Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center 2011

Katell Quillévéré: Love Like Poison (2010)

Quiet study of a girl coming of age on summer vacation in the Brittany with her granddad dying, her parents splitting up, a boy pursuing her, and her first communion coming up. First film that won a Jean Vigo Award.

Part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series presented in New York by UniFrance and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, March 3-13, 2011 at three locations, the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, IFC Center in the West Village, and BAMcinétek in Brooklyn.

Coline Serreau: Think Global, Act Rural (2010)

A French documentary about organic farming that explains where the destruction of the land and lowering of food quality come from (war industry), the difference between good and bad dirt, and many other useful facts. It does not explain how acting local can be made to happen on a global scale. A somewhat rudimentary documentary but with good speakers and with new information for most of us.

Click on the title above for the Festival Coverage section review. Another presentation of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema from UniFrance and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, with screenings at the Walter Reade Theater uptown, IFC Center downtown, and BAMcinématek in Brooklyn.

Claude Lelouch: What Love May Bring (2010)

In a farrago of love stories and ersatz WWII scenes set in France and Germany somewhat resembling Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds but without the humor or production values, Lelouch racaps his previous 41 films and again goes over the top. The French title is Ces amours-là. It opened in September 10, 2010 in Paris, not to great reviews. Skip this and watch his previous simpler and entertaining Roman de Gare

Click on the title for a discussion. Another selection of the March 3-14, 2011 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema presented by UniFrance and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Brigitte Sy: Free Hands (2010)

Brigitte Sy is a significant figure in French cinema, the lonttime companion and Eighties inspiration of cult figure director Philippe Garrel, and father of young star Louis Garrel. This is her belated first feature (she is fifty-five). It is openly autobiographical, and concerns a woman who often makes films in prisons, who is HIV positive, and who falls in love with one of the inmates. But the result is flat, and the reason is evident: Sy was too close to the material and her treatment of it is too literal. Which her stand-in protagonist, Barbara Vidal, also shares: her film made in prison merely transcribes ramblings of her inmate team about their lives. There is a complication, and a marriage; which in real life sadly ended very quickly.

Anthony Cordier: Happy Few (2010)

Two couples get together and agree to swop spouses for regular love-making, while otherwise continuing in their lives and marriages. Taking this material seriously instead of making it material for farce or scandal is a brave enterprise, which falls rather flat, despite an accomplished cast (Roschdy Zem, Marina Foïs, Nicolas Duchauvelle, Élodie Bouchez). Cordier's debut film Cold Showers was better plotted than this sophomore effort.

Click on the title for the Festival Coverage section review.

Part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema presened March 3-14, 2011 by Unifrance and the Film Society of Lincoln Center at three venues, the Walter Reade Theater uptown, IFC Center downtown, and BAMcinḿatek in Brooklyn. Check the FSLC website for details.

Two new French social comedies about class with political overtones and with the word "floor" ("étage") in them:

Angelo Cianci: Top Floor, Left Wing (2010)

An angry young Franco-Algerian takes a bailiff hostage in his banlieue apartment and he, his father, and the bailiff find out they have much in common. French title: Dernier étage gauche gauche


Philippe Le Guay: Service Entrance or, The Women on the Sixth Floor (2011)

A hereditary financier discovers earthy Mediterranean values in 1962 when he befriends his family's new Spanish maid and her fellow maids who live on the sixth floor of the old grande bourgoise apartment building in Paris. French title: Les femmes du 6e étage.

Alain Corneau: Love Crime (2010)

Alain Corneau's last film is what French critics described as "an old style film noir" with "clockwork precision," whose chilling inevitability hides several aspects that are wholly new. The problem Corneau set himself was in his own words "After you have committed the perfect crime, of which you will definitely be suspected, how can you prove you are innocent by making yourself look guilty?" And he set up this crime by creating its motivations -- jealousy, humiliation, anger -- in the setting of an elegant, high-level corporate world of the chillingly modern part of Paris called La Défence, and making his main protagonists, killer and victim, top women executives.

Audrey Estrougo: Leïla (2011)

Estrougo, whose first film I Ain't Scared/Regarde moi (Rendez-Vous 2008) was set in the Paris Banlieue and starred unknowns, got in over her head with this over-elaborate Paris West Side Story recycling French pop songs about a rich boy and an Algerian-French girl that shifts its focus to the plight of undocumented workers. You want to love it, but it's just too cluttered and inept.

Note: one more screening is coming in a week, Isabelle Czajka's Living on Love Alone/L'Amour et l'eau fraïche, March 4, 2011. Meanwhile all the other screenings are covered below. For the festival blurbs on the FSLC website and public screening times go here. . IFC Center R-V screenings are listed here.


Links to the reviews:

Big Picture, The (Eric Lartigau 2010)
Deep in the Woods (Benoît Jacquot 2010)
Free Hands (Brigitte Sy 2010)
From one Film to Another (Claude Lelouch 2010)
Hands Up (Romain Goupil 2010)
Happy Few (Anthony Cordier 2010)
Leïla/Toi, moi et les autres (Audrey Estrougo 2011)
Living by Love Alone (Isabelle Czjaka 2010)
Long Falling, The (Martin Provost 2010)
Love Crime (Alain Corneau 2010)
Love Like Poison, A (Katell Quillévéré 2010)
Mozart's Sister (René Féret 2010)
Potiche (François Ozon 2010)
Princess of Monpensier, The (Bertraind Tavernier 2010)
Queen of Hearts, The (Valérie Donzelli 2010)
Service Entrance (Philippe Le Guay 2010)
Sleeping Beauty, The (Catherine Breillat 2010)
Think Global, Act Rural (Coline Serreau 2010)
Top Floor, Left Wing (Angelo Cianci 2010)
What Love May Bring (Claude Lelouch 2010)

Isabelle Czjaka: Living by Love Alone (210)

A young women in Paris with five years of university education can't get a decent job and isn't cut out for lowly ones. She winds up running away to Spain with a disreputable but charming young man she meets in a job interview at a door-to-door encyclopedia sales business. Anaïs Demoustier, who plays the young woman, is a star in the making. The trajectory of Czjaka's film isn't entirely successful, but she handles the French job situation with subtle humor..

As you know, The Princess of Montpensier has been released in theaters by IFC Films. The film did very well in "my theater". I chat up my patrons quite a bit so they're in the habit of sharing their opinions post-screening. Everyone seems to enjoy this movie very much. And yet, the box office take after 7 weeks is only $285,000. The problem seems to be that even IFC has too few theaters nationwide in which to show it. Notice that we are talking about mainstream, cinema de qualite here, not something avant garde or experimental. Another bad sign is that, at least at my theater, the audience was mostly 50 and up. The audience for foreign film has been declining since the late 60s-early 70s. I thought all along that it would level off but the decline continues. And that is alarming.

From this series at Lincoln Center, maybe Long Falling, a compelling Highsmith-esque murder story (currently showing in Frances and starring the increasingly famous Yolande Moreau) would (deservedly) do better; or Alain Corneau's rather dazzling final film, Love Crime, with terrific performances by both Ludivine Sagnier and Kirsten Scott Thomas; and maybe also the original costume piece, Mozart's Sister; obviously the audience-pleasing Potiche, with none other than Deneuve and Depardieu sharing the screen and dancing cheek-to-cheek. Personally though I was very up for The Princess of Montpensier originally, and have seen ti twice, it has only one good performance in it, by Lambert Wilson, who also shone in Of Gods and Men -- he's on a roll.

As for the alarming decline in attendance of foreign films, I'm no expert on trends, but there seem to be several things that are different from the late Sixties and early Seventies. There are a lot more foreign films available to us, in one form or another. And correspondingly, but for other reasons, there are fewer foreign directors that the American audience is keenly aware of and goes out to see -- the way they went out to see Fellini or Kurosawa. In fact directors of any nationality don't get the publicity they once did. On traliers or movie posters their names are tiny and at the bottom of a cloud of type. Maybe therefore the US audience for cinéma de qualité has forgotten who Bertrand Tavernier is if they once knew. The films by him I remember without prompting are Coup de Tourchon and Round Midnight.

From this series at Lincoln Center, maybe Long Falling, a compelling Highsmith-esque murder story (currently showing in France and starring the increasingly famous Yolande Moreau) would (deservedly) do better; or Alain Corneau's rather dazzling final film, Love Crime, with terrific performances by both Ludivine Sagnier and Kirsten Scott Thomas; and maybe also the original costume piece, Mozart's Sister; obviously the audience-pleasing Potiche, with none other than Deneuve and Depardieu sharing the screen and dancing cheek-to-cheek. Personally though I was very up for The Princess of Montpensier originally, and have seen ti twice, it has only one good performance in it, by Lambert Wilson, who also shone in Of Gods and Men -- he's on a roll.

As for the alarming decline in attendance of foreign films, I'm no expert on trends, but there seem to be several things that are different from the late Sixties and early Seventies. There are a lot more foreign films available to us, in one form or another. And correspondingly, but for other reasons, there are fewer foreign directors that the American audience is keenly aware of and goes out to see -- the way they went out to see Fellini or Kurosawa. In fact directors of any nationality don't get the publicity they once did. On traliers or movie posters their names are tiny and at the bottom of a cloud of type. Maybe therefore the US audience for cinéma de qualité has forgotten who Bertrand Tavernier is if they once knew. The films by him I remember without prompting are Coup de Tourchon and Round Midnight.

René Féret: Mozart's Sister (2010)

Opens August 19, 2011 at at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center of Lincoln Center. A Music Box Films (limited) release. It will be opening at various other US locations up to Nov. 4. Release details here.

Re: The Sleeping Beauty. Chris, you mention that the film has yet to be released in France. I just want to point out that this film is made-for-TV. It was released (televised) on Arte France in 2010. I am always fascinated by Breillat's deconstructions, mixed temporal states, and re-imaginings and this film is no exception.