2025 French Film estival

  Boris Lojkine’s Histoire de Souleymane/ Souleymane's Story is the film Donald Trump is warning us about. I can’t see it getting space at the repurposed Kennedy Centre though It has scooped up (mainly European) awards for a story about an unauthorised Guinean immigrant bike courier trying to keep it together without his papers. Well, Trumpy could always go off and watch Anora. I’m sure there’s something for him there.

Histoire de Souleymane/Sangare 

The way Souleymane's Story is made is remarkable. Following real deal illegal Abou Sangare on his run through Paris making fast food deliveries, the camera uses a specially built rig developed to keep up with his cycle weaving through traffic, largely blue tinted by nighttime available lighting.  The city never looked like this in any other film I’ve seen. The constant movement, between restaurant queues and apartments where he makes his drops, generates the desperation of the character’s circumstances.  If he has a problem, he has to double back to the home of the owner of the license he is using fraudulently, to have it verified by selfies on the iPhone which dominates his life. A manager orders him onto the pavement. One elderly customer is up seven flights and can hardly walk.  Delay means missing the last bus to the homeless shelter, where his few possessions are stored under a bunk bed and he gets a basic meal and a shower. Missing that means a night on the streets. A pause is a call to Keita Diallo the hometown girl who wants to marry him but has had another offer from an engineer.  Sangare ridicules the picture she shows and her screen image covers its face.

 Watching we begin to understand the mechanism that keeps his society in place. He scrapes together payments to one of the fellow immigrants, who is coaching him in his citizenship interview, berating Sangare for not retaining details of his fictional journey and imprisonments and not keeping up the payments for his services. At one point the delivery is to a parked van full of (Oh, Oh!) gendarmes who see through his story but send him on his way. None of the people who figure in this threatening environment are actually malicious, even the customer who refuses to pay him because the delivery bag is damaged.  

 Just as the routine is losing its impact, we get to the final interview section, which is extraordinary  - just two people sitting in a room but with all the suspense of defusing a bomb. The ordinariness of  Sangare and interrogator Nina Meurisse drives it and the abrupt ending can’t be faulted.

Well,  French TV News  ran an item on Sangare’s real-life accreditation and being given public housing (after winning a festival Grand Prix). That raises more questions than it settles but it would be a hard heart that didn’t welcome it. 

Souleymane’s Story is not the kind of film I seek out but I rate it the best thing I’ve seen in the event.

Sarah Bernhardt, la divine is a big Euro-culture movie which bombards us with Bel époque images, personalities, citations and music (Claude Debussy leading the hit parade). This is not new or even Infrequent. Think  Michel Ocelot’s winning animated 2017 Dilili  á Paris and Aurine Crémieux’  documentary Sarah Bernhardt - Pionnière du show business traveled this route as recently as last year. Yes it’s “Sigmund Freud would like to talk to you” time again. However, the determination with which this one piles on its references and the luxury of its imagery wears down resistance. 

Writer-director Guillaume Nicloux has come a long way in the twenty years since his Cette femme la & L’affaire privée thrillers.  His new Bernhardt life has the ambition to eclipse its predecessors. We kick off with titles in with flickering clips, mainly from the real Bernhardt 1912 Les amours de la reine Élisabeth and find ourselves watching the archaic surgery to remove her diseased limb. We never see  Kiberlaine performing with her wooden leg but there is a reference to the telegram from Phineas T. Barnum offering to put her leg on display.  Sandrine queries “Which one?”

That’s already into the distancing, which makes this one more digestible than most of these historical-romanticals. They are telling us about the most beautiful and famous woman of her time and casting Kiberlain, who not even her admirers, among whom I count myself, would describe that way, which means Sandrine has to act being gorgeous and magnetic - already interesting.

 Attention centers on Bernhardt’s relationship with actor Lucien Guitry (Laurent Lafitte). KIberlaine’s public confrontation with Mathilde Ollivier, who has taken her place with Lafitte, is on the way to being the high point.  The film unwinds backwards like Harold Pinter’s 193 Betrayal or Jane Campion’s l982 Two Friends so we get a chance to follow Lucien’s son Sascha Guitry back to his childhood, making him a welcome audience stand-in. Knowing the younger Guitry’s own work gives an odd perspective.

 The film overwhelms objections with its barrage of detail. A stage is showered in gold leaf.  Sandrine relaxes in her intensely decorated home, surrounded by her menagerie (relations with the mountain lion she shares a couch with, seem to be a bit nervous), approving a famous Art Deco poster and mixing with just about every celebrity and historical reference they can summon. We get normally glamorous Amira Casar doing austere Sapphic love interest Louise Abbéma, Sylvain Creuzevault’s Edmund Rostand trying to think of a name for his long nose character, Sandrine persuading Arthur Igual’s Emile Zola to intervene in the Dreyfus Case, recalling her youthful witnessing an anarchist guillotined in front of a blood-spattered crowd appalled.

This one is a class act pulling away from the horse hair art films that we normally get.

Frank Dubosc has had a curious thirty-year career path, working on TV, including a run as continuing character on a reincarnation of Coronation Street, playing straight man in increasingly ambitious comedies that nobody felt like importing here and breaking out as writer-director-star with his Tout le monde debout, whose fake wheelchair-bound character made commentators uneasy. Un ours dans le Jura/ How to Make a Killing, his third try as auteur,  has been better received.  

Frank and Laure Calamy are nicely cast as the failing middle-aged tree farmer couple with a special needs son in the Jura village (faded welcome mural on the side of a house) where everyone has known one another since childhood. Frank went to school with Emmanuelle Devos the Madam of the local Culpidon swingers club (“bang bang” “non-gang bang”) and Gendarme Major, the indestructible Benoît Poelvoorde finds himself competing with his ex-wife’s new husband, who used to be his dentist.

 The tone is immediately established when Frank swerves to avoid a black bear on the snow-covered road (well staged)  creating a multiple pile-up and launching a growing body count. He suddenly finds himself loaded down with Drug Cartel cash, having Laure count out the six-figure sum on her pocket calculator. The migrant fugitive mules are to be detained in Poelevorde’s cell,  if they can find the key. Any kind of secret is doomed.

The film nicely balances the affable incompetence of the locals with the murderous crime syndicate and the big city cops who take the case away from Benoît. He however proves to have a handle on the situation, complete with his plan outlined to Laure and Frank out of earshot on the isolated highway  - practical but ruthless. Curé Christophe Canard trying to assert moral authority is rapidly put in his place by his one-time schoolmate Benoît.

 Dubosc is not always sure-handed with the edgy material and his technique is not in the class of the great European filmmakers that preceded him but he makes his characters real in a way that holds its own with the competition - the mature couple in their home closet finery for a last night out, the major’s (old enough to be legal) daughter Kim Higelin making a deposition to him about her make-out in a crime scene car,  nondescript deputy Joséphine de Meaux, who conducts a motherly language lesson for the prisoners but proves to be familiar with the Swingers Bar and not intimidated by the need for lethal force.  Poelvoorde gradually works himself into the intrigue’s center to remind us what a force he can be even when he’s not getting top billing. Our last glimpse of him is the film’s biggest laugh - and then there’s the bear. We were wondering what had happened to that.

I enjoyed this one the most of what I've seen.

Finalement / At the End of the Day is recognisably Claude Lelouch - great looking film with imposing cast, scenics, misleading developments, Nazis, Musical Numbers, May '68, (tame) porn, self citations & issues. Unfortunately, it keeps on going past the one-hour mark where the format runs thin.

Tramp Kad Merad announces himself as a fugitive defrocked priest-rapist to drivers he hitchhikes with, while picking up clues on caring for sheep. They promptly turn him in. However, he manages to complete his wanderings acquiring a bric-a-brac trumpet, which he proves able to play, from shop owner Clémentine Célarié. Sleeping rough in a barn he is given a breakfast by farm owner Françoise Gillard and they end up doing a trumpet-piano duo. Her husband takes a dim view of having a vagrant in the house even though Kad on his way out wrote them a cheque for the new tractor they need. He makes it to Mont Saint Michel, Le Mans and the Avignon festival, with the occasional fit before they put him into the care of Dr. Dominic Pinon and therapist Julie Ferrier. There is a genuinely disturbing scene of Kad blowing away his nice family.

The piece loses impetus when we start to hear about “frontotemporal lobar degeneration” and the glimpses of his fantasies are gradually pushed out by the reality of life and home, worried wife Elsa Zylberstein front and center. This runs to a second plot stream with Gad’s half sister Bonnaire introducing herself  to mum aged Francoise Fabian who is contexualised with poor quality clips of Heureuse Aniversaire  to match the beach number lifted from L’aventure est adventure. Turns out Sandrine is carrying on the work of her mother in protecting (glamorous women) sex workers and they slap a warrant on her for procuring. 

The film lacks the discipline it needs to keep the audience sympathy. Kad meets Jesus and the disciples including Judas, explained as “It’s wrong to hold a grudge.” OK but then he keeps on encountering scruffy God Raphael Mizrahi, which is milking it. The rant by the disgruntled visitor to the Theatre festival or the opening piece of stand-up do suitably disrupt expectation.

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The action is broken up by musical numbers most featuring Eurovision finalist Barbara Pravi, one of those winning young women who inhabit Lelouch movies. In their final song together Merad, who had been carrying the piece effectively, proves to be a pro vocalist.

A companion veteran work is ninety one year old Constantine Costa Gavras’ Le dernier souffle / What Comes After. This one is unlike the thoughtful European and lesser Hollywood films that he rolled out after the massive success of Z - He Lives, not exactly tent pole popular attraction cinema. -The now senior citizen director contemplates not death but dying, with a palliative care specialist, Kad Merad again, here in the company of writer Denis Podalydès. Kind of like an inflated industrial movie but not without interest.

Finding Merad as the lead in this one too is remarkable in itself. His two characters are totally distinct without any help from make-up and speech patterns. Merad is moving into the imposing place once occupied by Harry Baur, who he somewhat resembles, as their great French character-actor-star. Alain Jessua once told me they were going to be without one of those and all I could come up with was Rufus.

Le dernier souflfe, Before What Comes After is something different. While it has all the features of a Boulevard release - name stars, polished mobile camerawork, tight scripting, significance - this one curiously adopts the structure of one if those industrial movies where the outsider is shown the sponsor's activities.

Denis Podalydés is a celebrity author whose Boston Hospital MRI reveals a dark spot on his liver. Understandably disturbed, he flies back to Paris and gets a second opinion from Palliative Care Specialist Merad, again excellent. They discuss collaborating on a book and Kad suggests Denis put on one of the lab coats in the closet and accompany him as he deals with celebrity guest stars playing contrasted patients, kind of like Clifton Webb going about with Dana Andrews visiting suspects in the murder of the woman in the picture?

This one is not a film about death. It's a film about dying, Haughty Charlotte Rampling attempts to manage her own demise. Endearing Francoise Lebrun (La maman & la Putain) chats philosophically with the white coats. In deep denial, Hiam Abbass demands they continue futile treatments for husband Frank Libolt. A daughter contemplates the scuffle with her stepmother, to come when the father dies without a will. The squad of bikies who show up in formation to see a member off, tends to distract from the show-piece finale, where gypsy royalty George Coraface and Angela Molina arrive in a motorcade of their followers for her treatment, which proves to be less productive than having the colony's young girls sing her off with a Joseph Kosma-Jacques Prevert number. Using the once voluptuous Molina is a considered choice. It makes a point that I don't know I want to be reminded about.

Merad works in abundantly resourced hospitals where the staff have time to knock off and applaud patients taking their last ride home. There is a bit of distraction in recognizing the senior citizen movie stars in hospital gowns and movie technicians and the director's family doing bit parts - Andrew Litvak, Romain Gavras. Informational content occasionally breaks through - a quarter of the population is no longer contributing to society, one-third of prescribed drugs are of no value to the patient.

While it's a work of high seriousness and made with big-budget know-how, I'm not sure that I would recommend this one. I wonder if it's not a bit too close to home.

The effectiveness of the early passages manages to win out over the notion that Elyas is a French re-tread of the Denzel Washington  Man on Fire, even if we do get another hard man bodyguard (“pas soldat - guerrier”) looking out for the teenage girl put in his charge.

Elyeas/ Zem & Michel

The Iraq war opening shifts to face scarred, self-medicating veteran Roschdy Zem working out and stripping his sidearm against the clock. The clicking of his paratrooper knife will become significant. He’s recruited by a friend for a bodyguard gig at the palatial French villa of Arab millionaire Sherwan Haji. The magnate’s women are restive at being confined within the grounds, even with the pool that auto-fills when trim French TV star Laëtitia Eïdo in her two-piece steps in. Laëtitia wants to hit the shops and her young daughter Jeanne Michel snatches a chance to ride her bike out when the gates swing open, with Roschdy in pursuit spotting the black helmet duo on their motorbike and striking the shooting from the knee pose though they took his Biretta away. In the angry recrimination that follows, there is no image of the bike on the CCTV. Everyone including our hero begins to wonder about him.

Driving the claustrophobic women folk results in a spectacular traffic incident and, while Roschdy is reclaiming his piece, a large-scale shoot-out erupts. Director Florent-Emilio Siri, who did the Algerian War piece l’ennemi intime and Bruce Willis’ Hostage is absolutely in his element on these, and the film rates top class as thick ear entertainment, with the body count staying just within the bounds of credibility. 

However, at one hour forty-five minutes, Elyas has ambitions. We get everybody’s back story. Gypsies, immigrant smugglers, mercenaries including a camper van load who we suspect are innocent bystanders and an Arab Royal heavy with five wives, thirty children, a private army, and a penthouse in the desert city needlepoint high rise, with its own museum of antiquities.  Some of this is spectacularly effective - parachuting down the urban tower, Roschdy bursting out of the blazing semi-trailer on a forklift. His friend advises the hired muscle “You messed with the wrong man” about the time they claim that they only found seventeen bodies. The ultra-violence must be aimed at convincing us that this is serious stuff but just reminds everyone that we are stepping up the Charles Bronson tradition. The film fared miserably in its home market.

Elyas / Zem

 The intensity undermines Elyas’ satisfactions as action entertainment without managing to convince us about the film’s seriousness of purpose. There’s the nagging suspicion that they are telling us something we are supposed take on board about nasty Arabs. Still, it’s always nice to see Roschdy Zem doing grim. The rest perform as well as they are allowed.

Romain & Maxime Govare‘s ‘scope & colour Heureux gagnants/Lucky Winners turns out to be a would-be outrageous four-part film á sketch providing wide spaced laughs.  

Lively Comédie Française redhead Pauline Clément has just had her millions-winning ticket photo taken when she is hit in the street by dream boat cyclist Victor Meutelet, who rushes her to the Pharmacie. They make a date that night. Our perception switches between her roommate’s downbeat take on him as a gigolo fortune hunter and his self-presentation as NGO founder digging Third World wells, who has turned his back on the rich family home he shows her. Next, overworked dad Fabrice Eboué is in the family car with wife Audrey Lamy and the kids when they discover his winning ticket is about to expire. He has to make an auto stunt dash through Marseilles, racing against his Satnav deadline.  Three jihadists, Sami Outalbali, Mathieu Lourdel and Illyès Salah have just fitted an explosive vest when they discover their win and menacing police, who move on them in the Métro, turn into an escort until their cover is blown.  Anouk Grinberg’s medical team make off with the winnings of their elderly misogynist patient Gilles Fisseau when he expires with the shock. Serial calamities strike leaving them believing the prize is curse. What we are to make of fellow prisoner Michel Masiero’s uplifting monologue is just confusing.

Happy Winners/ Fabrice Eboué

This one is not as clever as it needs to be but the cast is expert and there are scattered laughs generated by some deliberately off-kilter moments -  the family photo removed to reveal one of smiling Arabs, a comic-grisly splatter effect between the automatically shutting doors, dragging away a body leaving a trail of blood just out of view of guests dancing at the out of doors disco pool party, after the one shot of doctor Sam Karmann’s new Slavonic trophy wife dabbing her eyes. 

 

A retrospective look at Jean Pierre Melville's L'armée des ombres, best film of an overrated director, is still to come.

Barrie Pattison 2025

 

 

 

Leda Borelli: Back to Turin

A moment of light in the gloom of the local enthusiast film scene occurred when the Italian Cultural Institute imported and screened two of the films of Lyda Borelli at the Newtown Dendy last week. Borelli was one of the celebrated Divas of the Italian Cinema in the World War One period, when its Turin Studios were a leader in film production. Occasionally we read about these but, outside of Pordenone where they are considered the home team, this material usually remains a footnote in film history. 

Beginning at the age of eighteen, Lyda Borelli became a prominent figure on the Italian stage, triumphing in works like the Oscar Wilde Salomé. As the new film industry emerged, it was natural that she would become involved.  Her first movie, Mario Caserini's 1913 Ma l'amor mio non muore.../But My Love Does Not Die/ Love Eternal was on show and proved exemplary.  A sharp, detailed copy ran at the right speed in the correct format and with clear English sub-titles. Reproducing the original tinting would have helped but we have the moon...  Signora Borelli’s flamboyant hand gesturing, hair tossing theatricality fitted right in.

But My Love... is a fascinating demonstration of the ability of the first European filmmakers to produce work that comes down the years effectively, though it is made in the conventions of early cinema with minimal editing inside the proscenium arch frame and making no use of fades, dissolves or optical devices until a final black vignette isolates our heroine's face. There are some effective sorties into exteriors but the most imposing material is sustained, static runs of the camera in detailed art deco studio-interior settings. A copy of Le peit journal spread on a table flutters to the floor blown in the breeze, suggesting that these have been constructed in the open air to take full advantage of sunlight and get their striking depth of field.

In a WW1 Europe torn by intrigue, a brief intro shows that shifty Giampalo Rosimo in a frock coat can only escape the burden of his excesses-induced debt by stealing the battle plans of the Duchy of Wallenstein from  Col. Vittorio Rossi Pianelli.  We then move into the set piece interior in the decorated Pianelli home living room with alcove, where the camera remains bolted (?) to the floor and the characters move in full-length shot, cropping at the ankle if they get close enough.

At dinner in the home with fellow guest, uniformed mutton chop whiskered Col. Ellio Petacci, Rosimo cultivates piano-playing daughter Borelli. It is only when the officers move to the dim alcove to study the plans that we get an edit, the jump covered by the insertion of a full-screen title. 

  Love Etern - Borelli, admirers, mirror & perforations

Grasping a chance to rifle their unattended document case,  Rosimo wastes no time motoring the documents to his employers. Discovery of the theft brings disgrace, with suicide the only option. Borelli is exiled, driven to the ridiculously under-manned border crossing. The signpost. reads "Suisse & arrow"  However in her new home, her musical talent is recognised by impresario Camillo De Riso, who makes her an opera star, acknowledged with giant flower baskets in her dressing room - another fixed camera decor where having a full length three panel mirror increases movement-in-the-frame, reflecting diner suit admirers crowding through the screen-right door and later (they don’t get this one quite right) doubling up the passionate embrace.

Love Etern - Bonnard & Borelli.

Though feted on all sides, Lyda is attracted to fellow loner Prince Mario Bonnard (his directing career will extend to the Steve Reeves Last Days of Pompeii) who isn’t anywhere near as good at making the theatrical gestures, overdoing his palm to the brow grief. They go sailing together, reclining in the stern of the speeding sailboat (one shot that seems to get into all the compilations) There’s also an impressive paddle wheel steamer landing.

However the evil Rosimo is also smitten with Lyda (a regular event in her movies) and she takes the chance to destroy him, only to expire on stage watched aghast by true love Bonnard, from his theatre box seat.

This all holds attention surprisingly well. Director Caserini has mastered the Turin film craft of his day. He manages to fill his static frames with high-fashion detail and showcase Borelli’s flamboyant performnce. 

 

The second film Malombra was another matter. By 1917, director Carmine Gallone had been able to absorb the advances introduced by Birth of a Nation. As happened throughout Europe, the innovations that would become the basis of film language were taking hold in Italy. Not only is this one tinted but it uses the full vocabulary of the new international cinema - close ups, dissolves, action matched on movement within the shot, fades frame a flashback, a double exposure shows Borelli falling under the evil spell. 

 In this one Lyda is welcomed by her uncle Francesco Cacace to Malmobra Castle and rejects the gloomy chambers allocated to her, wanting the room with a view of the lake. The flunkies are horrified, considering this to be haunted by the spirit of the Count's father's dead wife. However Lyda has her way. There she accidentally opens the secret drawer in the desk and discovers a diary, (another) mirror and a hank of hair, the instruments of the curse placed on the nobleman's descendants after he unjusly suspected his young wife of encouraging the advances of a castle guest, in a green-tinted flashback.

Leda's life ceases to be a matter of being feted by the peasants in aquatic flower festivals. After breaking the mirror, she becomes the agent of the dead woman's vendetta against the count. This is not going to end well. Possession and death ensue. 

Unfortunately, as would be the case throughout his long career, Gallone failed to understand what will make his on-screen action play for an audience. Compositions are awkward and pacing erratic. Also the reconstituted Desmet Process copy had become disturbingly contrasty in trying to reproduce the original colour tints.

So much for an opportunity to demonstrate the development of film language, the encroaching Hollywood model, the dominance of feature length. No such luck. The Italian Culture Jefe wheeled in a USyd Film Studies Senior Lecturer's live introduction, complete with a young woman wearing a replica of Borelli's Liberty Culture wardrobe. The comparison between those and the outfit for her Salmomé has been noted. No comment on how ugly this style was, in the gap between hoop skirts and bobbed hair. 

Not only was there no attempt at film study but we were told that the inset titles, which were part of the film's structure, didn't require translation (not even a handout synopsis). Customers whose Italian was better than mine confessed themselves baffled. We were still making up our own plotlines when the lights came up. To work out what was really happening I had to go home and run the YouTube Copy - murky but literate English language captions.

The Italians had rounded up Mauro Colombis to provide one of his expert piano scores. The effort of mixing this with a voice-over translation, let alone providing English subtitles proved beyond the team. This was not the first time a silent film became an add-on to live music here. 

Even so, I rated this a great chance to increase understanding of the evolution of world cinema. Leda Borelli was a dominating performer. Her body language ranked her with Brigitte Helm or Bette Davis. Decades later she could have had a career to compare with theirs. Isa Miranda or Kay Francis would have been no competition. There were curious anticipations - is Malombra the point of departure for later Italian spooky film makers like Ricardo Freda and Mario Bava? Borelli's death is shown by inverting her face, as with Cocteau's Orphé or Albert Lewin's Living Idol. Are we watching the first of the malignant female movie presences that will surface in the forties as Rebecca, The Uninvited or the Isa Miranda re-make of Malombra? 

 However Leda Borelli married well and abandoned her career early. She set about destroying all memorabilia - posters, programs, costumes. I wonder if this is the reason that I'd not seen her before, where her more proletarian fellow Diva Francesca Bertini has been given occasional showings. 

Well, when you live in Australia where there hasn't been a National Cinematheque for fifty years, I guess you should be grateful for anything that comes along.

Love Etern - Bonnard, Borelli & iris.

Barrie Pattison - 2025