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