chorus rehearses Hans Kása’s opera “Brundibár” which was written  in Theresienstadt.

Location filming in Prague and the actual camp comes with elaborate studio construction. Radok had the sophisticated facilities of the Barandow studios which had not been destroyed during the war and was possibly the best equiped facility in Eastern Europe. Set design and costuming are superior. The expert photography is however let down by what appears to be the inferior laboratory work available in the country at that stage.

By the time the now single length Distant Journey was ready for showing however, the Communist Government had taken control of Czechoslovakia. The film presented a problem for the new regime. This close to World War Two, they couldn’t be seen as being Anti Semitic but the subject matter would play uneasily with their new Russian masters. However there was a get out of jail card. This was the period of Socialist Realism and, rather than the subject matter, it was the presentation that came under criticism. Art movements like surrealism, symbolism and expressionism were being ridiculed as decadent Western elitism and counter revolutionary throughout the Soviet empire and Radok’s work was an easy target.

After a small number of initial screenings in Prague, Distant Journey was  withdrawn and not shown again for forty years. During this time Krakatit, which was surrealism, symbolism and expressionism in spades, was promoted round the world by Czechoslovak Government Cultural services.

Radok, however did not vanish. He made a couple more movies, 1953’s Divotvorný klobouk / The Magic Hat and the 1957 Dedecek automobil / The Vintage Car with Raymond Bussières, and some TV and he registers on the international scene with his Magic Lantern presentation, where its story was shown with pauses for the audience to vote how they wanted it to continue and their choice screened. Just the mechanism for doing this with theatrical gauge film must have been an extraordinary challenge. 

It was running it in New York when I was there and I thought I’d beaten the game with a chance to see the celebrated Magic Lantern. Unfortunately it closed the day I tried to book. I always regretted that.

All things come to an end and under the the Velvet Revolution the old prohibitions were revised. Radok had died in 1976 but, with the fall of  Communism, heroes did emerge. During all the decades that Distant Journey was a forbidden work, at some risk, the Czechoslovakian Film archive preserved the duplicating materials. They were able to strike new film copies and in 1991 Distant Journey was widely shown around the country and hailed as a major work.

However - and this is interesting - without the nostalgia audience, publicity, press and festival showings generated by a first run, Distant Journey remained virtually unshown outside its country of origin. Meanwhile National Events and sub-titled re-issues had ensured the place in film history of The Last Stage.

It is only now, after another thirty years, that Distant Journey is becoming known, following a major World War Two exhibition at the London Imperial War Museum where, as a banned Czechoslovak war film, it was major a talking point in a new sub-titled digital restoration. The Australian Jewish Film Festival screenings are part of the flow on from that.

Seen today Distant Journey appears glum and theatrical with its bursts of loud dramatic music and comic strip Nazis, like the Gestapo man in a leather overcoat who stops the leads in the street, screwing his monocle into his eye. Potentially interesting characters are not explored - Anna Vanková’s vamp or the Theresienstadt guard whose menacing appearance at their door sets up a false expectation, when he brings the leads messages from their imprisoned families.

Daleká cesta / Distant Journey

However moments do ring true - the woman dragged out of the induction crowd and thrown against the wall for laughing or discovering a familiar face in the orchestra. The climax is vivid. Dr. Blanka Waleská learns of their tormentors’ defeat while in the Typhus ward surrounded by dying patients. This belongs in a more substantial film. In a context like the London presentation, the film can be seen as a pioneer Holocaust study, the attempt of a serious artist to represent horrors that he had experienced personally.

Better films would follow - Italian Marxist Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapo or Lina Wertmuller’s Pasqualino Settebellezze / Seven Beauties. From the grotesque British 1941 Gasbags to Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella, it is surprising how many of these are comedies. They share the subject with a swarm of inferior films, mainly pouring out of the Soviets and emphasising liberation by the People’s Red Army.

You can take away from all this anything you want but to me one clear message is the absolute fatuity of censorship. It is largely because its opponents suppressed it, that Distant Journey is the only forties Czech film being seen around the world today.

Barrie Pattison 2022

EVEN MORE FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL

Patrice Leconte’s first theatrical film in 5 years, Depardieu as Inspector Maigret - this was always going to be an event. It asserts, despite lacking many of the features of the standard French policier.

Leconte, a devotee of author Simenon, sees Maigret as “une personne emblematique.” The movies have provided us a small army of Inspector Maigrets. Depardieu is the newest in a line winding back to Abel Taride in his brother Jean‘s 1932 Le chien jaune / The Yellow Dog. French directors seem to have liked putting their brothers in the role. Jean Renoir got Pierre to front his La nuit du carrefour -  followed by Albert Préjean, Charles Laughton, a cheery Jean Gabin, Jean Richard, Bruno Cremer, along with implausible TV Britons, Rupert Davies, Michael Gambon and, would you believe, Rowan Atkinson.

Maigret is a dour detective. He doesn’t carry a gun and ride in a police car with a screaming siren. When he needs to travel here, Depardieu takes taxis. As he explains, he doesn’t interrogate suspects by beating them with a telephone book. What he does is listen to people. It makes a hard act to follow. Refuse all substitutes - that’s you Hercule Poirot and Columbo!

What the current film offers is an aged Maigret, like Harry Baur from the formidable Duvivier La tête d’un homme,  still the character’s best incarnation. Gross Depardieu is now barely recognisable as the energetic juvenile of Les Valseuses and the Truffaut films. The currently scandal plagued actor is a resonant match with the character, which we can add to his Great French Movie Star catalogue - Jean Valjean, Cyrano, the Count of Monte Cristo.

Actor and role both evoke a long and demanding work life. This Maigret is first seen being told by his doctor to give up his signature pipe smoking to spare his heart. Throughout the film, he is greeted by characters who he encountered in investigations he now barely remembers. Anne Loiret’s Mme Maigret mentions the couple’s grown daughter, which further motivates Depardieu’s interest in his new case - echoed in the resonant scene with André Wilms describing the devastating effect of an offspring’s death, which has no other function in the plot.

This all motivates Depardieu’s intervention in the life of Jade Labeste, one of the case’s miserable girl victims, who contrast with the drunken privileged class crowd found celebrating by singing “C’est si bon”, that avenger Depardieu faces with his damning coup du théatre.

They drop in odd Simenon detail like Maigret only drinkling one brand of liquor during each case. Though Lukas and Janvier are marginal in the film’s constant engulfing shadow, we do get a telling scene in Police-Secours with its light-up wall map of Paris, introduced by the shattering of a call box glass.

The film claims to be adapted from “Maigret et la jeune morte” but many of that one’s features have been ditched, including the rival Inspector  (think Philo Vance’s hapless Segeant Sgt. Ernest Heath and quite a few more). Discovering the killer is replaced with elements of “Maigret tend un piège.”  As a detective story, Maigret is unremarkable with the outcome telegraphed from our first glimpse of matron Aurore Clement peering from the background.

The film opens with Clara Antoons naked and vulnerable, as it turns out for an evening dress fitting. We see her arrival produce consternation at a society engagement reception and shortly later her disfigured body is found in a public square. Depardieu doubles back to take the call and we cut to her body being turned over.

His inquiries reveal the film’s real core, the murky, evocative universe of author Simenon’s crime stories, the luxury homes of the well to do and to the miserable accommodation of peniless girls. Though subtly placed by details - the big china coffee mugs, the no handle loup magnifyer with which Depardieu examines the event photos, they only run to one vintage car. There are no street vistas with authentic traffic and extras in period costume. We hear about the train station but when Jade Labeste makes her departure it is from a grubby bus depot. The home of Jules Maigret, Inspecteur brigade criminel, Quai des orfevres 36, as Depardieu announces himself, is is a Paris without bateaux mouches and the Champs-Elysées. It’s streets are as mean as anything Philip Marlowe ever went down.

The downbeat material is relentless. Depardieu asks the reception hall manager whether a table cloth like the one the body was found wrapped in went missing and is told that, where silver wear is routinely stolen, they haven’t bothered to check the linen. A victim of a lesbian procuress observes “I should have kept the money.” The coroner describes the mutilation the duck they will have for diner was subjected to.

 Patrice Leconte’s  film deliberately references cinema with a visit to Studio Billancourt where Antoon’s roommate Mélanie Bernier, in front of the painted decor, comments everything is false. The ending repeats the device used strikingly with Louise Brooks in Prix de beauté and Carol Landis in I Wake Up Screaming, where characters watch a film of the now dead victim.  Maigret constantly recalls perversely resonant moments from other movies. Dress maker Elizabeth Bourgine, shown her creation soaked in the life’s blood of it’s owner, comments that it’s sad to see her work treated so badly, recalling  Barbara Leigh-Hunt in Frenzy telling her rapist and killer “Don’t tear the dress”. We saw the story of young girls arriving in Paris with a suitcase in La rozière des Halles, Dactylo and Club des femmes. It is part of the film’s scheme that rather than finding a colourful artist’s garret, she ends in a miserable room up the six flights of stairs which both the aged Maigret and the housekeeper negotiate reluctantly. Rather than a scenic interlude, Depardieu walking with Jade Labeste by the Seine has him recall his first murder where he couldn’t forget the girl victim drowned in the river. It’s like Al Pacino in Sea of Love, telling Ellen Barkin that they are passing buildings where he investigated killings, transforming the ordinary street into a haunted setting.

It would be interesting to know how much of this citation is conscious.

Maigret is a milestone in the history of it’s star, director and long dead author. The final image emptying to leave the grim Paris alley way is an indicator of it’s intent.  I’ll be surprised if the so far excellent French Film Festival can come up with anything better.

Curiously French critics, who see Leconte as a light weight, despite pieces like his other Simenon subject M. Hire or his imposing La veuve de saint Pierre, have been largely unsympathetic.

A few months back Jérôme (Anthony Zimmer) Salle’s new Kompromat would have looked like a bit of formulaic Ruskie bashing, harking back to the Crimean campaign. At the moment, it plays like topical contemporary issues drama.

Gilles Lelouche works hard as the family man Alliance Française director on Irkutsk station in Siberia. His productive life proves to be a sham. Gilles’ wife plans on leaving him and the ballet he books as a local theatre attraction works out as gay men wrestling half naked in red light. The local hunting fan sponsor is not amused.

Before he knows what is happening, the fur hat cops are marching Gilles, doubled over by hands cuffed behind his back out of the house in front of his terrified daughter, and his wife has made a video deposition claiming he’s a pedophile who flogs kiddie porn on the net.

The cell full of tattooed bald men susses that he’s on a 424 sex crime warrant and beat him up, causing him to be shifted to solitary where he chokes on his bread and water. His French diplomat associates get him “le meilleur avocat au cité” who proves to have limited English and outlines the grim fate awaiting Gilles now that he has run foul of FSB, successor to the KGB, who have faked his incriminating Kompromat dossier.

Things pick up when supermart bags of groceries with a smiley face receipt arrive in his cell before the lawyer proves smarter than he looks and gets Gilles release to home detention with an ankle bracelet - no phone, no net, no contact with people associated with the case. Using a bit of ingenuity our hero finds out that the groceries came from Joanna Kulig, a girl he danced with at the show’s after-party. She is as conspicuous here, in an underwritten role, as she was in Cold War.

Kompromat - Kullig & Lellouche.

Faced with fifteen years in a Russian slammer, Gilles takes the advice the lawyer confides while the kitchen appliance drowns out the room’s surveillance bug and does the runner we’ve already seen in the pre-title.

The escape has a few inventive touches - the cell phone on the long distance coach is nice and Gilles outfoxing his pursuers gives us an interesting glimpse of diplomatic assistance in action. However it’s disturbing to see the featured use of cell phones, which should have given the game away. Kulic’s one legged Chechen war veteran husband is also a promising element but his character is poorly deployed. A traveling Orthodox Patriarch is better but the action material is implausible.

The suggestion that Gilles must really be a spy because of all the attention he’s getting and his skill in dealing with the blundering secret policemen has a spurious plausibility. ”What does a spy look like?”

The film is well made and the cast are good but the film they prop up is old fashioned and unconvincing - even though we are assured that it’s “loosely” based on reality.

This one is the only disappointment I’ve had out of the French Film Festival so far.

 

Emmanuel Carrère’s Ouistreham / Between Two Worlds is a challenge because it’s hard to say anything about it without giving away the revelation which sets it up, though the publicity and reviews don’t feel inhibited about that.

The opening establishes an unfamiliar setting where we see Juliette Binoche lost in the confusion of the French coastal Caen social security office, where a woman indignant about the her missing paper work jostles her out of her turn with the case worker. Juliette accounts for the gap in her work record as representing a failed marriage.

We see her interviewing for a bottom of the employment ladder spot - no insurance, no holidays, no security. After one dismissal, she ends up sharing the shuttle bus with the women who clean the Ouistreham ferry. The scenes of mastering the rapid turnaround methods and the company of the fellow women cleaners are vivid and make the best element of the film.

Part of the authenticity is that Juliette is the only professional in the cast. She blends in impeccably. The others are the real deal. They even come up with a transgender worker whose farewell party is a highlight. The casting director must have lit a candle in thanks.

The film making is accomplished. The business of the women snatching any happiness that happens to present is new and involving and the night time port setting (again) makes for striking images.

However Ouistreham has a personal rather than social agenda and when they lay this out things become less interesting. It ends up being the movie where we see the admirable Binoche clean toilets.

Barrie Pattison 2022

More French Film Festival.

French movies are everywhere at the moment. After Lou Jeunet's  Curiosa on SBS - about the Pierre (Devil Is a Woman) Louÿs and Marie de Hérédia's letters and photos, and Jacques Audiard's Olympiades,  I wait for Noémie Merlant to turn up naked every time - an impressive build that hasn't been distorted by training like Brigitte Bardot or Bo Derek who trod this path before her. My viewing on the current French Film Festival has been uniformly rewarding. Consider these Noémie Merlant free movies. 

Samuel Benchetrit’s Cette musique ne joue pour personne / Love Songs for Tough Guys offers an atmospheric first image of a blue plastic bag fluttering in the sea shore breeze. We’ll see the bag and the ocean again.

Starr, Lanners, Damiens, Bedia, Kerven.

Director Benchetrit gets better as he goes but you can still recognise the director of his 2007 J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster / I Always Wanter to Be a Gangster in his new film where the excellent François Damiens (also in the interesting Les Cowboys on S.B.S.) has inherited the family small time racketeering empire in a bleak French container port. Things are not going  well for François.The punk kids are stealing his cocaine shipments and his labor force is ageing. However his attention is elswhere as he struggles in the poetry class to prepare love verses. A scornful fellow class member gets duffed up for laughing. Tutor Thierry Gimenez is however at ease re-wording his death threat as an Alexandrine.

Henchman Gustave Kervern with an axe (thanku I’ll Never Forget Whats’isname) is sent on a debt collecting job and the targeted accountant dies in the process. This leaves the man’s wife, played by a mature Vanessa Paradis (currently Benchetrit’s wife), struggling to find her co-star for a local theatre piece based on the lives of Sartre and De Beauvoir as a musical. Kerven ends up reading her in  De Beauvoir’s lines and when the company’s Sartres keep on meeting violent ends he gets rung in - including the exercise with the imaginary feather. (“Oh, non! La plume”)  Kerven is great in this part but so are the rest.

Paradis & Benchetrit.

François has middle aged orphan henchman Ramzy Bedia (from the comedy duo Eric and Ramzy and also in Hommes au bord de la crise de nerfs) deliver his verses to fresh faced Hyper-Mart check out chick Constance Rousseau but she spots the improvement when Ramzy starts authoring them himself.

Aging stand over men Joey Starr and Bouli Lanners (some cast!) are recruiting school mates by force for Damiens’ chubby daughter’s party.  As a consequence, one guest turns up in a surgical collar. That works out nicely too.

Meanwhile wife Valeria Bruni Tedeschi discovers his poems and decides she is Damiens’ muse. She stops lazing about the house. One of her scenes is a sustained, vanity free, no make up close-up of her face as her hair is washed. You have to have a lot of trust in your director for that and she is rewarded with gleaming gold lit mid shots, alternating with Damiens in her final big appearance, a contrast with his meeting with Rousseau played in a full height single take.

A class act, this one places it’s dreadful characters in a setting of overwhelming drabness and we become totally involved. It’s a long way from Sascha Guitry but I feel he would have gotten it.

 

 Yohan Manca's Mes frères et moi / La Traviata, My Brothers & I is another housing projects piece where eleven year old Maël Rouin Berrandou is itching to quit school like his brothers, who he barracks in their beach soccer games and goes lookout for in their small time drug deals. Dali Benssalah (in No Time to Die) the oldest, wants him to get a real job like Pizza delivery. Sofian Khammes is concentrating on body building to pick up middle aged women at the tourist hotel pool while rebellious Moncef Farfar is into small time crime, including stealing the money they use for meds for Fadila Djoudi their comatose mother retained on a drip in her bed room despite medical advise and the wishes of her brother who contemptuously subsidises his nephews' petty schemes.

Benssalah, Berrandou, Khammes & Farfar

Berrandou is fascinated by the opera recordings inherited from his his late father. He plays them for the mother. causing more friction at home (“That’s not Pavarotti!”) While painting the corridor of the school, where he’s still enrolled, as part of a bogus holiday cultural program, he runs into a small class run by opera singer Judith Chemla, (a real life item with  director Manca). Seeing his aptitude she recruits him and shapes his enthusiasm. “You have to sing to someone.” When Berrandou does the aria Chelma has rehearsed him in for his mother, he becomes convinced she responds.

Berrandou & Chelma

There’s a nice scene of  Chelma running late and her and the kid riding with Khammes on his motor bike.

Of course, in one of these nothing is easy. The authorities take Djoudi away and she has to be liberated in a commando style raid. Berrandou becomes infuriated with the demands Chelma makes of him, associating her with the luxurious life of the Europeans he glimpses and rejects her “rich bitch” lessons and the cops hit the flat while she’s come to check on his absence.

We don’t get a dramatic break though to send the audience out on a high but the kid’s visit to the concert hall where Chelma is performing shows him fascinated by the stage machinery - the rows of now empty seats and this goes with his final resolution and provides a surprisingly up beat ending. This one has been called an Arab Billy Elliot but it's really closer to  Ladj Ly's imposing 2019 Les Misérables showing the lives of immigrants mis-shaped by tenement living.    

 

En corps / Rise comes from Cédric Klapisch  who has been one of the most engaging French film makers since the nineties and his Un air de famille. We associate him with winning ensemble pieces like his L'auberge espagnole /The Spanish Apartment cycle but there is another line running through his work, his dance films, his Aurélie Dupont or Paris Opéra documentaries. His clip of the their dancers working out at home during the lock down is really winning.

Cédric Klapisch

Klapisch’s new En corpse / Rise is a peak in this activity and, from it’s elegant opening titles, pretty much the most handsome film the director has done. It is on the way to being the most involving dance film we have and full of unfamiliar touches which add conviction. We hear the dancers’ feet in performance, where the sound is usually muted for effect. The climax shows the performers still on a high from their success, breaking into their moves out on the deserted night time square. Star Marion Barbeau’s run through the streets ends with her partner catching and twirling her. We see not only her routines but exercises - twisting her feet back on themselves in a way that is painful just to watch. The Red Shoes this is not.

Klapisch’s film has her play a twenty six year old première danceuse distracted in her star performance oriental theatre spectacle and falling. Hospitalised she is put in a cast, which has to come off immediately if she is to dance again, and told by her doctor, her physiotherapist bearded François Civil (Klapisch's Ce qui nous lie / Back to Burgundy) and her uncertain, widowed lawyer dad Denis Podalydès (also in Les amours d'Anaïs) that she may have to abandon the career she has built her life round.

As the film progresses we see her always dealing with this possibility while watching a (dazzling) hip-hop dance battle or hearing her associates discuss the contrast between classical ballet and modern dance - the performer’s relation to the floor.

Barbeau finds herself helping out in Pio Marmai’s epicure catering van at Muriel Robin’s resort where Hofesh Shechter’s company is rehearsing - nice moment of her doggedly peeling carrots as she watches his dancers go through their moves on the other side of the glass partition.

One gets her to replace the chair he’s using to simulate a dead person and Shechter has her join in their work outs. Civil comes back from his stint at the ashram in Goa and punches the red cushions in frustration finding she’s already paired with the hip-hop dancer. We get comic cutaways to Marmaï’s red van rocking as he gets it on with his squeeze and end with it rocking for Gautier and the dancer, to go with nice scenes of her joining the company’s activities - leaning into the wind or eating Marmaï’s non vegan haut cuisine. Include sunsets.

Finally Garnier is invited her to join the company and Podalydès takes time off from the case he’s working on in Paris for a lunch to deny neglecting her. Comedy of him nervously observing their rehearsal, the dancers passing in front of him from the fixed camera position.

The big show which we are waiting for is not an anti climax with the happy ending not Gautier’s romance or her reconciliation with dad but her beginning a new dance career. “You have to learn to move in a different way. It’ll never be perfect”

In with this there’s the appealing relation with Barbeau's sisters and the featured players showing Klapisch’s familiar skill in putting group dynamics on the screen. Barbeau is winning in her first major screen role. The film needed a plausibly twenty six year old dancer lead and pivots on her performance. That was a big ask for anyone.

That makes three superior films about the interface of (high) art and real life. Maybe that's a co-incidence or maybe that's what the European movie audience is buying now. It's certainly getting a remarkable work out.

Barrie Pattison 2022

 

 

 

FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL 2022.

Another French Film Festival confirms the impression that these are the only thing the fringe film houses can make money with. They've chosen to bring on this one level with The Batman. Well see how that goes. The scale is ambitious - forty films dominated by the work of celebrity performers and directors. Yea Frogfest!  It would be nice if other sources got this kind of coverage. What are the busy Phillippino or Egyptian industries up to?

After Dheepan and The Sisters Brothers, a new film by Jacques Audiard, latest member of his film making dynasty, fronted by rising star Noémie Merlant (Le retour du heros, Portrait de la jeune fille en feu), is eagerly anticipated. I'm surprised Les Olympiades, Paris 13e. / Paris, 13th District is not getting more sessions.

This one was always going to be an event and they try to fulfill the promise - titles in the now forgotten A Man Is 10 Feet Tall style (these don’t quite work), well built young leads getting naked regularly, the director’s own unfamiliar Les Olypiades home environment rather that the impoverished projects or the exclusive central Paris that we are used to seeing. There's and an attempt to give us a cross section of the city’s life - house hunting, call centers, the Sorbonne, Aged Care, home maintenance, discotheques and a glimpse of the porn industry. 

Encouragingly, this is also the third Black and White movie I’ve seen recently, along with The French Despatch (partly) and Ablaze.

Paris, 13th District - Lucie Zhang, Makita Samba

For the first half, it all plays quite well, as harassed Lucie Zhang tries to get by rent sharing her granny’s flat, which she has moved into, and working on Tele-Marketing from a crowded office, while her mum  harasses her with split screen ‘phone calls about getting married. Despite looking for a girl flat mate, Lucie takes on black student tenant Makita Samba and it’s hot sex on and off. It's surprising that in such a raunchy movie they fuzz the one 'phone dickpic.

Complications ensue when Samba’s friends buy him a Birthday phone sex session with the legendary "Amber Sweet" - fade to black and bring up the brief colour section. At this stage attention switches to thirty year old Merlant who is trying to re-make her life by becoming a lawyer after ten years working in the Real Estate office run by her uncle (by marriage).

Things come to a head when her younger fellow students, who aren’t all that welcoming, decide that, in the character defining blonde wig and scanties, Lucie is Amber Sweet and start asking for selfies with her. The film’s stand out scene is when the misidentification is shared round the Tobiac lecture hall via the students’ phones, during Merlant's call-on to demonstrate her understanding of  a difficult point of law for the class.

Paris 13th District - Lucie Merlant & Samba.

The rest concerns her prickly relationship with Samba, now running an Agence Imobilier where she knows more about the job than he does. We get to fill in their back stories, including running into one of the kids he taught in school now in a low skill manual job, as happened to too many, and Merlant’s having a ten year affair with the uncle.

Merlant is fascinated by her porn star lookalike and starts to buy time to talk to her, while Samba is faced with relationships with Lucie and Zhang, which is laid out in unlikely terms of true love and commitment.

The people are engaging and the film is ambitious enough and shows considerable skill but its central proposition is not as interesting as those of Audiard’s other movies and I rate it as his least rewarding. Also, despite the title,  it tells us disappointingly little about Les Olympiades, offering nondescript footage of streets and apartments where the elevated Métro provides the most distinctive visual they can come up with.

Frank Dubosc has been around for a long time. He was a continuing character in Coronation Street in the eighties.  His Tout le monde debout / Rolling to You however moved him to stage center, directing himself and starring as a character who the Me Too lot would cheerfully hang from a lamp post but we kind of get to like.

Well Dubosc and his character are back again with variation in the new Rumba la vie / Rumba Therapy.

We kick off with Frank alone, making himself a meal meal like Yves Montand in Police Python and with much the same connotation. Fellow driver Jean-Pierre Darroussin seems to be his entire social circle. Frank dismisses ball room dancing, and by implication movies like Strictly Ball Room and Shall We Dance, as effeminate. Turns out he's a chain smoking school driver using the bus P.A. to teach the kids to swear in English on his run and advising one “If you don’t want to go to school, sign on for the dole. It saves time.” The gags beat the old larf a minute in this one, before it predictably shifts into sentimental in the final section.

However a heart attack and double by-pass (explaining stents) causes a major mid-life crisis and Frank starts evaluating his past, seeking out old Hispanic flame Karina Marimon in her estate house with the slow opening gates and long ringing door chimes which her meek husband waits to subside.

 After some dialogue about how long Frank took to show up, she reveals that twenty years ago she carried his baby full term and now the girl’s grown to be Rumba instructor, the winning Louna Espinosa. He decides to seek his daughter out at the dance studio where she teaches and turns to African neighbor Marie-Philomène Nga (also in the new OSS ll7 movie) for advice on Afro Cuban dance - nice scene where she insists that Frank eat with her family and he makes every culturally insensitive move. We find that she’s actually a French teacher named after Pagnol’s "Fanny" which she promptly quotes to him. 

He finally rolls up to the dance academy full of people decades younger than him and is directed to Espinosa's class in the Salle Noureev only to be confronted by scantily clad Las Vegas dancers including a guy with a hairy but. He tells the instructor that he’s her dad only to find she's another girl who used the room for the day.

Frank finally enrolls in the daughter's class without telling her. Jokes about him turning up in Fred Astaire tap shoes and being ordered into his socks. He squirms through her sexy dance and his tongue-tied approaches are taken as a come on, getting him invited to meet in her favorite South American restaurant where he fails to recognise Guacamole and she explains her attraction to older men, embarrassing the heck out of him. Her fiancé regards Frank with suspicion but later proves to have a key role, with his speech about not failing Espinosa again. 

Frank Dubosc

Meanwhile sex with a middle aged class member puts Frank back in the hospital with her in the room with Dr. Michel Houellebecq, who had advised masturbation as better exercise than walking. It's that kind of picture. “Dying is something everyone can do. Living is hard.”

Turns out  that, like Alexandra Lamy in Tout le monde debout, Louna has tumbled his masquerade and is protracting the agony and (this is the point where the style and pace of the film changes) she has a plan for Frank to connect by partnering her in the World Rumba championship in Brighton - OK scenes of him rehearsing with her transferring his hand from her shoulder to her rump in the dip move.

Prepared they  arrive and get togged up but the stress hits Frank and he breaks out that last cigarette he bumpered to convince Lourna he was serious. Calamity strikes where we were expecting an up beat ending.

 This one is funny and very much in contact with contemporary attitudes.  The re-invented Frank Dubosc is someone more people should know.

Barrie Pattison - 2022

ABLAZE.

Time was we were seeing quite a bit of New Zealand production and things like John Reid's Middle Aged Spread, Geof Murphey's Goodby Pork Pie and Murray Ball's Footrot Flats were lively and unexpected - better than the films being made in Australia. Well, those days are gone but the odd New Zealand film still makes it’s way onto TV here - usually in the middle of the night, like 2019’s Ablaze directed by Joshua Frizzell and crewed by people whose background like his was in series TV.

Ablaze - Bruce Hopkins, David Van Horn.

This one is a scaled-down disaster movie dealing with a Xmas 1947 fire which engulfed Ballantyne’s department store in Christchurch. It gets some attention immediately for being in black and white ‘scope and attempting accurate period.

However it looks as if the makers have overreached themselves in trying for a big store movie. What they put on screen is less convincing than Ladies in Black or even the Marx Brothers and Norman Wisdom, let alone the three exceptional French films of  Zola’s “Au bonheur des dames” - Julien Duvivier’s late silent, André Cayatte’s 1943 turn and Pot Bouille by Duvivier again in 1957.

The New Zealanders seem to be working too hard, foregrounding a snotty floor walker who snubs a visitor in shirt sleeves and isn’t above making off with stock, putting moves on the shop girls and having a quiet smoke in the store room. By contrast, dress maker Hannah Marshall is concealing her pregnancy and is relieved when her severe supervisor re-assures her that she’ll be re-hired after her confinement. The girls are shown to be exploited (“I’ve never been to the races. I can’t afford it”) The dressmakers and milliners are at panic stations because they have to outfit current Miss New Zealand Mary Wootton and the auditors are in, getting all owner Mark Mitchinson’s attention.

Despite considerable effort, we never have the feeling that all this is happening in a sprawling three story fire trap. The elevator with it’s light up indicator is clearly the art director’s show piece but it comes as a surprise a couple of reels in to find that the store has a spacious Tea Room.

However at the point where I was losing interest, we get the fire disaster, which does play effectively in character terms with the cast gradually realising the situation and reacting differently to the circumstances they find themselves in as the ingrained store discipline restrains them.

Parallel with this we get the fire service in shiny brass helmets struggling after an inadequate preparation. The warden has to use the street pay kiosk to phone the fire in and they discover

Alison Bruce, Janine Burchett, Jared Turner, Serena Cotton, Mark Mitchinson, Manon Blackman, Nick Davies, and Brittany Clark.

with alarm that the doors are being locked to prevent pilfering while the fireys are restrained because they need the owner’s permission to enter private property.

The actual scenes of rising smoke and corridors blocked by flames, while the characters we have been induced to make usually bad decisions, do hold attention not the least because this is not a Towering Inferno but a small retail business menaced on a scale beyond their anticipation. 

Even here the cut price film making limits efforts. Through the window we see the dress maker escaping on the roof opposite without watching the stunt jump which we are told landed her there. Shots of figures on the smoke-filled stairs don’t prepare us for the body count which is more effectively conveyed in a final title listing the names of victims.

The use of actuality of the building blazing, its flag still flapping in the wind while the fire crews pour water into the flames, and the subsequent memorial carry the real charge, along with the news that the Ballantyne’s fire led to major changes in regulations and, since they were introduced, there hasn’t been a comparable disaster.

Ablaze is sufficiently accomplished to make you wonder about the other current New Zealand films, including the work of the people that contrived this one. I should watch those other unsocial hours transmissions to check.

Ablaze - Hannah Marshall, Manon Blackman and Ella Hope-Higginson 

 

 

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2022