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.