Rendez-Vouz with French Cinema 2017
DJANGO (Django (Étienne Comar 2016)
ÉTIENNE COMAR: DJANGO (2016)
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REDA KATEB (SEATED, FAR RIGHT) AS DJANGO REINHARDT IN DJANGO
Wonderful music, teamwork, blah plot
In 1943 the great gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt left Paris and, after months of waiting in Thonon-les-Bains, fled to Switzerland to escape the German massacres of his people who, along with Jews, homosexuals, and communists, were targeted for extermination by the Nazis. This is the moment French director Étienne Comar chooses to focus on in this atmospheric, beautiful, but unfortunately rather flat film, which comes out 25 Apr. 2017 in France. It debuted at the Berlinale 9 February and opens Lincoln Center and UniFrance's Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 1 March. This film nicely showcases Django's music, including a lost suite for orchestra, organ, and chorus composed while in flight and a Paris theater concert of Django and the Jazz Hot Quintet recreated by the Rosenberg Trio, Warren Ellis. The filmmakers deserve much credit for letting the music breathe in a few extended sessions rather than the usual tiny cli[ps. The movie also is valuable for the information it conveys about the persecution of the Roma people. And it's an unusual lead role for the inconspicuous French-Arab actor Reda Kateb, who's played in excellent films like Zero Dark Thirty and (most notably) Audiard's great A Prophet, but is rarely noticed, especially outside of France.
There is much here to show what exceptional chops Reda Ketem has. He not only looks and acts the part but gives an effortlessly convincing impression of Django's lightening fingers on the guitar and speaks the Roma language. But despite a vivid mise-en-scène (complete with period Roma encampments) and a good cast - including Cécile de France as an ambiguous femme fatale, a Django fan and a bit more (her hair big and wavy as in her "The Young Pope" HBO TV series performance for Paolo Sorrentino), we seem to spend too much of the movie just waiting for something to happen. And when it finally does, it lacks drama because it's masked by an unmemorable decadent-Nazis partying sequence. And then, in this oddly paced scenario, we're immediately zipped forward to 1945, when Django's safely back in Paris, the War over, conducting his suite (or a recreation of it). We're left with the memory of those toe-tapping, head-bobbing Jazz Hot sessions.
Maybe writer-producer Étienne Comar, who scripted for this directing debut, is better at static situations, which is where he excelled in writing the screenplay for Xavier Beauvois' Cannes Grand Prix-winning 2010 film Of Gods and Men/Des hommes et des dieux about a group of monks menaced by terrorists trying to decide what to do. Django also begins with a kind of stagnation. Django is an enormously admired musician in Paris and around the world, when we meet him, who's been joined by Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins; you name it. So the fact he's from a group classified as "degenerate" by the Occupation seems not to matter - till it's gradually clear that the culturally sophisticated Nazis aren't ultimately the ones in control, but the racists and exterminators.
Perhaps the film's highpoint is its recreation of the Quintette du Hot Club de France theatrical performance, with the group cooking non-stop on stage and the audience smoking, jiving, finally standing up and dancing in the theater. Details of the group's makeup aren't much detailed. Instead we see how boorish and domineering the German officers are when they tell Django how he must play at an upcoming tour of Germany, for which he's to be highly paid. Django, whose proclivity for drink and fishing have been roughed in when he's first seen prior to the concert, is contemptuous, and simply says he won't go or ever play for the Krauts. But Louise de Klerk (Cécile de France) and others warn him that he can neither go - he'd never come back - nor simply refuse to go: the moment has come to go into hiding. And so reluctantly he does sneak off to Thonon, with his pregnant wife Naguine (Beata Palya) and colorful mother Négros (Bimbam Merstein), for what will be a boring and drawn-out period of waiting, shifting residences, and performing incognito to pay expenses.
Here, despite initially arousing hope with its musicality and its fluent sense of period, the film founders, and we realize that, outside of the toe-tapping concert sessions, it never did really have a sense of rhythm. There are several more of those, all good, and Django connects with his local Roma comrades. And there's a complicated and cooked-up Hitchcockian-cum-Inglourious Basterds plot that neither gels nor convinces. All the fun little details just ultimately seem like only an excuse to glue together the musical sessions, and we can't help wishing for more of those and less ho-hum plotting. Kateb always quietly shines, as he might better have done in a movie with more charisma. Props to dp Christophe Beaucarne for the film's handsome gloss and to production designer Olivier Radot for its quietly authentic settings. I love it when the old cars in a period movie don't look like they just came out of a museum or collector's garage but have some rickety patina, as here. The purely musical parts of this film deserve to be anthologized and re-watched.
Django, 117 mins., debuted at Berlin 9 Feb. 2017. Screened for this review as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema where it is the Opening Night film 1 March. French theatrical release 25 April 2017.
FRANTZ (François Ozon 2016)
FRANÇOIS OZON: FRANTZ (2016)
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PIERRE NINEY AND PAULA BEER IN FRANTZ
Ozon redoes the postwar romance in fine style
Ozon's new Frantz at times seems terminally tasteful and tame, impeccably set in post WWI trappings and filmed in handsome black and white (with discreet color segments) that makes everything and everyone look pleasingly generic. Primarily it's a nice vehicle for its two young protagonists, the rising French star Pierre Niney (ex-Comédie Française and the official film YSL) and the promising German newcomer (so awarded at Venice) Paula Beer. Niney plays Adrien Rivoire, the mysterious slim young Frenchman who appears in the little German town cemetery where Anna (Beer) pays daily homage at the grave of her late fiance, Frantz Hoffmeister (Anton von Lucke), killed in the war.
As is his wont Ozon teases and puzzles us. And yet still he lays out points with absolute clarity. When Adrien explains who he is, it takes a while for Frantz's father, Doktor Hoffmeister (Ernst Stötzner) to accept him. But then everybody does. Later comes a shocking surprise that amateur script-doctors may have guessed; and concealment goes on, while the impact of the surprise is muted, some are protected from it, and it's then viewed from various angles.
If nothing gathers intense emotional power, Frantz touches on various intriguing themes. First is the pacifist one. A beer-drinking gang of bereaved German fathers are made to consider that they caused the war and sent their sons off to die in it. Frantz's favorite poet was Verlaine and French was his and Anna's secret language and she is fluent in French as Adrien is in German. But nationalism can't be banished with cultural affinities and a few pious generalizations. One is somewhat in the territory of Vercors' Le silence de la mer, the subject of Jean-Pierre Melville's first film, about the German Occupation officer who just loves everything French; but whose delusions become painful, while all along his humble French "hosts" refuse to ever utter a word to him.
In his Venice review for Variety Jay Weissberg points out that in Frantz Ozon is remaking Ernst Lubitsch’s anti-war drama Broken Lullaby, "expanding the melodrama while soft-pedaling the pacifism." More than that Ozon may see the pacifism as a mere teaser, or a red herring. With these two attractive people (Niney and Beer) drawn (impossibly?) to each other, there is much material for melodrama. But Ozon is having most fun with deception, surprise, and mysterious portents, including multiple hints (with reference to a painting in the Louvre by Manet) of the possibility, or temptation, of suicide. Frantz isn't as clever, sensuous, and certainly not as eccentric and provocative as some of Ozon's previous films. But in a world of kitsch excess, it does stand out. It is an elegant and beautifully made movie. In Hollywood Reporter Boyd van Hoeij saw the French/German mirroring effects as signs of "a master storyteller."
Frantz, 113 mins., in German and French, debuted at Venice, where Paula Beer won the Best Young Actress award. Nine other festivals including Busan, Telluride, Toronto, and London. French theatrical release 7 Sept. 2016 (AlloCiné press rating 3.7/33). The anglophone critics' rating is a bit more lukewarm (Metacritic 63). The film is also included in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2 Mar. 2017(with Ozon) and 11 Mar., and its US theatrical release is 15 Mar., Bay Area 24 Mar. Rewatched 15 Feb. 2017 as part of the FSLC-Unifrance Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center.
NOCTURAMA (Bertrand Bonello 2016)
BERTRAND BONELLO: NOCTURAMA (2016)
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HAMZA MEZYANI, MANAL ISSA IN NOCTURAMA
Bonello's ballet of young terrorists
Ideally the title will seem to you dark, cool, and threatening. Those who've been unable to avoid seeing the trailer, as I have several times, will suspect a terrorist act involving a dozen or so young people of mixed social and racial types. But it's still a gripping, tense thriller composed in new ways: staccato, process-oriented, powerfully suspenseful, turning a cold eye on youth, politics, consumerism, holding you in its tight, sweaty grip for over two hours. Dazzling in another genre, Bertrand Bonello goes on showing his originality, boldness, and chops.
Even the unsatisfied ones must grant the boldness and variety of Bonello's filmography, in what I've seen of it. Apollonide was a languorous period film of a nineteenth-century Parisian bordello. Saint Laurent (NYFF 2014) was a biopic, but a cool one, focused on the designer's period of high fame and other highs, and lows, drugs, decadence and depression- with a to-die-for cast including Gaspard Ulliel, Helmut Berger, Dominique Sanda, Léa Seydoux, Louis Garrel, Jérémie Renier, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi - YSL himself would have liked to be in it. Nocturama takes on the different challenge of an action film. Except Adèle Haenel, who speaks a key line, and Vincent Rottiers and Finnegan Oldfield (not really box office luminaries) the cast is carefully selected but largely unknown.
The anonymity and youth of this team underlines its simple efficiency. It works perfectly to do what it's set out to do. As the young people rush around taking Métro trains hither and yon in the disquieting, brilliantly conceived opening sequences, grabbing stuff, and tossing "burner" phones, all focus and all energy go into the operation. What is it? We don't know till it happens. And Bonello plays a bit with time, shifting back and forth among the characters, challenging and confounding us (this is a movie that will benefit from repeated viewings). When it's over, as we know from movies from Rififi to Reservoir Dogs, then things tend to go wrong. But the question is how. Each one must transcend the tradition in his own way. What's new about Nocturama is the strange, subtle, drawn-out disintegration, staged in a large, old, extremely posh Paris department store where the young terrorists mysteriously assemble, and hide, and wait all night.
Bonello has explained how he conceived this movie while working on the "opiate," sleepy Apollonide: something completely different, contemporary, fast, hard, energetic, explosive. (It's explosive, alright.) The opening rushing around of the young men and women he saw as like a ballet, organized, purposeful. Then, the shock, the explosions. Last, the waiting, dissipation of energy, chaos. As he describes it, his film was thus conceived in contrasting movements, abstractly, impressionistically, telling its story "plus dans l’action que dans le discours (more in action than in speech). So, nothing likeRififi's long period of planning. No filling in of character - except for one or two, and what emerges or is hinted at in the last third. Viewers may complain of a lack of character or of technical detail. They can't fuss about the tension. That screws up tight in the first frames and won't let go even in the enveloping flames of the final credits.
Bonello is musical and particularly here tecnno and other types of very loud contemporary music are screwed up to a pitch to produce a sense of (I have to keep using this word) tension, dissolution, Dionysian release: in the deluxe playpen that is this department store where the wind up the kids find the sound system department and crank up the Bang & Olafson. It throbs and screams and shakes us. When after the Paris attacks of 13 November "Paris est une fête" (Hemingway's celebratory Moveable Feast) having become too much a morale-building rallying cry, no longer was a good title, Bonello browsed through his albums and found "Nocturama" by Nick Cave, a word that turns out to apply generally to the part of the zoo for nocturnal animals which fits the film and its conclusion too. Terrorism became specially sensitive for French people in 2015, but Bonello avoided problems by staying focused on the subject as he conceived it six years ago.
Mike D'Angelo rated this highest (74) of the films he first saw at Toronto (Toni Erdmann was an 82, but already seen at Cannes). His tweet was hedging on the score, "Depends where I ultimately land on the ending, the ugliness of which I'm not sure is justified. But this is stunning." So: yes, the ending, where the Gendarmerie Nationale's shock team GIGN moves in and guns them down, is brutal and numbing. But it provides the decisive sense of an ending that suits the construction of this remarkable film. This is a conceptual revolutionary movie on steroids. Especially at the end it didn't really remind me of the November 2015 Paris attacks but the claustrophobia of Marco Bellocchio's 2003 Buongiorno, notte (2003) about the Red Brigade kidnapping of Aldo Moro - which does not end well. After D'Angelo's recommendation, I was surprised Nocturama wasn't in the New York Film Festival (so was he). Now that it belongs in the US to Netflix, people are afraid it won't see the big screen, or not much. That would be wrong. It's a magnificent looking and sounding film - even if in its effective creation of discomfort and nerves it goes on a bit too long at two hours and ten minutes.
Nocturama, 130 mins., premiered in Paris 8 July 2016, in French theaters 31 August. Over 15 international festivals starting with Toronto. AlloCiné press rating is 3.4; Metacritic rating 73. (On D'Angelo's scale, his 74 is much higher.) Some French critics were displeased by the lack of context or politics or realism, want these young people to be vicious ideologues instead of confused and naive, as they are. Les Inrockuptibles gets it right: the film shows their utter foolishness but is tenderly sympathetic toward their anger and frustration with the materialistic world they've inherited. Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-UniFrance 1-12 March 2017 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.
RÉPARER LES VIVANTS/HEAL THE LIVING (Katell Quillévéré 2016)
KATELL QUILLÉVÉRRÉ: RÉPARER LES VIVANTS/HEAL THE LIVING (2016)
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GABIN VERDET AND TAHAR RAHIM IN RÉPARER LES VIVANTS
It all comes together
Katell Quillévéré's third feature adapts Maylis de Kerangal’s bestselling French novel (Heal the Living), a humanistic medical thriller about events leading up to a heart transplant. It begins with Simon (Gabin Verdet), the bleach-blond surfer boy whose car accident makes him brain dead and his perfect organs available for replacing others' failing ones, if his devastated parents, Marianne and Vincent (Emmanuelle Seigner and Kool Shen) are willing. Meanwhile there are closeups of the medical professionals involved, young cardiologist Thomas Rémige (Tahar Rahim) and his master Docteur Pierre Révol (Bouli Lanners) and nurse Jeanne (Monia Chokri). Then we observe Claire (Anne Dorval of Xavier Dolan's Mommy), the lady who is to receive Simon's heart, a lesbian classical pianist and motehr of two college-age sons (Finnegan Oldfield, Théo Cholbi) whose heart's days are numbered.
Like Tell No One, a French version of an American crime story way better than Hollywood could do it, this is a ridiculously vivid, clear, humanistic and tasteful version of what seems the most conventional US TV medical drama material, and you cannot but admire it, while in the back of your mind still wondering, why did she bother? Quillévéré's leap forward as a director of complex, demanding movie dramas - with more budget and more name cast members - is also a step back out of the raw indie territory she inhabited in her first two movies into a safer, more mainstream, even if demanding, work.
But it's still an ambitious, complex film, and not only does she never slip into the saccharine territory that the material threatens to draw her into, but she provides some lovely touches, while the whole fits together impeccably.. The opening passage when Simon leaves his girlfriend Juliette (Galatea Bellugi) in the wee hours, leaping out the window, races a pal, suits up and surfs - water sequence magnificently shot to show both perfect marriage with the waves and threat of death. Then the fatal drive, turned into a sea death as sleepiness of all three youths makes the road and horizon fade into soft waves, the crash just a bang, no messiness. This whole Simon passage, a model of its kind, is of a sublime simplicity and physicality, delivering nothing but a sense of youth, health, and impermanence. The only further development of Simon is equally physical: to seduce Juliette at first meeting, he successfully races her rail car with his bike, leaps over his bike in a move I've never seen, climbs up breathless to the platform, and they kiss.
Later, the film gets equally intimate in a lower key in following Claire as she interacts with her concerned sons Maxime (Oldfield) and Sam (Cholbi) and attends a piano concert by her beautiful protégée and former lover Anne Guérande (actress and pianist Alice Taglioni). She also meets with her cardiologist, who will perform the translpant; Drs. Rémige and Rémol will remove Simon's heart. Claire's scenes require a refocusing effort from the audince after the intensity of the earlier passages, all of them at a high pitch further heightened by Alexandre Desplat's piano-based score. The presence of the well-known French movie composer is a sign of the glossier production, but Thomas Marchand, the editor, whose presence is more essential, was present on the director's first two films. Claire's sequences apparently add to a barely outlined character in the novel, and they're still relatively flat after the vivacity and invention of Simon's sequences and the high pitched emotions of his parents' grieving. A turning point in the film, and a key to its humanism, comes when Marianne and Vincent, still in great grief, come to accept the goodness of allowing their son to be an organ donor.
The still boyish Rahim, who gently elicits this decision, is a good choice for exuding human kindness, and the film's best moment and best evocation of the magic of the medical miracle this story is about comes when he carries out a ritual farewell to Simon in the operating room following the boy's parent's directives, and it's at this moment that this tasteful and economical film indulges in its one repeat sequence, Juliette's tearful face in the light of dawn and Simon's leap out her window: rhythmical repetition, a joining of the circle, death and life.
Still, for all this beauty, though may not miss the oddness of the director's debut Love Like Poison, one does miss a bit the wildness and emotional extremity of her sophomore effort, Suzanne, which also put Adèle Hanel on the map. What Réparer les vivants, heavily publicized in France and widely distributed there, does do, is show that Quillévéré is a directorial talent both recognized and worth continuing to follow.
Réparer les vivants/Heal the Living, 105 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2016, also showing at Toronto and London. French theatrical release bega 1 Nov. 2016. Origially screened for this review at UGC Danton, Paris, 1 Nov. 2016. Also screened as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-UniFrance series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (1-12 Mar. 2017).
MAL DE PIERRES/FROM THE LAND OF THE MOON (Nicole Garcia 2016)
NICOLE GARCIA: MAL DE PIERRES/FROM THE LAND OF THE MOON (2016)
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MARION COTILLARD IN MAL DE PIERRES
Magic Mountains
"Gabrielle (Marion Cotillard) comes from a small village in the South of France, at a time when her dream of true love is considered scandalous, and even a sign of insanity. Her parents marry her to José (Alex Brendemühl), an honest and loving Spanish farm worker who they think will make a respectable woman of her. Despite José's devotion to her, Gabrielle vows that she will never love José and lives like a prisoner bound by the constraints of conventional post-World War II society until the day she is sent away to a cure in the Alps to heal her kidney stones. There she meets André Sauvage (Louis Garrel), a dashing injured veteran of the Indochinese War, who rekindles the passion buried inside her. She promises they will run away together, and André seems to share her desire. Will anyone dare rob her of her right to follow her dreams?"
That's an IMDb plot summary for this new film by Nicole Garcia, which opened in France today, 12 Oct. 2016. It's nice to see Marion Cotillard looking beautiful and being full-on passionate again after her unflattering role in Xavier Dolan's tiresome It's Only the End of the World. It's also enjoyable the way Nicole Garcia likes to take us for a wild ride, as she did in her pleasingly mysterious - and more contained and interesting - 2013 Un beau dimanche/Going Away. And this is terribly romantic. Having Marion Cotillard and Louis Garrel fall in love in a Swiss sanatorium provides an exotic new dose of French movie glamor.
Adapted by the bestselling Strega-prize wining novella by the Sardinian writer Milena Agus, this is like Nicolas Sparks in French, on acid. It transfers events from Italy to France, and considerably simplifies the plot. Set in the post-war period, it focuses on an eccentric, strong-willed and sensuous woman who's put in an arranged marriage with a Spanish man when she's over thirty. Both swear they will never love each other. The husband is allowed to see prostitutes but his wife Gabrielle starts taking the prostitute's role to save them money. They try to have a child but her painful kidney stones cause repeated miscarriages. Her husband sends her to the cure in the mountains so she can have a baby, and she does. You think you know exactly where things are going, because there is a frame tale, and a very long flashback, so we know what's up with Gabrielle in the present, so when we see her finally meet Louis Garrel's dreamily ill French army officer back from Vietnam at the mountain water cure resort, and he plays Tchaikovsky's "Barcarole" so beautifully on the piano, we think we know what's going to happen.
The plot pitches us a couple of curves that feel unconvincing. The movie explanation is less convincing than the novella's, and and also winds up confusing the ongoing issue of whether Gabrielle is crazy or not. Once we get to the mountains, there are some very nice scenes and the watered-down "Magic Mountain" sequences are engaging. Cotillard and Garrel and even the underappreciated Brendemühl get to do some nice work - that doesn't, however, quite work.
A lot of the early stuff is unnecessary. It should not take so long to show Gabrielle is unhappily married, and is looking for a great love. In all the establishing scenes one feels one is being force-fed; in the mountain "cure" ones, that one is being offered a cartload of sweet pastries. Screen International calls this "an old-fashioned romantic weepie," but it pitches too many curves to provide that kind of simple satisfaction.
at Cannes May 2016, four other festivals; French theatrical release 19 Oct. 2016. Again a film well received by French critics (AlloCine press rating 3.6) that English critics have little use for (Metacritic score 42%). Screened for this review at UGC Odéon Paris on 19 Oct. 2016. Also screened as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (FSLLC/UNIFRANCE 1-12 MAR. 2017).
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LOUIS GARREL AND MARION COTILLARD IN MAL DE PIERRES
DANSEUSE, LA/THE DANCER (Stéphanie Di Giusto 2016)
STÉPHANIE DI GIUSTO: LA DANSEUSE/THE DANCER (2016)
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SOKO IN THE DANCER
Biopic of a turn-of-the-century dance innovator is showy, but fails to engage
Stéphanie Di Giusto's directorial debut is a lush but routine biopic. Its subject is a turn-of-the-century American dancer and theatrical staging pioneer known as Loïe Fuller, who took her talents to Paris. She wowed theatergoers with her dramatically swirled drapery and advanced use of mirrors and colored light. After a struggle for acceptance of her unusual routine, her talents were showcased at the Folies Bergère and briefly the Paris Opera. She helped other performers including the now more famous Isadora Duncan.
La danseuse begins with a long, unnecessary introduction depicting the protagonist's early life in America. This passage shows her past to have been exotic in French terms, with its trappings of a Western, her drunken father and bossy mother and her habit of carrying around a pistol. But none of this seems relevant later except to learn she was a child actress before conceiving more elaborate and unconventional performances and stagings.
As Fuller, we get the 100% commitment of Soko, who played the hypnosis subject of Alice Wincour's moody, stylized Augustine, with Vincent Lindon. Names in the cast include Gaspard Ulliel as the decadent Conte d'Orsay (an invented character, with him playing a less interesting version of his Saint Laurent lead),Mélanie Thierry as the dancer's beautiful manager, collaborator and lover Gabrielle Bloch; François Damiens as director of the Folies Bergère, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing as the Paris Opera boss, Christopher Plummer's daughter Amanda as Fuller's temperance crusader mother, and Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paridis's daughter Lily-Rose Depp as Isadora Duncan. The Conte d'Orsay is Fuller's involuntary Maecenas and would-be lover, who's hooked on ether, a period drug in this very period movie. Fuller flourished in the Nineties and early twentieth century. Perhaps the greatest success of this ho-hum effort is the way it evokes the tastes of its times - for such things as this cloth-swirling show, and for young women in diaphanous, vaguely classical drapery running around in the woods.
Di Giusto's film, written in collaboration with Jacques Audiard's writer Thomas Bidegain, takes various liberties, jazzing up lesbian relationships, adding a fictitious character in the Count, and dwelling so much on Loïe's muscle pains and eye trouble she comes to seem as much a patient as a performer. Swirling the gauzy materials around is shown to be a huge physical effort, sometimes leading to exhaustion. It hurts! What's wrong with her eyes - severely damaged apparently by the bright lights? We never really learn, but she spends the last third of the labored film putting in eye drops and wearing round sunglasses. Isabella Duncan, with Lily-Rose Depp lacking the authority to play such a future diva, is presented ambiguously. At some moments it seems we're supposed to hate her for seeming about to steal Loïe Fuller's fire. At others they seem not only friendly collaborators but erstwhile lesbian lovers. Loïe's off-and-on affair with the Conte d'Orsay has been strenuously criticized in queer circles for falsifying by diluting her pioneering open homosexuality.
Loïe's personality is otherwise unclear, seen as a mix of fiercely ambitious, physically determined, and insecure. She keeps saying she is not a dancer. And indeed her "flame" performance, in once scene impressively recreated here, is more playing with cloth and lightening than dancing in the classical sense. With all the effort, suffering, mood swings, and physical problems, Loïe Fuller still doesn't quite emerge as a real person. Even the final sequence, a fraught long-awaited debut at the Paris Opera, is ambiguous. It seems Loïe is barely able to go on, and as staged her performance, all in white instead of with the colors, seems lackluster, a disaster ending in collapse. Then she goes out to receive a standing ovation. Maybe that's how it actually was. But despite the impressive mise-en-scène, cast dotted with notables, and collaboration in the writing from Thomas Bideguin, Di Giusto has not produced a coherent or solidly enjoyable film.
The Dancer/La danseuse, 109 mins., debuted at Cannes may 2016; over a dozen other festivals, including the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema of FSLC and UniFrance (1-12 Mar. 2017), as part of which it was screened for this review. The French theatrical release 28 Sept. 2016 led to mixed reviews (AlloCiné press rating a fair 3.4). Most critics admired the dedicated performance of Soko; some noted the biopic conventionality.
IN BED WITH VICTORIA/VICTORIA (Justine Triet 2016)
JUSTINE TRIET: VICTORIA/IN BED WITH VICTORIA (2016)
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VIRGINIE EFIRA AND VINCENT LACOSTE IN VICTORIA
A hectic blonde lawyer
Victoria, with the delicious and amusing Virginie Efira in the lead role and featuring Vincent Lacoste and Melvil Poupaud, is a distinctive modern French version of a Hollywood screwball comedy, and the second film of Justine Triet, whose debut was the tour-de-force The Age of Panic/La bataille de Solferino (Rendez-Vous 2014). Its lead character is Victoria Spick, a divorcee with two young daughters whose career as a trial lawyer is highly accomplished but whose personal life is a trainwreck. And this has been compared to the recent Judd Apatow/Amy Schumer vehicle of that name. While Efira's talents may not match Schumer's, she's got them; and she and the other leads contribute to the fun by freely improvising. The jazzed-up English "in bed" title misleads a bit. Victoria keeps arranging online hookups for herself at her apartment, but she never manages to be in the mood.
The movie is perhaps most hilarious at the outset, during a chaotic, also American style, wedding party, but the trial that's the action's main focus has its moments too, even when a Dalmatian and a chimp are introduced in the elegant red courtroom as witnesses. Vincent Lacoste (if memories of him in Julie Delpy's crude Lolo don't kill him for you) plays a charmingly silly yet sincere and helpful young man ripe to become this lighthearted film's love interest. Victoria got Sam Mallet (Lacoste) off a drug dealing charge; they meet up again at the wedding. Out of work (without the drugs) and in effect homeless, he wants to be her law trainee and, to solve his residential problem, act as her au pair babysitter. Later he wants to be her lover, and this affectionate and more sincere hookup may solve her midlife sex crisis.
Vincent (the ever-watchable Melvil Poupaud), a dear friend of Victoria's, does a song and dance number at the wedding, a wonderful quick mix of modesty, ease and charm. Good and drunk, he tries to have sex at the party with his nutty ex, with her pet Dalmatian watching disapprovingly. (We don't see this.) She then accuses him of stabbing her in the stomach. (He says she stabbed herself: we don't see this.) He is arrested, and he insists Victoria defend him (we see this). She protests that mixing the personal with her criminal defenses is a big mistake, but gives in. Scenes at her sublimely chaotic apartment (thanks to production designer Olivier Meidinger) show the amiable disorder of her home life. (The two girls are charmingly and sparingly used.) When her ex, David (Laurent Poitrenaux), turns up uninvited, he reveals that he's writing a blog now that's a big hit due to its thinly disguised details of her professional and personal peccadilloes, including sex with judges (back in the day when she was up for sex, evidently). This leads to another court case, since his revelations threaten her career. A narcissistic nincompoop, he conducts his own defense.
Vicky's periodic arranged assignations at home only lead to confusion or nerves. Once an abandoned session gives her a serious anxiety attack and Sam, experienced at helping clients through bad trips, coaches her back to calm. He administers a Xanax, and she dozes. Her sleeping beauty is what enamors Sam and makes him want to kiss her. Meanwhile she sees not only a (white male) "psy," a shrink, but a large black female psychic who card-reads her fortune, usually disapprovingly. This mélange, when shown in rapid succession, produces a quietly giddy state of amusement in the sympathetic viewer - who, however, may be surprised when Vicky is summoned before the bar council for talking to a witness in a case. It was a woman who came to her home and harassed her: she should have refused to speak. Despite a beautiful lawyer's pleading in her defense, she gets suspended, like Will Gardner (Josh Charles) in "The Good Wife," but for a lesser offense and only for six months.
This leads her to let Sam go, but the girls will miss him and he will be in the wings ready to return when her suspension ends - and Vincent begs her to take his case again now that an old girlfriend (Claire Burger) has appeared, inspired by word of his impending trial, to accuse him of harassment. She will take the case on, with little time to prepare, and Sam will be back to become her lover and law assistant as well as man slave. The trial will climax with its Dalmatian-chimp appearances and a favorable outcome for Vincent and Vicky. But despite all the action this movie, which is glossier but obviously less original than La bataille de Solferino, isn't so much notable for its plot drive as for its comic vignettes, like Victoria's failed at-home sex hookups, Poupaud's song and dance performance, the meetings with Sam, the shrink and card-reader sessions. Triet manages to be both over-the-top and tastefully French - and sexy, especially in one heavy makeout scene between Lacoste and Efira (who throughout play very well together). It is this mixture that, especially if you're a fan of French film comedy, that will endear Victoria to you.
Victoria/In Bed with Victoria, 90 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2016 and opened in French cinemas 14 Sept. to great reviews (AlloCiné press 4.0) including a rare rave from Les Inrockuptibles and a favorable opinion from Cahiers du Cinéma. French critics more than once mentioned Woody Allen, and so does the American Jordan Mintzer of Hollywood Reporter, who locates Triet's comedy "somewhere between more femme-centric Woody Allen films like Alice or Another Woman and the work of French farce maven Louis de Funes." Shown at a dozen or so other festivals including Chicago and Vienna. Screened for this review as part of the 1-12 Mar. 2017 UniFrance-Film Society of Lincoln Center series The Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.
Saturday, March 4, 9:30pm (Q&A with Justine Triet)
Sunday, March 12, 3:30pm
MA LOUTE/SLACK BAY (Bruno Dumont 2016)
BRUNO DUMONT: MA LOUTE/SLACK BAY (2016)
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BRANDON LAVIEVILLE, RAPH, DIDIER DESPRES, CYRIL RIGAUX
A post-Victorian slapstick murder mystery by the sea takes Bruno Dumont in a new even stranger direction
In Ma Loute/Slack Bay, one of the weirdest and most arresting movies you may ever see, the Bruforts are a family of rude sailors who carry softer folks across a shallow bay in their arms. They also practice cannibalism, and that explains the disappearance of a young couple from Lille. This event is being vaguely investigated by inspectors Machin and Malfoy (Didier Després, Chril Rigaud), a Laurel and Hardy-like pair. The Bruforts' eldest son, an angular rube called Ma Loute (Brandon Lavieville), connects with the daughter - or is it the son? - Billie (Raph) of the haughty Van Peteghem family, who have come to their Egyptian-style manse on the hill for the summer. This might be a love that would cross the class divide, and the sexual one too, since "ma loute" is a feminine term of endearment - but instead it goes bad. The action is set in the early days of automobiles, in 1910, by the sea, near Dumont's usual rather desolate home region of Bailleul, Nord, but we're far from the harsh, intense neorealism of his early films if not from their religious overtones.
An extension in a way of his 2014 mini-series P'tit Quinquin/L'il Quinquin, which also has a pair of bumpkin cops investigating a chain of murders, this is stranger and harder to relate to. It's a costume drama, with elaborate, melodramatic, absurd acting mannerisms. It also has two more name actors. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Fabrice Lucchini join Juliette Binoche, who was there last time. All behave and look peculiar. In the case of Binoche, as Aude Van Peteghem, this is allowed to go much too far: she croons and moans - it's just bad overacting. Lucchini, as André Van Peteghem, comes off better. He is almost unrecognizable, his face looking flat and a little bloated; almost a hunchback, he lurches back and forth, his arms flailing oddly. Brother Christian (Jean-Luc Vincent, Paul Claudel in Dumont's 2013 Camille Claudel) is similar. Everyone tends to fall down a lot. So does the big, bloated Inspector Machin, who rolls down sand dunes and topples into things constantly. Does all this ineptness, these pratfalls, make this a comedy? But what about the cannibalism?
Dumont is always unclassifiable. Hence it should not surprise us that he was meaning here to evoke the haute-bourgeoisie charm of the photographs of Jacques Henri Lartigue (at least in his detailed article on the making of the film in Le Monde, Jacques Mandelbaum says so). Or that there is an interrupted outdoor ceremony in celebration of the Virgin Mary that leads Aude to float up into the air, which happens to Machin in the final sequence, when he inflates even more, and breaks away from a rope. Magic realism, surrealism, horror, harsh social satire, slapstick, black Charles Addams comedy form a mixture that is both numbing and hypnotic.
This personal world is rich and fascinating in its way. And it's beautiful: look at the delicate color, and the lovely decor of the Van Peteghem dining room. Watch the romantic, painterly scene of small boats on a stormy sea and listen to the soaring music of Bach at the end. And yet the action lacks the charm of L'il Quinquin or the power of Dumont's strong earlier films. Here, he has lined up two class enemies, a "decadent bourgeoisie and carnivorous proletariat," as Philippe Lagouche of La Voix du Nord put it, in a "ferocious farce" that "Buñuel would have loved."
With the exception of the misfired US-set Twentynine Palms, Dumont made one stunner after another: Life of Jesus, Hunanité, Hadewijch (NYFF 2009) and Hors Satan command one's utmost attention, almost reverence, even if one is at times also repulsed. Well, Slack Bay/Ma Loute too provides a bracing, unique experience. But Dumont seems to have entered a mannerist phase.
Ma Loute/Slack Bay,122 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition May 2016 and opened in French cinemas simultaneously, to rave reviews (AlloCiné press raging 4.1)
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BINOCHE, LUCCHINI, BRUNO TEDESCHI
Ma loute/Slack Bay, 122 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition May 2016 and opened in French cinemas simultaneously, to rave reviews (AlloCiné press raging 4.1). Screened for this review in Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (UniFrance, Film Society of Lincoln Center) Feb. 2017. US theatrical release begins 21 Apr. 2017. A Kino Lorber release.
L'ODYSSÉE/THE ODYSSEY (Jérôme Salle 2016)
JÉRÔME SALLE: L'ODYSSÉE/THE ODYSSEY (2016)
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LAMBERT WILSON AND PIERRE NINEY IN L'ODYSSÉE
Shallow waters
This biopic follows the career of the famous French undersea explorer and maker of TV documentaries Jacques-Yves Cousteau. He was a pioneer who made the world of water his domain. Commander Cousteau (Lambert Wilson), depicted here with his two sons Jean-Michel (Benjamin Lavernhe) and Philippe (Pierre Niney) and his wife Simone (Audrey Tautou), was a naval officer, member of the Académie Française, scientist, innovator (most notably of the aqualung), explorer, conservationist and indefatigable public figure as well known in America and beyond as in his native France. Salle has made a grand and glorious film full of energy and hope and enlivened by big, bright, open images of sun and sea, with some breathtaking underwater photography. The cinematography by Matias Boucard is luminous, the music by Alexandre Desplat sweeping.
And yet this movie based on books by Jean-Michel and Albert Falco takes on a routine air early on and winds up being at times on the flat and disappointing side, too timid in its exploration of rough truths, too hagiographic all the rest of the time. Salle's handsome, beautifully filmed movie has a few impressive diving sequences, but not many and only a couple that are awesome. But maybe that wasn't the point. Public issues and personal problems are not ignored. The trouble is that throughout, the film seems showy and artificial. It winds up feeling like a missed opportunity: too often the ceremonial overtakes the dramatic, and overall a bit on the bland side. Salle's Odyssey is a spectacle that will delight fans of ocean photography and of Cousteau. It's just not one of the year's compelling dramatic films.
The film doesn't hesitate to depict some of Cousteau's sad, dark times and conflicts with Simone and Philippe. Tautou and Niney shine, and this is further proof that Niney has the makings of a big star, who's perhaps at his most dashing and sexy on screen yet as Philippe. Philippe's conflict with his father began when the brothers were sent off to boarding school, which he considered "abandonment." It's clear the Commander has some large blind spots and a giant ego, and loves fame as much as he loves nature. Niney provides glamor and excitement as well as eye candy (the glowing skin, the sculptured torso, the glossy locks, the steamy glances), but the clash of father and son is powerful dramatic material that the film unfortunately only touches on.
There are important historical themes here. First of all Cousteau begins diving at a time when it was all new. He and his collaborators (a crew lovingly satirized in Wes Anderson's endearing The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou <), with the big boat The Calypso, had to develop the aqualung, to breathe underwater, and the pressure-resistant cameras they used to photography the marvels they found. And then Cousteau had to develop a career - the big American contract to make films to be shown on TV. Over the decades, we see how this innovator started to become outmoded.
The height of Cousteau's fame comes through the Palme d'Or-awarded film (based on his first book), The Silent World, co-directed with Louis Malle; and then, starting in the Sixties, for decades the "Voyages of the Calypso" TV series was standard fare in the US and elsewhere.
The film gradually reveals the extreme naivety of the Calypso crew, who ignored how they were destroying the world they were observing. Cousteau is aware of ecological issues early on, but does work for petroleum interests because he needs financing - and that's an issue from the start, when Simone sells all her jewels to buy the Calypso. Later, the Commander forgets about ecology and cheats on his wife. This behavior causes a serious rift with Philippe, who disappears for four years - and Niney is missed. But they make up.
Fabien Lemercier comments on Cineuropa.org</a> that [i]L'Odyssée "doesn’t dig too deeply, so as to preserve the audiences’ empathy for its characters." That's precisely the trouble with this beautiful, ambitious, not unrealistic but still thoroughly timid movie. Commander Cousteau dives under the waters, director Salle stays on the surface.
L'Odyssée/The Odyssey, 122 mins., debuted 23 Aug. 2016 at the Festival du Film Francophone d'Angoulême, also showing at four other festivals, and released in French Cinemas 12 Oct. by Wild Bunch. French critical response was positive but not exceptional (AlloCiné press rating 3.4). Les Inrocks, Le Figaro, Libération, Le Nouvel Observateur, and Le Monde] all published reviews expressing serious disappointment. See the lively take-down in Le Nouvel Observateur and the explication of the more complex issues in LIbération. This film was originally screened in Paris in Oct. 2016, and again for the March 2017 FSLC/UniFrance Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, in New York.
L'OPÉRA/THE PARIS OPERA (Jean-Stéphane Bron 2017)
JEAN-STÉPHANE BRON: L'OPÉRA/THE PARIS OPERA (2017)
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A distracted look at the Paris Opera
This Swiss/French documentary film, as the festival blurb says, "nimbly juggles a dizzying number of storylines," including strange staging of Schoenberg's Moses and Aron; bad press for the opera ballet director (who later resigned); a national strike that makes performances tricky;, the freshly hired young Russian bass-baritone Mikhail Timoshenko
- featured, understandably, in the trailer - he's photogenic and charming and could have been the subject of a documentary himself; a group of mostly black school kids who get several weeks of rehearsals of stringed instruments and a pubic performance attended by parents and a proud sponsor; an effort to replace a lead singer at the last minute; troubles with the blocking of a chorus; that chorus' director in action; some moments of ballet rehearsal; and on and on.
"Nibly" juggled, perhaps these various strains are. But there are too many of them. The director should have decided what he wanted to focus on. He seems too easily distracted, as for example, understandably, the director of the Opéra must give a speech after the November 2015 terrorist attacks. Since this film is meant to cover a single season and a half of the Paris Opera, and it included that time, reference to it needed to be there. But the details of using a giant bull in the staging of Moses and Aron is unnecessary. You have to ask yourself: was bringing this bull on the stage representative of the life of the Paris Opera? It just seems a novelty - and in the end how the bull appears in the finished production isn't even made clear. In fact, there is far too little footage of actual performances - the most essential, what this place is about, is badly underplayed. And some followups - the directorial resignation; how Mikhail Timoshenko's career has gone; he's been in many operas and recitals in he past couple years, the Opera's website shows, but he's left dangling by the distractible Blon.
Bron may feel he is doing something in the manner of Fred Wiseman, but he is not. He does not have Wiseman's dedication, thoroughness, and clarity. LOpeera doesn't hold up in comparison, in fact, with Wiseman's typically exhausting but highly rewarding 2009 documentary, La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet. That film too, in rather more detail, includes a labor dispute. It also has lengthy, and illuminating, segments of dance practice. It concludes at the end of its nearly two and a half hours a satisfying view of the finished public performance of the ballet we've been seeing worked on. Wiseman proceeds methodically. He dots his i's and crosses his t's. He moves around, but everything he looks at, he looks at long.
In view of the fact that he doesn't do that, but prefers to flit about, Blon might have provided more guidelines to viewers, such as text lines identifying certain figures in the film when they first appear, and when they reappear after a long interruption. And he might have provided an introduction that informed non-French viewers what the Paris Opera is, that it has two venues, L'Opéra Garnier and l'Opéra Bastille, and might have clarified the film's movements back and forth between them. This film will show you glimpses of the wonderful stuff that goes on at this essential cultural venue. But as a documentary film, it falls a bit short.
L'Opéra/The Paris Opera, 110 mins., debuts in French cinemas 5 Apr. 2017, distributed by Les Films du Losange. Jean-Stephane Bron is a Swiss writer and director who has nine previous directorial credits, mostly documentaries. Not listed yet on IMDb, slated according to AlloCiné for French theatrical release 5 Apr. 2017. L'Opéra was screened for this review as part of the 1-12 Mar. 2017 Film Society of Lincoln Center-Unifrance series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.
Thursday, March 2, 4:00pm
Saturday, March 11, 3:30pm
LA FILLE DE BREST/150 MILLIGRAMS (Emanuelle Bercot 2016)
EMMANUELLE BERCOT: LA FILLE DE BREST/150 MILLIGRAMS (2016)
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SIDSE BABETT KNUDSEN IN 150 MILLIGRAMS
A successful battle against French Big Pharma
Right after 2015's Standing Tall/La tête haute about an at-risk teenager who struggles to become a good citizen, actor-writer-director Emmanuelle Bercot has made an Erin Brockovitch/Karen Silkwood film about real-life big Pharma whistleblower Irène Frachon. In the role as the feisty "Brest Girl" is Danish-born actress Sidse Babett Knudsen, who's in every scene. Dr.Frachon is a pulmonologist at the university hospital in Brest, in Brittany. Assisting at an open heart surgery operation, she observes degenerated heart valves in a middle-aged woman, Corinne Zacharria (Isabelle de Hertogh), who's been taking the Sevier company's drug Mediator, prescribed for decades for diabetes and for weight loss. Frachon notices there are other similar cases. The film takes us through Frachon and her collaborators' struggle to get this killer drug taken off the market.
Bercot and her co-authors, adapting Frachon's own book Mediator 150 mg, Combien de morts? ("Mediator 150 mg., How Many Deaths?"), take us through grueling, sometimes numbing details of this struggle. This may seem a humorless film - except that Knudsen's slightly over-the-top performance is engaging and full of fun - and frankly I had doubts somewhere in the middle if all this mundane detail was really worth it. But at the end Irène Frachon's (and all her collaborators') victory feels so good, it all turns out to be worth it.
Essential to the process, and to the film, is the great Benoît Magimel - who won an award for his performance in Bercot's last film, who plays Dr. Antoine Le Bihan, a specialist in medical research, who authors a paper that is the basis for negotiations with authorities. Big Pharma is ruthless, of course, and indifferent. They don't care if hundreds are dying from Mediator; they just want to go on selling it for the hundreds of thousands of patients in the country taking it. Magimel's performance makes clear the human toll of this battle as Dr. Bihan is ruined by the drug company, losing all his grants, and eventually winds up applying for jobs in Canada. But this isn't just a movie of a few stars, great though the two leads are: it's an ensemble piece, and when the ministry makes its statement condemning Sevier and withdrawing Mediator from the market, the camera pans around to all the people who have played a role. Not least, Dr. Frachon's family, and her good-humored husband who, when she notices his new glasses, which he's been wearing for three months, just laughs, and is the one who persuades her not to give up at her lowest point.
The beauty of 150 Milligrams is in its meticulous details of every stage of the struggle, and that makes it hard to talk about. Early on, notably, Dr. Franchon loses her cool at her first hearing before the government review board and does what Bihan said she should absolutely not do. She reveals that there is a study under way, and that he heads it. This puts the under an almost impossible deadline. They must finish the study immediately. At the board, the Sevier officials are condescending and game the system skillfully to put off any enquiry. When she and her collaborators ever appear, they are mocked as being rubes because they're from Brittany and the small city of Brest. Later, not for the first time, Dr. Franchon is contacted by an insider, this time a man inside the national insurance system, which is penetrated by Big Pharma. He takes the code name Santa Claus ("Père Noël"), and is the one who can gather national statistics of the number of deaths attributable to the drug. Dr. Franchon also has a female PhD candidate who attaches herself to her, who even more skillfully and rapidly crunches numbers.
When they have suffered several defeats, rather in desperation Dr. Franchon writes the book, Mediator 150 mg with the subtitle Combien de morts?, How Many Deaths? The drug company brings suit against her tiny publisher (another ally gathered along the way) and bars him from using the subtitle. He figts back, and prints the book with "Sous-titre censuré," subtitle censured, on the jacket. The story is growing national news, and still another ally is a blowzy, every more eccentric woman reporter for the national magazine, L'Express. When the magazine gets behind the story, the effect is decisive.
The film been criticized for being too utilitarian and observational. But that is the point. With all its little steps and details, it conveys the long tough slog that is a medical study that resists the forces of Big Pharma. And the admittedly sometimes flat and grinding scenes are counteracted by humanness. Bercot has directed a lively, impressively human ensemble production, headed off touchingly and entertainingly by the unique Knudsen and soulful Benoît Magimel, both of whom give selfless and memorable performances.
La fille de Brest/150 Milligrams, 128 mins., debuted at Toronto 12 Sept. 2016 and also appeared at San Sebastián. French theatrical release was 23 Nov. to excellent reviews (AlloCineé press rating 3.7) It got two César nominations, Best Actdress and Best Adapted Screenplay. Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-UniFrance series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (1-12 Mar. 2017).
Saturday, March 4, 3:15pm (Q&A with Emmanuelle Bercot)
Monday, March 6, 4:15pm
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LA LOI DE LA JUNGLE/STRUGGLE FOR LIFE (Antonin Peretjatko 2016)
ANTONIN PERETJATKO: LA LOI DE LA JUNGLE/STRUGGLE FOR LIFE (2016)
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VIMALA PONS AND VINCENT MACAIGNE IN LA LOI DU JUNGLE
Schlub adventure satire
The American festival blurb for this film calls Vincent Macaigne's character, Marc Châtaigne, a "middle-aged intern." He's not really middle-aged - just bald and pudgy at 38. Macaigne makes an amiable fall guy, as seen in Louis Garrel's talky, stylish directorial debut Two Friends/Les deux amis where he's madly in love with an impossibly beautiful young woman (Goldshifteh Farahani). Macaigne has been acting in movies since he was 20, but lately he has been seen much more in ones that have made it outside Gallic territories. Four years ago he was in 2 Autumns, 3 Winters and Age of Panic/La bataille de Soférino and Guillaume Brac's Tonnerre.
In Antonin Peretjatko's slapstick comedy set in French Guyana, Macaigne/Châtaigne has been sent by the French Bureau of Standards to follow up on a project to build a ski resort into the jungle, using artificial snow, and write a report. Macaigne may be pudgy, but he comes off as tirelessly energetic and resilient. So are Galaric (Matthieu Amalric), a prancing, cigar-puffing supervisor in a rakish hat, and the young lady who becomes Châcaigne's companion for jungle misadventures, an intern with the Forestry Ministry known as Tarzan (Vimala Pons).
A lot of effort has gone into this satire of bureaucracy, colonialism, and commercialism, which seems like a poor cousin of the wittier, more successful Brice de Nice James Bond style satires that made a name for Jean Dujardin. The festival blurb calls this movie "something like a Jerry Lewis gag-fest meets Survivor." My guess is that while this combination may appeal to French viewers, it's unlikely to play well with non-francophone audiences. A familiarity with French politics and bureaucracy is a prerequisite. The gags may be almost simple enough to laugh off, but not to laugh with. An example: at one point Tarzan declares herself bitten by a water snake and says she has ten minutes to live, and her dream is to have sex with Marc. Both strip and have at it. After a while Marc notes they've been going for over an hour. "Well, sometimes I'm wrong about these things," Tarzan comments, and they move on. Rather than amusement, most of the time one feels mostly awe that the filmmakers and the cast were capable of so much work in such steramy, muddy conditions.
La loi du jungle/The Struggle for Survival, 99 mins., showed at festivals in Cabourg, Vienna, and Torino. French release 13 Jun 2016, AlloCiné press rating 3.6 (USers 3.0). Watched for this review on a press screener provided by the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (1-12 Mar. 2017) of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Unifrance.
Monday, March 6, 7:00pm (Q&A with Antonin Peretjatko)
Tuesday, March 7, 9:15pm (Introduction by Antonin Peretjatko)
VOIR DU PAYS/STOPOVER (Delphine, Muriel Coulin 2016)
DELPHINE, MURIEL COULIN: VOIR DU PAYS/STOPOVER (2016)
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ARIANE LABED AND SOKO IN VOIR DU PAYS
Post-battle trauma with a female POV
In this film, which will interest students of women at war and post battle psychological issues, we follow Marine (Soko) and Aurore (Ariane Labed), two young women soldiers, of only three females in a combat unit, as they participate in a three-day psych evaluation/debriefing session on Cyprus en route home from Afghan duty. The process is a strange combination of old-fashioned drunken R&R, complete with sex with locals (for Aurore) and a lot of sunshine, on the one hand, and, on the other, solemn virtual reality sessions where some individuals go before the while unit and talk about traumatic moments of their Afghan service. It was only a short time, but there have been deaths and their are recriminations and hostilities that go deep. So is the sexism and the men's desire to beat up on somebody, whether each other, the women, or the locals. It doesn't look like anybody is going to make a wonderful readjustment to non-combat life.
Voir du pays won a screenplay award at Un Certain Regard at Cannes, and it deserves credit for looking closely at women in the military. The trouble is that the filmmaking sisters, who previously dealt with a rash of teenage pregnancy at a provincial French lyçée, seem by the nature of their choice a bit out of their depth here both with the subject matter and the technical demands of dealing with warfare. Focusing on a debriefing session is an easy way of bypassing combat scenes. But can you imagine a movie or a novel that talks about PTSD without actually showing action in country? Good use is made of the Cyprus locations and Cypriote actors, especially Chrystos, a local interested in the girls (Andreas Konstantinou). The fault is never with the actors, and there are some young men who make an impression to match the strong thespian efforts of Soko (also seen in the Rendez-Vous film The Dancer, which highlights her talents more fully) and her female cohorts.
Aurore and Marine, friends from childhood with limited futures, joined the army as a career opportunity and as the French title ironically declares, to "see the world." It didn't turn out that way. When a local asks them how Afghanistan was, they say they didn't see it: they went straight to the base. Through the course of the film it comes to seem the future Aurore and Marine have ahead of them has shrunken, not grown. And they have become disillusioned with both the military and with me. The film also shows hostilities among the men, and the ability of some unit members to gang up on the others, particularly one who is scapegoated for publicly questioning a command decision to withdraw that the officers claim as a victory. He thinks the unit losses could have been prevented. Another soldier, the first to speak at the debriefings, is tormented by subtle guilt for the death of a comrade. He thinks it is his fault, because he let his pal take a seat in a vehicle that was usually his. Now the arm on that side has no feeling.
Voir du pays/Stopover, 102 mins., debuted at Un Certain Regard, Cannes 2016, winning the Screenplay Award and nominated for the Un Certain Regard Award. Nominated for the Golden Pyramid at Cairo. showing in a half dozen other festivals including Angoulême, Jerusalem, London, Thessaloniki, Cairo and Palm Springs. French theatrical release 7 Sept. 2016; AlloCiné press rating 3.6. A First Run Features release (US). Watched for this review as an online screener for the Unifrance-Film Society of Lincoln Center 2017 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (1-12 Mar. 2017). Public screenings:
Thursday, March 9, 9:00pm
Friday, March 10, 4:15pm
RIGH HERE, RIGHT NOW/TOUT DE SUITE MAINTENANT (Pascal Bonitzer 2016)
PASCAL BONITZER: RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW/TOUT DE SUITE MAINTENANT (2016)
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ISABELLE HUPPERT, JEAN-PIERRE BACRI IN TOUT DE SUITE MAINTENANT
Love and money
This suave but somewhat chilly film is an ingenious mashup of old romance, new romance, and finance. It begins when Nora Sator (Agathe Bonitzer, the writer-director's daughter) comes to the too-perfect suites of a mergers and acquisitions firm called AB Finance, where she's to work. With her perfect mane of side-swiped red hair and severely plain outfit she's as cold as the place. Xavier (Vincent Lacoste), a young associate, is chilly too, but he will soften, and if you know him from Lolo or the recent Victoria you know this is an odd place for such an amiable goofball. They will have a somewhat-romance. A contretemps with Nora's much warmer sister Maya (Julia Faure), a singer-bartender who talks sexy, will get in the way, as well Nora's obsession with getting ahead, though Xavier is persistent. Nora is going to reveal some secrets just to spite Xavier and this vindictive gesture, misconstrued as loyalty and initiative, will get Nora a stunning promotion.
Meanwhile Nora meets two old associates at AB Finance. Her boss, Arnaud Barsac (Lambert Wilson) now has only contempt for the dreamy Prévôt-Parédès (Pascal Greggory). In financial district drag these two look very alike, but the casting is logical. Barsac and Prévôt-Parédès have a long history together, and Nora learns that Barsac knew her father Serge (Jean-Pierre Bacri).
There will be a big purchase-merger deal of course, to give Xavier and Nora something non-romantic to fight and compete over. It's successful-unsuccessful completion (it seems both, which doesn't strengthen the plot) will shake everything up. Prévôt-Parédès has already been pushed out, and Xavier is thinking about a more appealing line of work.
After we've met Nora, Xavier, Barsac and Prévot-Parédès, the focus turns to Jean-Pierre Bacri's Serge, father of Maya and Nora, an early-retired scientist of some sort. First Bacri does his famous grumpiest-man-in-the-world act, and later he does an off screen dying act that leads him to the hospital and a painful-touching reunion with Barsac's wife Solveig (Isabelle Huppert), who comes to find him. Once upon a time Solveig had two suitors, Barsac and Serge, and Serge was the one she really loved, but she picked the other guy, because Serge wrote terrible poetry for her - or to spite herself. (Part of Huppert's fascination is that she's always mysterious.) There is much talk of the poetry, and of one particular poem.
Maya's propositioning of Xavier at a bar, Xavier and Nora's squabble-romancing, Bacri's grumpiest man speech, Barsac-Wilson's putdowns of his old cohort Prévôt-Parédès are memorable moments. But nothing can compete with the few minutes when Isabelle Huppert is on the scene. Boy can she hold the screen, and boy is she elegant and wonderful to look at, sixty-something. So the best scene is the ironic, nervy one where Solveig encounters Serge leaving the hospital, and they both remember their lost but never forgotten love. Watch Huppert walk for long seconds toward the camera, as the tears well up in her eyes. The lady can act. And as great artists bring out the best in their collaborators, so Bacri acquires considerable heft in this scene as well. Bingo. Forget the financial world. The film's most powerful moment evokes a lost romance.
Pascal Bonitzer shuffles together several generations and plot lines with skill here. He is obviously as well-connected as you can get in the small world of French cinema: hence this star-studded cast. It's top drawer and a pleasure to watch. And including his daughter is not mere nepotism on Bonitzer's part (though this industry is a bit inbred): Agathe Bonitzer is by now an experienced thespian who's worked for Noémie Lvovsky, Jacques Doillon, Christophe Honoré and Agnès Jaoui. But there lingers a certain suspicion that this famous screenwriter (who's worked most for Téchiné and Rivette, but many others including Raoul Ruiz, Chantal Akerman and Barbet Schroeder) isn't quite as good a director as he is a writer: another person at the helm of this film might have provided it with more warmth and umph.
Right Here, Right Now/Tout de suite maintenant, 98 mins., produced by SBS Production, and co-produced by Entre Chien et Loup and Samsa Film, debuted at Cabourg, shtowing also at the Champs-Élysées and Brussels festivals. It opened in French cinemas 22 Jun. 2016; AlloCiné shows the critical response was solid (3.5) but viewers have been very lukewarm (2.7). Screened for this review as part of the Lincoln Center Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (FSLC-Unifrance 1-12 Mar. 2017).
Rendez-Vous public screenings:
Friday, March 10, 9:30pm
Sunday, March 12, 5:45pm
JOURNEY TO GREENLAND/LE VOYAGE AU GROENLAND (Sébastien Betbeder 2016)
SÉBASTIEN BETBEDER: JOURNEY TO GREENLAND/LE VOYAGE AU GROENLAND (2016)
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THOMAS BLANCHARD AND THOMAS SCIMECA IN JOURNEY TO GREENLAND
Overgrown boys' adventure
Betbeder is the cinematic poet laureate of the Parisian perpetual adolescent, the twenty-something, now thirty-something, amiable loser. In 2 Autumns, 3 Winters, this person was embodied in Vincent Macaigne with Bastien Bouillon as his best mate. This time the two pals are Thomas and Thomas (Thomas Blanchard of Poison Friends and Thomas Scimeca), who go on a visit to Kullorsuaq, one of the most remote parts of Greenland to see the first Thomas' father, who went to live in an Inuit village decades ago. The two Thomases met in acting class where they failed at improv and quit together (yet they are now part-time actors). Again as with 2 Autumns, the story is anchored by a voiceover (by Thomas 1, Blanchard). Nothing much happens. This will strike some viewers as lame and unimaginative. Indeed Betbeder takes few chances. But there is a documentary authenticity, a charm and a sweetness to make matters appealing.
There is little going on but Thomas 1's concern about his father's heart and Thomas 2's attraction to a pretty local girl. As the ever-disapproving Cahiers du Cinéma says, they are twiddling their thumbs in their shared bedroom: "why travel 4,000 kilometers for this gag?" Well, because it's life. Thomas 2 is circling fingers trying to remember how the solar system works: they're so cut off from the usual world he's forgotten. Maybe these two doofuses aren't too bright. But in amping up the naiveté Betbeder also makes the guys seem curiously cuddly. The action is filled by introducing us to a succession of locals at parties and gatherings where there's singing, dancing, smiles - and no liquor: they town barred it, because it caused trouble. Apart the partying, the Thomases learn to hunt seals and are honored by being allowed to kill one. A boy has committed suicide: we learn the Internet generation has become disturbed by the limited options - go to the capital, which is tough, or stay and be a hunter in the traditional life, which is tough.
The ways language distances people has never been clearer. Thomas 1 has studied an Inuit phrasebook, and now Thomas 2 is working on it, but aside from "hello," "goodbye," and "thank you," they don't know much. Subtitles tell us what the Inuit are saying that the boys comically misinterpret. When Thomas 2 makes the big speech he's memorized making a play for the pretty girl, she tells him thank you but she has someone; he guesses she's expressed interest. Always there is this barrier, the guys speaking French, everybody else (including Nathan) speaking Inuit.
There is the inevitable moment when the finger-twiddling guys lose their patience with each other. Thomas 1 allows that Thomas 2's Daniel Auteuil imitation isn't that funny. But it passes. Here as elsewhere Betbeder has kept it light.
The climactic event is perhaps a non-event: Thomas 1's inability too talk to his dad about his possible heart trouble. Runner-up is their nerve-racking last-minute effort to get on the internet to bring their social security job report up to date. They must list their few gigs every month by deadline to remain eligible for benefits. And this moment, with a bunch of locals gathered around as they log in on a borrowed computer a kid takes them to, seems quite real, as does their farewell tour around the village delivering complimentary French pancakes to all the people they've befriended during their stay. Maybe Betbeder's success is thanks to not trying too hard.
Journey to Greenland/Le voyage au Groenland,, 98 mins., debuted at Cannes in the ACID (Association du Cinéma Indépendent pour sa Diffusion) program May 2016; four other festivals. French theatrical release was 30 Nov. 2016, to good reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.5). François Forestier wrote in Le Nouvel Observateur "It's often funny, intelligent, and very pleasant to watch." Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Unifrance 1-12 Mar. 2017 series, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.
IN THE FORESTS OF SIBERIA/DANS LES FORÊTS DE SIBÉRIE (Safy Nebbou 2016)
SAFY NEBBOU: DANS LES FORÊTS DE SIBÉRIE/IN THE FORESTS OF SIBERIA (2016)
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RAPHAËL PERSONAZ AND EVGENIY SIDIKHIN IN THE FORESTS OF SIBERIA
A Frenchman deep in the Russian wild escapes from urban life
Adapted from the bestselling book by Sylvain Tesson, this movie is beautiful and has a lovely (if sometimes intrusive) score. But it has no teeth. Quite unintentionally I'm sure, it makes the most challenging ordeals look relatively easy. The handsome Raphaël Personnaz, as the French adventurer, Teddy, who's shut down his life in Paris for this challenging six-month solitary idyll, has a quality of lightness and natural elegance about him. He was just right to play heir to the throne the Duc d'Anjou in Tavernier's The Princess of Montpensier, or the lighthearted political speechwriter in the same director's The French Minister. He could even be right for this. he is; he does sterling work; and has told how he loved the book before being engaged to participate in the film.
Yet here's something in the writing and the editing that lightens the pain and strife. After all it's Siberia in the middle of winter Teddy has chosen to go to, in a little cabin by the shore of Lake Baikal. A key moment is the one when Teddy gets lost in a blizzard and collapses face down in the snow. This is when Aleksei (Evgeniy Sidikhin), a Russian fugitive who's committed murder and hides in the foret, picks Teddy up and slings him over his shoulder like a blanket. This makes it look like Teddy has a charmed life indeed. And Aleksei, a character not in Tesson's book invented to liven up the film, becomes a foil, friend, and comfort.
Some have said this story will be whatever you make of it, and this is true: it may seem utterly enchanting, a fantasy you delight to escape into; or it can be an ordeal you rejoice not to have to face. Or it may seem beautiful and exciting but rather distant, as seen through a cracked glass. But it's interesting that according to the French movie website AlloCiné the viewers like this quite a lot more than the critics did (4.0 viewers vs. 3.4 critics). In critical terms, Nebbou's film falls short of its material; but viewers dream with it. However it's interesting to me what Eric Libiot wote in L'Express: "The strange impression that emerges after watching the film is that the making of it must have been incredible, while the result, on the other hand, fails to convey the exaltation Teddy sought and found for sic months."
In the Forests of Siberia/Danes les forêts de Sibérie, 105 mins., debuted at Cabourg 8 Jun. 2016, opening theatrically in Switzerland and France 15 Jun. Screened for this review as part of the Unifrance-Film Society of Lincoln Center 1-12 Mar. 2017 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.
L'INDOMPTÉE/DAYDREAMS (Caroline Deruas 2016)
CAROLINE DERUAS: L'INDOMPTÉE/DAYDREAMS (2016)
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TCHÉKY KARYO AND CLOTILDE HESME IN DAYDREAMS
French artists in Rome
In her first feature film, Caroline Deruas takes on a tricky, but interesting subject: life at an artist residency. This one's at the impressive Villa Medici in Rome, site of the actual French Academy in Rome (Mission Colbert), depicted here as failing financially and slated for extinction. First, then, several hazards of such places: one might get too caught up in the problems of management; and the place might be so glamorous and beautiful one is distracted from work. Another thing: do artists really want to be in a colony? A further snag turns up here: a jealous, competitive spouse. One might also just wind up writing about or painting or photographing the residency and come away with something too claustrophobic and self-reflective.
These things happen to Camille Peano. She's played by Clotilde Hesme, who was cast as Louis Garrel's lover in Regular Lovers/Les amants réguliers (directed by Louis's father Philippe, the considerably older lover of Caroline Deruas in real life); and also in Christophe Honoré's Lovesongs/Les chants d'amour. Camille (like Caroline?) has a much older husband, Marc (Tchéky Karyo). He's a successful writer, but perhaps washed up, at least jealous of Camille's entering the field. Marc pulls out the noisiest portable manual typewriter in the world and comically types away on it day and night so Camille can't think, or sleep. Her idea is to write about Villa Medici's first woman artist resident. But she can't get going - till Marc leaves.
These things are incidental because whhile Deruas plays around with the actual problems of residencies, her main concern is to turn the story into a surreal meditation on such places. Central to this aim is Axèle (Jenna Thiam), a pretty young photographer with glorious red hair, who seems even more haunted by the place's past, wielding cameras of various formats and turning out quite handsome efforts in which she, the architecture, and local statuary are rendered in surreal images. There is an understood competition between Camille and Axèle, who anyway is neurotic and crazy. Thaim and Hesme, an actress who normally exudes cool bemusement, are a good contrast. Axèle gets an impressive exhibition at the villa at the end that she seeks to destroy. Spoiler alert: maybe Axèle is just a figment of Camille's increasingly energetic imagination.
Daydreams/L'Indomptée ("The Untamed") is really a very watchable film with delicate, beautiful images if you sit back and enjoy and indulge some of its more over-the-top surreal images; but it isn't a wholly successful effort. The artistic life is a subject it's hard to broach without falling into some clichés and that happens here. Deruas ought to have let herself indulge more freely in surrealism, to bring to life the ghosts that haunt the place and the hermetic mind games that plague artists shut off in a colony. Cahier du Cinéma's critic called this film "More the fantasy of a great film than aa great film about fantasy." Daydreams gives pleasure with its visuals, its settings, and its cast, but remains superficial.
Daydreams/L'indomptable, 96 mins., debuted at Locarno Aug. 2016, and opened in Franch cinemas 15 Feb. 2017 (AlloCiné press rating a meager 2.5, though there were many favorable comments). Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Unifrance 1-12 Mar. 2017 series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. Shotimes:
Wednesday, March 8, 4:30pm
Friday, March 10, 6:45pm (Q&A with Caroline Deruas)
RAW/GRAVE (Julia Ducournau 2016)
"For the first time, a Film Comment magazine presentation within Rendez-Vous with French Cinema" - FSLC press release.
JULIA DUCOURNAU: RAW/GRAVE (2016)
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RABAH NAÏT OUFELLA AND GARANCE MARILLIER IN RAW
Hungry girl
Raw (Grave in French, which means something different,of course) is the first film written and directed by Julia Ducournau. It concerns Justine (Garance Marillier), who is only 16 (though the actress looks older and is older). She is reserved and precocious, and her parents (Joana Preiss and Laurent Lucas, who've had some interesting and edgy roles before this, especially Lucas - Lemming and With a Friend Like Harry, for example) take her to join her older sister, the bumptious Alex (Ella Rumpf), as a student at a rather unusual veterinary collage. No wonder this turns into a horror movie.
Justine and her parents are vegetarians. Why is that important? The same way it's important that she's a virgin. She's a tabula rasa. A little below the surface this prim vegetarian virgin is a sex-starved vixen whose taste for raw, bloody flesh is so rapacious it rapidly leads to cannibalism. There: I have given it alway. But there is plenty of buzz about this movie, about people fainting or having to be led out of the cinema, when it first showed at Cannes. And the English title, Raw, doesn't hide anything. If you don't know what's in store, you're a perfect tabula rasa too, ripe for shock. You're lucky.
Justine and her parents are vegetarians. Why is that important? The same way it's important that she's a virgin. She's a tabula rasa. A little below the surface this prim vegetarian virgin is a sex-starved vixen whose taste for raw, bloody flesh is so rapacious it rapidly leads to cannibalism. There: I have given it alway. But there is plenty of buzz about this movie, about people fainting or having to be led out of the cinema, when it first showed at Cannes. And the English title, Raw, doesn't hide anything. If you don't know what's in store, you're a perfect tabula rasa too, ripe for shock. You're lucky.
We, like Justine, are assaulted from the start of her arrival, when her parents point out to her the location of the hospital and the morgue. ("I'm already getting confused about geography," she says.) More than a veterinary college, this is a ferocious hazing program. The new students - the first year is the best, Alex tells Justine - are made to crawl on all fours on the way to a wild party. They are doused from above with buckets of animal blood. They're made to eat raw animal organs. Justine's is a rabbit's kidney. There are wild bachanalias. And Justine's roommate Adrien (Rabah Naït Oufella) is a hunky gay guy whose nearly shaved head and thick lips make him look animalistic and sexy. Justine opens the door of their room one day and he's standing there getting a blow job. Raw doesn't spent much time on personalities or the development of relationships. But it's strong on sisterly bonding, and Justine and Adrien are bosom buddies nearly immediately, and often sleep side by side. It goes further than that - lots further. Classes? They go directly into drawing and quartering horses, dissecting dogs, things like that. But the hazing takes up most of the time.
Raw is a good looking, well cast and well acted film. It's French. Cronenberg and Lynch have been mentioned. Nonetheless it risks feeling more like a chic exploitation film. It's a horror genre movie toned down just enough to be taken seriously by more effete, non-genre viewers. It has some good shocks spaced through its run-time. Justine has a succession of revolting scenes, those involving eating of meat before she gets to like it; then her violent scratching of a rash; her chewing and then vomiting up quantities of her own hair; her sister's painful wax removal of her pubic hair; her consumption of a severed finger. Bu despite all this individualized disgustingness, the film is fundamentally shallow and unsubtle. It focuses - successfully though - on propulsive action rather than mood, and fails to awaken much emotion, other than disgust. For this reason its effect can be pretty superficial. It's well done for what it is. Again: it's French; its gross, tasteless song lyrics are in that language, subtitled. It has good production values. It has a glossy, beautiful look; but it still hasn't solved the problem of how to make blood look real.
Yes, Julia Ducournau shows talent and has produced an accomplished first feature. It's not clear that she is the kind of distinctive talent we see in Lucile Hadžihalilović, the wife of Gaspar Noë, for example, and this film has been a bit overrated. It doesn't leave one with much to ponder. It all comes down to a pretty simple explanation at the end. It made me giggle more than cringe. This place, and these people, were so blatantly fictitious. LIke Anthony Lane of[urlf="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/kong-skull-island-and-raw"]The New Yorker[/url], "when the carnage was over" I too "went out and had a steak." No frissons, no nightmares. But yeah, I can see turning into a compulsive cannibal would be pretty bad. Is that why people give up eating meat? They might not be able to control themselves? This isn't an ad for vegetarianism: it makes vegetarians look creepy.
Raw/Grave, 99 mins., debuted at Cannes at Critics Week, receiving the FIPRESCI Prize; shown in many other international festivals it has won many awards and nominations. Its critical claim is impressive. Metacritic rating is 82%; AlloCiné press rating is 4.1. Actually released in the US before France, 10 Mar., US, 15 Mar. France. Also shown as part of Film Comment Selects 2017 at Lincoln Center and, in an unusual move, also listed as part FSLC-Unifrance Rende-Vous with French Cinema as well.
