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