FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL 2023.

Well, it’s that time or times again. Palace seems to find their French Seasons to be their big earners and who’s to complain? That’s a year’s worth of French movies jammed into a month and on a theater screen with subtitles. There are always curious omissions but these programs, based on original Box Office, are usually much better than the festivals based on critical selections - with distributor whims playing into both. Doesn’t look like too many surprises this year - two Jean Dujardin, two Gerard Depardieu, two Benoît Poelvoorde and, particularly welcome, the new Michel Ocelot animation Le Pharaon,le sauvage et la princesse.

To kick off, writer Ivan Calbérac’s La degustation / The Tasting is French to excess - two so charming leads planted in attractive surroundings where they have alfresco meals surrounded by winning character actors.  Alcoholism, obsession and wasteful luxury are in there to give it substance. The films of Benoît Delépine & Gustave Kervern and a whole lot more operate on the same basis and The Tasting is a really nice example. 

Bernard Campan has been a star for decades without drawing our attention. He was  opposite Monica Belucci in Bertrand Blier’s 2005 Combien tu m'aimes? Here he’s spot on as the rural community liquor store owner, whose finances and liver are giving him simultaneous problems, when local midwife/ sage femme baby-obsessed Isabelle Carré comes into the shop. They are of course just what the other needs. She’s a suitable pupil for his fine wines instruction. She’s already complimented the priest on the communion wine. He sets up an in-store tasting for her, for which only his old chum Eric Viellard and the subsidised work experience intern Mounir Amamra show up. The kid prompts that Viellard has eyes for Isabelle, planting an extra tension in a comic scene.

The piece plays out with an off key choir master, lovable derelicts, a picturesque funeral, Spanish scenics, AA, a threatening Arab hoon and near a death experience. It all looks great. I’m sure even Laurent Aknin’s orchestra is beautiful. 

Carré has matured from winning jeune première to a star in the Danielle Darrieux, Annie Giradot, Juliette Binoche line. The sustained close-up where they play Sidney Bechet's "Petits fleurs" over her face is a formidable climax.

I feel invested in Arnaud Desplechin since I waded through a Paris retrospective, that even included his apprentice work with a young Emmanuelle Devos, and I rated his films among the best from the years two thousands, so I homed in on Frère et soeur / Brother and Sister from a script he did with regular collabotator (Jimmy P.) Julie Peyr. This is another of the director’s family re-union cycle, which here becomes opaque. They spend the film giving us clues to disfunction without putting them into any shape and incidentals, like Marion Cotillard freaking with the helpful black pharmacien (prominent in the trailer) or Catholic Melvil Poupard lost at the Jewish funeral, tend to protude from more significant material.

The opening gets attention with Cotillard in the rain, turned back from the gathering for the child’s death and the multiple traffic accident where the old couple find the teenager still alive but fearful after crashing her mother’s car. But we cut to the too peaceful rural scenic and the piece is already in trouble.

Siblings Cotillard & Poupaud continue to encounter during the film. We get her young, expressing an unexplained hatred of him with a grin, the hysterics when he presents himself in a bar at wife-to-be Golshifteh (About Elly) Farahani’s suggestion or passing out, when their supermart trolleys crash, and final reconciliation.

A successful actress (a Métro poster lists the season of classics of which she’s the star), Marion can’t forgive the descriptions of her in brother Melvil’s books.

Out of sequence passage of time is identified (none too successfully) by the length of Cotillard’s hair. The on-screen incidents cluster round the hospitalisation of their aged parents. Performances and dim imagery are polished (Farahani & shrink Patrick Timsit do register) without making any impact and this one is too long. It’s record of day to day French life - shops, bars, homes, is its best feature.

Michel Hazanavicius was riding the wave after his Jean Dujardin OSS117 movies and L’artist but his attempts to follow up seemed to have strayed off message. Well, Hazanavicius is back, even if he’s fencing his bets by re-working a runaway Japanese hit, the 2017 Kamera o tomeru na! which cost twenty five grand and netted twenty five million.

Hard to say anything about his Couper / Final Cut without revealing the surprise structure. It’s curiously like Babylon with it’s filmmaking film, three-part form. Sufficient to say that the A listers, including Mrs. Hazanavicius, knew what they were doing signing on for something where they appear in a single take (faked with whip pans) zombie cheapo. 

Grégory Gadebois gets a particularly effective gross out innings. Roman Duris does strenuous effectively and hold-over from the Nip original, straight faced Yoshiko Takehara, cements the tone nicely. The wannabe film student daughter with the Quentin Tarantino T-shirt also gets some of the best moments. This one just keeps on getting better.

 

Director-writer-cameraman etc. Quentin Dupieux seems determined to corner the market on weird, starting his career with a film about a murderous rubber tire. He’s attracted big feature talent to his work - Jean Dujardin in 2019‘s Le daim and Benoît Poelvoorde in the superior 2018 Au poste. Now, I’ll watch anything with Poelvoorde (currently on Netflix in Comment je suis devenu super-héros / How I Became a Super Hero eg.) so I try hard not to feel cheated when he’s only in the last few minutes of Dupieux’ new Fumer fait tousser / Smoking Causes Coughing.

Fumer fait tousser / Smoking Causes Coughing - Tobacco Force.

The film battles to maintain it’s maker’s status as a genuine crazy, mixing elements of Godzilla movies, Horrible Histories, Charley’s Angels and the interjected sub-plots in Au Poste - include the truth telling diving bell found in the closet of the holiday home.

After titles backed by the Serge Gainsbourg number about God smoking Havanas, the super hero team, who draw on the lethal qualities of tobacco to overcome monsters, are first seen battling Olivier Afonso in a Tortusse suit which would have fit right in a Ishiro Honda movie. Though gore spattered, their passing boy fan is rapt, despite his dad’s smoking which lycra uniform team leader Benzène/ Gilles Lellouche indicates as a filthy habit. The slobbering rodent operator, voiced by Alain Chabat, has the justiciers’ service robot drive them to an isolated riverside group retreat aimed at restoring team spirit. They are delighted to find the underground titanium bed luxury resort  with its own closet supermarket staffed full time by by Marie Bunel, who indignantly rebuffs Méthanol/ Vincent LaCoste’s advances. Nicotine/ Anaïs Demoustier  and Ammoniaque/ Oulaya Amamra overcome Chabat’s powers of seduction. They begin to tell scarey campfire stories. Though family man Mercure/ Jean-Pascal Zadi doesn’t get to do the one he keeps on volunteering, this is continued by a talking barracuda which Lelouche has scooped out of the river onto the grill. However it looks as if it will be too late to save humanity.

The striven-for tackiness gets attention but really the gag needs a better punch line. I didn’t feel sufficiently intrigued to do Dupieux’ Incredible But True also in the event.

 

By accident we get the beautiful people of seventies juxtaposed here. Isabelle Adjani and Gerard Depardieu  front a couple of the festival films. 

Constance Meyer's Robuste kicks off with a downwards shot that resolves into a close up of an aged, puffy Depardieu in a biker’s helmet. Turns our he’s a wasted but still famous veteran movie star who’s being prepped for the lead in a period movie. He needs a minder to get him through the pre-production and his regular bodyguard Steve Tientcheu puts forward twenty-something black girl wrestler Déborah Lukumuena - no ingenue type this one. She’s as solid as Depardieu but all muscle.

The film charts the pair’s journey through the different experience that the association
represents for both of them. Lukumuena has an inconclusive relationship with white athlete Lukas Mortier and is not satisfying her trainer Florence Janas, as she competes in mat matches. Her East European gymnast friend, become bar girl, Megan Northam is impatient with her. Then Lukumuena find herself injected into her employer’s luxury life, complete with a young child of his current divorce given a puppy, an up market home with a tank of ugly, luminous ocean bottom fish and an admirer waiting on call outside his door.

 

 

            Robuste - Depardieu

Gerard is not an easy charge. Déborah has to down some eco-terrorist muggers (what was that all about?) and rush him into care.

On her first feature, Meyer has used an initially attention getting style, constantly introducing unexpected material - sheet ice breaking away, the sound of skipping rope - and with each new detail adding to our understanding. This holds attention for a while till it become clear that a coherent revelation is not going to emerge from this mass of information. Gerard deliberately injecting himself into his keeper’s unsatisfactory relationship with Mortier, at the Chinese restaurant meal, is the giveaway.

What we end up with is a chance for aged and wasted Depardieu to strut his stuff, floating bloated in his pool, objecting to the costume designer’s squirrel coloured top coat and cravat,  being coached by Comédie Française trained director Sébastien Pouderoux in eight different line readings on the word “non” and finally doing his on-camera performance with all the authority his years of experience have generated.

The film works out as a composite of Kevin Kostner‘s The Bodyguard and Omar Sy in
Intouchables - odd rather than satisfying.

 

At least it's better than Nicolas Bedos’ Mascarade where, by contrast, Adjani is splendidly preserved when she heads up the great cast - Pierre Niney who gets better every film, a weathered François Cluzet, Marine Vacth from the Ozon Jeune et jolie, Emmanuelle Devos,
Laura Morante, Charles Berling.

Mascerade - Ninney, Adjani.

This one has had the big push - opening night movie, picture on the cover of the booklet, quite sympathetic overseas press. It turns out to be like the bad restaurant - the food is awful but there’s a lot of it - two hours and fourteen minutes in fact. They are telling us it’s part of that cycle of Riviera high life movies complete with a Somerset Maugham opening quote. In fact Mascerade is a messy attempt at some kind of crime and message piece with the somewhat familiar female empowerment plot that leaves us feeling sorry for the blokes. Ninney is one time star Adjani’s fancy man and he meets good time girl Vacth, when she drives an admirer’s veteran car into the swimming pool. They determine to scam Adjani and property mogul Clouzet, with the aid of grudge baring Morante. We pick this up from material dropped into a court room scene. Things get  complicated but none too involving as the grand design is unveiled.

All writer-director Bedos’ attempts to enliven proceedings just make things feel more forced - a scoop of Sunset Boulevard, intercutting two bed scenes, having the characters appear twice in the same frame as they plan their exploits. This is also one of the most consistently nasty films about and it’s that most grotesque form of production - a sex movie without nudity.    

I was feeling quite kindly disposed towards the event until I ran into Mascerade.

 

...and I tipped the documentary and Animated Oscar winners. I should try horses.

Barrie Pattison 2023.

The CIA and Selected Shorts.

Ennio

 Generally our local viewers can only consider the Oscar winning non fiction and short films with curiosity. However this year enterprising distributors are putting them up on the screen for our consideration - as Variety puts it.

I got another chance to see Ennio, The Glance of Music, his former collaborator Giuseppe Tornatore's three hour homage to Ennio Morricone, a great companion piece to Ettore Scola's Che strano chiamarsi Federico / How Strange to Be Named Federico tribute to his late colleague Fellini. Too many of these giants of the Italian film are gone now.

Tornatore's film relies of phenomenal library research, interviews and extracts, rather than dramatisation. Coming from a musical family and training with classical instructor Goffredo Petrassi before his years with RAI, cameras were never far away as Morricone acquired celebrity status. His sound stage recordings were filmed, providing material to cross cut with the finished films, here often with fabulous effect. Their Sacco & Vanzetti montage is a highlight that few films could follow - but they do. The two sources of course play in time like  the interviewees singing or miming the scores. The scene of Tim Roth at the piano in Tornatore's Legend of 1900 cutting back to the actual pianist performing, is particularly arresting

Scored by Morricone. Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto - Volonte & Bolcan

.

When bombarded with so much information, only a few elements can register. We hear about young Ennio listening to a Stravinski recital through a door left ajar, watching John Cage perform and later explaining that a typewriter was part of his own orchestration. Dario Argento says that having Morricone score your film is like winning an Oscar. We get Joan Baez' finale “Here’s to You...” lyrics as a last minute addition, become a chart hit, Morricone's last public trumpet performance being on the church steps for Pontecorvo's wedding.  His honorary Oscar was seen as a farewell tribute only to be followed by the real thing for Hateful Eight. Add the out doors pop concert throng singing along with one of his chanted scorings. Morricone jokes that it will take two hundred years to evaluate Tarantino's comparison with Beethoven. 

The film does run on to the point of being exhausting but the material is all so good, what are you going to cut? 

 

Daniel Roher's Navalny sits on the edge of conviction but is certainly remarkable as a piece of actuality film making, as we watch the subject fall victim to Novichok poisoning, we are told at the hands of Vladimir Putin. You Tube star Russian Opposition figure Alexei Navalny  emerges as an agreeable protagonist. He speaks ironic English with just the right amount of accent, like his fetching blonde wife & U.S. educated daughter. The family is a gift to an indignation stirring film maker.

Struck down while flying ("I was on my way home.Then I died") Navalny is rushed to a Vienna hospital. His Russian doctor watches him taken away and says "Nobody thanked me." The star turn is the introduction of "one very tired Belgian with a lap top", who uses the dark web to break the 'phone records of the Moscow Signal Institute represented as a Domestic Assassination machine and puts Navalny onto the line with a gullible scientist from the photos on the wall, claiming to be one of the team on the job of murdering him. In the back ground, the reporter's delight, as his plot delivers, is visible

  Navalny & wife.

We get Vladimir Putin saying that if he wanted Navalny dead, he'd be in the ground by now but he's nowhere near as media savvy. The film carries us with it, in a purpose-fit climax of Navalny flying back to Russia, where he faces the risk of death and, despite diverting the plane,  being greeted by a mob of supporters calling his name - alerted by social media. His opponents will say it's all a CIA stunt but the film does include Navalny's involvement with Russian extreme Nationalists. I wonder whether I would have finished with their  footage of him feeding carrots to a German donkey, but as a film and argument Navalny is immensely involving.

 

Two programs of Oscar finalist shorts are also getting limited screening. Applause, applause!   I miss the Tournés d'animation.

The animated ones are usually the highlight. This year we got an Australian entry, Lachlan Pendragon's An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Believe Him pitting Griffith Film School against Disney and the Canadian NFB. 

Our toaster telemarketer 3D hero takes in his stride that a fellow office worker doesn’t extend below waste level, but he has to find himself dropped into a tray of spare faces (the boss’ jaw keeps falling off), where a live hand intrudes, and get advice from an Ostrich in the elevator to understand the situation. 

A good dash of The Matrix or Free Guy goes with the spooky content that separates this one from the joke 'toons it resembles. Comic design and smooth technique. OK but this is the big league.

Similarly Amanda Forbis & Wendy Tilby's The Flying Sailor is fine but light weight for the Canadian Film Board studios which once produced L'homme qui plantait des arbres and Ryan.

Deliberately crude animation covers a British sailor, caught up in the 1917 Halifax Harbour Explosion glimpsed in the background. He's blown into the air for over a mile to arrive unharmed but naked - except for his boots. The protracted semi abstract flight echoes 2001.

Ice Merchants

João Gonzalez’ Portugese, drawn Ice Merchants is a near abstract account of a father and son whose living is abseiling down from their high mountain home to sell ice to the people below. The design is unfamiliar and the illusion of dropping unrestrained down the cliff face is striking.

Peter Baynton &  Charlie Mackesy's BBC The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is the pick of the animation and indeed the pick of the year’s Oscar shorts, a top of the line childrens’ film that inhabits a curious territory between realism and fantasy.

Without the need for any explanation the young boy is lost in the snow. Joined by a cake-loving talking Mole, they search for the boy’s home. The menacing fox is redeemed with the film’s best scene, in the flooded river. An imposing, sad white horse, which provides another revelation, rounds out the group.  "Home isn't always a place, is it?"

... and separated from the rest with a caption about unsuitable content we got Sara Gunnarsdóttir's My Year of Dicks  putting on screen Pamela Ribon's somewhat incoherent, episodic, thirty years in production five attempts to lose her virginity on turning fifteen in early-’90s Texas. 

It drops into the styles of Robert Crumb, manga and the psychedelics to illustrate the lead’s adventures, running through Cool Bitch Party and a sex talk from her unjustifiably laid-back dad. The givers and takers turn out to be a dismal lot though an old friend does come through.

The live artist material proved unexpectedly more remarkable. At thirty seven minutes Le pupille / The Pupils barely makes it as a short film and it arrives with the names of heavy hitters on the credits - producers Disney and Alfonso Cuarón, with script and direction from Alice Rohrwacher, sister of  Alba Rohrwacher, the pair having previously collaborated on features Lazzaro Felice / Happy as Lazzaro and Le meraviglie  / The Wonders. 

It's off-putting to note how few of the films of busy Alba have come our way. Her unusual looks and willingness to depart from our expectations of a major star, not to mention a considerable talent, justify more attention. Here again she registers as part of an ensemble of less well known players, in the glamorless role of mother superior at a penniless nineteen forties girls' school, a story spun off a letter Elsa Morante (“My Brilliant Friend”) wrote.

The prayers of the innocent girl pupils are particularly sought by petitioners, including a well off, red lipped  Valeria Bruni Tedeschi putting a whole 70 eggs into a luxury scarlet Torte offering, outraging parsimonious Rowacher, who psyches the girls into giving up their treat - with one exception. Alba contemptuously gives the hold-out a delicious looking slice which ends squashed in her hand, from which, safely out of sight, the girls greedily take crumbs, while short changed workers carry off the cake.

Strong on tacky Catholic imagery, with the kids costumed and posed for the Xmas pageant by habit-wearing sisters in sparse surroundings -  washing mouths with soap and talk about the evil eye. Nice. 

Anders Walter & Pipaluk K. Jørgensen's Ivalu is a handsome but over oblique mix of folklorico and message piece. In Greenland, young Mila Kreutzmann’s sister Ivalu goes missing so her granny takes in the girl’s national costume for Kreutzmann to join a welcome to the queen. Inconclusive blip insets suggest misdeeds of dad Angunnguaq Larsen. Striking visuals like the downwards opening shot of a raven flying over the bleak landscape. 

Good looking film with OK performances and unfamiliar setting.

Cyrus Neshvad's La Valise Rouge / The Red Suitcase is a telling account of sixteen year old Iranian head scarf girl Nawelle Ewad, found looking for her red carry bag at the carousel at Luxembourg airport. When opened by officials, it proves to contain art materials, including portraits of her, hair spread. Though no one speaks the girl's language, the signatures on the paintings match her passport, asserting her claim to the bag. Turns out grey haired man Sarkaw Gorany she is avoiding, waiting with the bunch of roses, is her arranged husband now trying to trace her with his iphone. She turns her pile of Ayatollah-face currency notes into about thirty Euros which the coach driver scoops off for her fare, only to have the angry husband-to-be search his vehicle and retrieve the red bag from the luggage space where she is hiding. 

A disturbing message piece which fits its eighteen minutes nicely, this one is smoothly made.

Tom Berkeley, Ross White's An Irish Goodbye starts with father Paddy Jenkins bringing scrapping brothers Lorcan (James Martin), having Downs Syndrome, and Turlough (Seamus O'Hara) come back for their mother's funeral and intent on selling up the family farm and planting his reluctant sibling with an aunt. Participation is made conditional on completing the dead mother’s hundred-item bucket list which includes sitting for a naked portrait and putting the urn of ashes into space with fireworks rockets.  

This one is an agreeable miserabilist two reeler made appealing by the brother’s affection.

Pick of the batch is Nattrikken / Night Ride directed & scripted by Eirik Tveiten. Waiting at the Trondheim tram terminus on a freezing night, diminutive Sigrid Kandal Husjord is told she can’t shelter in the car while driver Øyvind Uhlving takes his break but activates the door while he’s away. A series of mistakes has her start the tram and picking up from a stop she over runs to the abuse of hoon passengers, who move on Ola Hoemsnes Sandum riding in the front She proves to be in drag. Asked for the driver’s protection, Husjord leaves bully Axel Barø Aasen to drive and comforts the escapee on the roadside bench.

Best moment, the cop car lights passing them in pursuit of the tram. Feature standard production values.

There aren't too many nights like this available at the movies now. I enjoyed this one.

Barrie Pattison - 2023