Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2009

[Chris Knipp]

Another bit of introduction to give you a thumbnail note on what the series offers this year.

The eighteen titles include a lot of famous French film names, including Claude Chabrol, Claire Denis, Costa-Gavras, Benoit Jacquot, Anne Fontaine, and the 80-year-old but still vigorous French film icon Agnes Varda. Andre Techine's "social drama" (I'll figure out what that means later) The Girl on the Train and Jean-Francois Richet's multiple prizewinning Mesrine (biopic of a French arch criminal) will have their world premiers. Jacques Mesrine. Techine's name is familiar to us. Richet is a young ghetto-bred director who first got notieced with Ma 6-T va crack-er ("My see-tay ['hood] is down the tubes"), which mashed together a B-actioner and social revolt. Then he went Hollywood mainstream with the John Carpenter remake Assault on Precinct 13. This is a return to native sources, and may be interesting. Or not; we'll see.

I'm always excited to see new work by Techine, Varda, Jacquot, Denis, Fontaine, even Chabrol; but I'm especially hoping that some of the newcomers will be revelations. The lineup looks solid, anyway.

The public screenings will return to the newly renovated Alice Tully Hall, home of the New York Film Festival. Filmmakers and guests attending screenings (not sure about press ones) include Claire Denis, Samuel Collardey, Patrick Mario Bernard, Pierre Trividic, Daniele Thompson, Costa-Gavras, Anne Fontaine, Jean-Francois Richet, Ilan Duran Cohen, Agnes Varda, Sylvie Verheyde, Martin Provost, Pierre Schoeller, and Benoit Jacquot, and prizewinning thespian newcomer Felicite Wouassi.