Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2010 at Loncoln Center

[Chris Knipp]

MICHEL GONDRY FILMED WITH HIS AUNT SUZETTE GONDRY IN THE THORN IN THE HEART

Michel Gondry: The Thorn in the Heart (2009)

Such a happy, such a sad, story

Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep) represents a French filmmaker famous enough Stateside for any new titles to seem release-worthy. But this memoir of Gondry's aged aunt, rich in detail yet lacking in depth, remains too slight an effort to have much of a future. It has however been picked up by the young indie distributor Oscilloscope, who released the Danish noir comedy Terribly Happy.

Suzette Gondry taught in a series of elementary schools in the Cévennes region of France from 1952 to 1986. The film begins with a film of a family dinner in which Suzette vigorously and with great pleasure tells a tale of Homeric food consumption with her late husband years ago. It's an image of vigor in age, family unity, and joie-de-vivre. Thereafter the director follows the lively old lady around to a dizzying series of towns where she taught. Each one is led into with focus on a place-sign set in a model train setup that turns out later to be a long-time preoccupation of Suzette's odd son Jean-Ives. He is an aging gay man, never happy, psychologically maimed in unexplained ways, who lives with his mother and is the person Suzette says was always "the thorn in my heart" ("l'épine dans mon cœur").

The film alternates between pictures of a still-vibrant woman loved and admired by former students, praised by her own aged mother (herself highly articulate, perhaps also a schoolteacher?), creative and endlessly energetic in teaching at her succession of schools, including a group of Algerian Arab students in the Sixties -- and the muted tale of mother, father, and son. Jean-Yves is present on screen, but sometimes unresponsive to questions, saying he "can't remember" when queried. He was taught by his mother for many years, which he did not like, and worked for his father in his lumbering and sawmill business, which he also did not like.

Questions remain unanswered. Why did Suzette teach at so many different schools? Did she commute to them or was she moving about? Where was her husband when she was on these assignments? A year in New York after her retirement is shown in the many home movies, with kids she oversaw then. Why was she there? Whose kids are these? Working with Michel on his films in recent years is mentioned, but without explanation of what she did. Her relationship with her husband, Jean-Yves' father, despite the latter's appearance in a series of stills and brief clips, is not much explained. Was Suzette a workaholic who escaped from family woes into her many classrooms? or did Michel simply fail to develop the family side in depth, despite touching on moot questions of the son and a daughter (the latter never spotlighted), except for a story about not telling them for days after their father died? There is also nothing about Michel Gondry's own mother and her relationship with Suzette.

There's a self-conscious effort to show the workings of the project by occasionally shooting the camera or sound man as Suzette revisits school sites, and an interesting sequence where family members, including Suzette and Jean-Yves, watch rushes of the documentary and comment. But apart from the model train links between passages there is nothing of the wildly inventive and playful aspect of Michel Gondry's cinematic style.


The result is a fascinating but also frustrating study. (For a bit more detail see the SCREENDAILY review.)

Debuted at Cannes, The Thorn in the Heart/L'épine dans le cœur will open in theaters in France in April 2010. Shown as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, New York, March 2020.

[Chris Knipp]

OSS 117 AMONG THE RIO HIPPIES

Michel Hazanavicius: OSS 117: Lost in Rio (2009)

Play it again, Michel

Michel Hazanavicius again collaborates brilliantly and with no loss of comic energy with his star Jean Dujardin and co-writer Jean-François Halin in another film spoofing the novels and films of De Gaulle era, Bond-like French super-spy and politically incorrect ladies'-man Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath AKA OSS 117. Note, there were many serious films of the Jean Bruce-authored stories André Hunebelle directed, ending in 1970. Hazanavicius' versions, of which this is the second (the first was the 2006 Cairo, Nest of Spies),* differ in being thoroughly tongue-in-cheek and deliberately foot-in-mouth. Hubert is embodied by the talented Dujardin, an essential element in the success of the films. He's often compared to Peter Seller's Clouzot, but Dujardin has more panache. In looks Dujardin resembles the Sean Connery version of James Bond, and his character is unfailingly charming, adept, and a complete fool whose racism and condescension toward women are further heightened in this episode, because the date is now no longer in the Fifties but 1967, when women now answer back.

The filmmakers were going to take Israel as their setting and include the Six-Day War, but including that historical event seemed too serious, so the decision was made to keep Jews in the picture but switch to Brazil, where Mossad agents could be tangling with (putatively ex) Nazis. Hazanavicius pushes the envelope more this time as Hubert insults not only the Chinese and Germans but Jews and women at the same time, when he teams up with Dolores (Louise Monot), a sexy Mossad lieutenant hunting down a Nazis organization plotting a Fifth Reich out of Rio. At one point Hubert suggests the Nazis should be allowed to have their own state -- "just like the Jews." Hubert's actual mission is to find the son of a Nazi general and get from him a microfilmed list of Frenchmen who collaborated with the Nazis. Hubert of course expects Dolores to be his secretary or his cook; he hasn't grasped the new role of women, and in fact goes into one of his maniacal laughs when someone suggests there could be better world coming than the one now.

The film is just as brilliant and loving a reproduction of slick Sixties technicholor B-adventure movies, with the widescreen look and color schemes, striking period modern architecture shot on location in Brazil, and an exaggerated but still beautiful use of multi-screen images, beginning with an opening credits sequence in which Hubert dances the twist with a bevy of babes. This sets the style of the film's look, which is to be silly but pretty at the same time. There's an excellent sequence where the hero climbs up to the diving board of his luxury hotel flexing muscles and dozens of resident bathing beauties in perfect period suits ogle him lovingly.

There are tiny throwaway touches. For instance walking through an airport Hubert spits out a wad of chewing gum and as he walks out of the picture stage left, somebody is picking the gum off his shoe. In another scene Hubert sets his camera (he's posing as a journalist) to take his picture roadside with a glam sports car he's been loaned, but he fails to notice the background next to the car is full of junk metal. Not such a throwaway but partly that for French audiences, Hubert's CIA pal Tremendous (Ken Samuels) is continually foul-mouthed and abusive toward Hubert in English, though the hero never takes note of that. Samuels pushes the character into a gross-out satire of American rudeness.

Dolores and Hubert go to meet the Nazi's son at a costume party that turns out in fact to be a big convocation of the neo-Nazis in full regalia; OSS shows up disguised as Robin Hood. Meanwhile the good guys are continually being followed around by a pair of Mexican wrestlers in absurd head guards working as assassins for the Nazis. Hubert has a peculiar fear of heights -- "vertige," vertigo -- that goes back, oddly enough, to a trapeze accident he was involved in. The Nazi general is Rüdiger Vogler's Von Zimmel, who is not quite Christoph Walz's Col. Landa, but has some of that quality. His son Heinrich, found in a beachside hippie colony, is ably impersonated by Alex Lutz. Again, just as in popular American movies, even today, everybody speaks English, both Brazilians and Nazis talk to each other in French -- though Dolores and her two Mossad associates briefly exchange some Hebrew.

Hazanavicius has said he switched references from early Bond movies and Hitchcock in Cairo, Nest of Spies to a focus more on action adventure references, and he says he "could mention over twenty films," but names Harper, That Man from Rio, The Thomas Crown Affair, North by Northwest, the "Matt Helm" series, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter. Scoffers who debunk both efforts or claim this one is cruder or less funny than the first, just aren't paying attention. These films are loving parody, which means their echoes are detailed and many-layered. Rio ne répend pas is actually better than Next of Spies in many ways, though fans will have different favorite sequences in each. The envelope-pushing prize goes to this film, with its combining of Jews and Nazis. There is a memorable scene in which von Zimmel, the film's most odious Nazi, begs OSS 117 for mercy high atop the foot of Corcovado's Christ over Rio by reciting Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech, substituting "Nazi" for "Jew." Now that's entertainment!

One can't help imagining Tarantino relishing this movie. The filmmakers expect to continue the series.

OSS 117: Rio ne répond pas opened in Paris April 15, 2009 to universal acclaim. Shown as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, New York in March 2010.

*My review of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies can be found here.

[Chris Knipp]

Xabi Molia: 8 Times Up (2010)


DENIS PODALYDÈS, JULIE GAYET IN 8 TIMES UP

Meeting on the way down: a film about economic marginality

Xabia Molia's first feature, 8 Times Up/Huit fois debout, a psychological and social study with a light touch, seeks to be an easy film about a hard subject, and largely succeeds in this aim. The narrative describes a process of decline but it's more spinning in circles than a straight drop. Hopelessness and desperation are tempered by whimsy, and however downbeat the film, it is delicate and specific.

Molia is fortunate in his two principals, Julie Gayet and Denis Podalydès, both of whom are appealing. Gayet, who is pert and pretty but here has a kind of sad determination, is a busy and versatile film actress. Podalydès is a member of the Comédie-Française. He looks a bit like Wallace Shawn: balding, vague, rather sweet, someone you might like to have a drink with but probably not want to hire.

Gayet and Podalydès play Elsa and Matthieu, two marginal people approaching middle age with limited prospects who meet because they're apartment neighbors on the verge of eviction for non-payment of rent. To make matters worse, both are hopeless at job interviews and lack solid credentials. They talk about putting interesting items in their CV's, to stand out from the crowd of applicants. Matthieu includes the fact that he practices archery and Elsa lists Kabuki.

Matthieu uses offbeat Zen sayings in interviews. One is "7 fois à terre, 8 fois debout" -- "seven times down, eight times up." Another: "He who hits the target, misses all the rest." Both Elsa, who has an illegal job cleaning off buses and takes care of a well-off lady's little boy, and Matthieu, who has sporadic work doing PR surveys, know about being down and not hitting the target.

We glimpse both characters doing job interviews. Elsa's are painful. She lacks motivation or confidence. When asked to show her knowledge of English during the pre-titles footage, she just stammers. She can't justify dropping out of nursing school except to say she wasn't cut out for it. Even when the interviewer tries to help her she flounders. Matthieu rambles and philosophizes. He goes on at length about what he was doing in the recent five-year gap in his resume. He was reading, he says, thinking, deciding whether working was a necessary thing to do; he concluded it was.

A tentative romance develops between Elsa and Matthieu, the love of losers, simultaneously distracted from connecting and pulled together by shared confusion and need. Elsa is is the first to be evicted. She is now approaching desperation, but still hopes to find a good job and seeks to put up a good front, especially since she wants to be able to go on spending alternate weekends with her son Étienne (Kevyn Frachon) who otherwise is in the custody of her ex-husband. Her downward path continues when a mishap at the bus-cleaning job leads her to abandon it and she becomes too scattered to show up for her babysitting work and gives notice by phone.

Matthieu, who is evicted soon afterward, seems more a whimsical drifter than a person like Elsa who is being pulled down against her will -- a man blithely coping, though remaining on the margins. He winds up for a while living in a tent in a forest, like the people in Pierre Schoeller's 2008 Versailles, which included the late Guillaume Dupardieu in a key role. Matthieu pops in and out of Elsa's life. She takes him to a dinner at her ex-husband's. It turns out he was a footballer, but only for the reserve team. Then he had muscle problems, and began to smoke, and went to Texas for a girlfriend, but didn't like Texas. End of football career. Elsa has been having psychological counseling, to conquer her fear of seeking jobs, but funding for these sessions has run out. She has also been evicted and is living out of her Volvo station wagon. She tries to give the therapist her mother's papyrus plant, but he refuses to take it. It floats down river when she throws it away, looking as if it may actually make it.

Elsa has a cousin she goes to on her first night after eviction. But he can't take her in, even for a night, because his girlfriend objects. He does, however, secure her a job interview to be cashier at a supermarket. The trouble is, she has no experience as a cashier. As she becomes more desperate waiting for the results of this interview, Elsa takes her son Étienne on a wild weekend ride to the beach, where she seems about to do something dire. But all is well and she and her son hug warmly when she leaves him off at his father's. She runs into Matthieu again on the verge of being fired from her first day as a clerk at a clothing store, and it looks like they are going to be bobbing together on the river for a while, like the papyrus plant. In the forest, Elsa has tested Matthieu's willingness to (literally) catch her as she falls and finds him the person she can most trust.

The film succeeds in its aim of showing Elsa and Matthieu's situation sympathetically and without pathos. It lacks the dark beauty and emotional power of Versailles, but its description of the opening stages of marginality may be more relevant to the sinking middle class today. 8 Times Up is a film that shows how thin the line between security and homelessness can be. But the light touch in part backfires: the very delicacy and the tenuousness of the couple's relationship makes the film feel itself marginal and tentative at times.

8 Times Up was shown as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, New York, March 2010, and is scheduled to open in Paris April 14, 2010.

[Chris Knipp]

CHAIRA MASTROIANNI AND MARINA FOIS IN MAKING PLANS FOR LENA

Christophe Honoré: Making Plans for Léna (2009)

A more complex and mature film from Christophe Honoré

A rudderless plunge into Arnaud Desplechin territory, Variety calls this film, comparing it unfavorably to the latter's recent A Christmas Tale. True, there is an unruly family gathering around the older parents, who are affectionate, and one of them seriously ill, just as in Desplechin's film. But it's not Christmas, and that's not the whole focus. The genesis of Making Plans for Léna/Non ma fille, tu n'iras pas danser lies in several things. Honoré wanted to make a movie around Chiara Mastroianni; the focus on her makes the film far from rudderless. Having completed what he now calls his "Paris trilogy" -- Dans Paris, Love Songs, and La Belle Personne -- and now being married with a daughter, he wanted to return to his native Brittany and focus on family, children, and the role of women. And so, collaborating on the script with the writer Genevieve Brisac, he has made a more mature and many-layered work than he has ever done before.

It naturally lacks the charm, the focus, the elegance and the fabulous quality of his Paris films, which deal with idealized or imaginary families and romanticized, amusing, frivolous young men, as represented by his alter ego, Louis Garrel. Garrel appears fleetingly here as Simon, Léna's (Mastroianni's) younger lover or would-be lover. Typically, he plays his almost throwaway role with lightness and verve, bringing welcome moments of fun into what is, after all, for the most part a pretty heavy flick.

Taking her two children to the country to stay with her parents (Marie-Christine Barrault and Fred Ulysse, seen as both annoying and sexy), she encounters her ex-husband, the American Nigel (Jean-Marc Barr). On hand is her playful younger brother Gulven (played by the director's own brother Julien Honoré). Her sister (Marina Foïs) is fighting with her husband (Jean-Baptiste Fonck) and seems on the verge of divorce. Léna comes on the scene as one who can't cope: she momentarily loses her son Anton (Donatien Suner) in the Gare Montparnasse train station before ever leaving Paris. Then she agrees to take away the sick bird they've found but puts it in a bag that kills it. As in Honoré's Love Songs, Mastroianni is continually troubled and sad and overwhelmed. But this is the much bigger role that Honoré wanted to give her. As Variety reviewer Jordan Mintzer writes of this career-capping performance, Mastroianni "manages to channel real energy into her character early on, making for a strong performance reminiscent of both Emmanuelle Devos in [Desplechin's] Kings and Queen and Gena Rowland's unruly protags in the films of John Cassavettes." And the thing is, the other principal actors are also in top form, are doing some of their best work.

The irony is that everyone else in the family wants to make Léna happy, and all this "making plans" for her makes her feel put-upon and overwhelmed. She wavers back and forth about whether to leave, with or without the children, and carries her worries about her role in life back with her to Paris.

Anton is more articulate and calm than Léna is (and we get to see children really tormented by watching the desperate honesty of adults). In the country, he and Lena go on a walk and he recounts a Breton tale, of Katell Gollet (Katel the Lost). The story is dramatized by figures in traditional Breton costume enacting a festival where Katell torments young men by making them dance to death and winds up marrying the devil to defy her father.

This strange but powerful interlude divides the film in two. Afterwards it returns to Paris and to Léna's continuing difficulty coping in her own life, whether taking care of the kids or her demanding job at a big florist shop that requires her to do wholesale buying and delivery service for an unsympathetic boss (Caroline Sihol).

This has been seen by French critics as a feminist film, and it focuses primarily on how overburdened the modern woman is. But men are not demonized. When Léna can't pick up her children because of a delivery to a cemetery, Nigel immediately steps in to help. But there still comes a literally shattering moment for Anton.

Making Plans for Léna, which is being released in the US by IFC Films, surprises with its complexity after the New Wave-ish, stylish, and relatively brittle Paris trilogy with a rounded, complex, mature work that takes Christophe Honoré to a new level. Long overshadowed by her illustrious parents, the film icons Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve ever since her small part was cut out of a Fellini film when she was eight years old, Chiara Mastroianni here finally has the opportunity to carry a film with a rich and complex role.

Non ma fille, tu n'iras pas danser opened September 3 in Paris to excellent reviews. IFC release in the USA. Shown as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (co-sponsored by FSLC and Unifrance) at the Walter Reade Theater of Lincoln Center and the IFC Center, New York, March 2010.

[Chris Knipp]

Mona Achache: The Hedgehog (2009)

Blame it on Barbery

In this adept and well-acted little sentimental charmer, a screen adaptation of Muriel Barbery's bestseller The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a precocious and artistic little rich girl, an intellectual concierge, and a benevolent Japanese gentleman come together in a posh Parisian apartment building for a brief period of understanding, communion, and the beginnings of love. The story is a little like an episode from Kay Thompson's Eloise, but set in Paris with philosophical and orientalist touches, a girl who is more smug and priggish than cute and an increasingly saccharine trajectory that is only just barely saved by a tart finale.

Paloma (Garance Le Guillemic) is continually filming her annoying family, her Minister father, her mother who is addicted to Freudian analysis, tranquilizers, and champagne and makes more fuss over her plants than her daughter, her non-entity sister, and people in the corridor of the luxury five-unit apartment building. As she films, she describes everyone and everything for us in a whisper into the camera recorder. She has concluded that her life is a fish bowl from which there is no meaningful escape and therefore on her next birthday, her twelfth, she has decided she will commit suicide. Meanwhile she makes her films, stockpiles her mother's tranquilizers, and does drawings that look like the work of a professional illustrator rather than a sub-teen kid (because that's what they are).

Meanwhile one of the wealthy residents dies of a heart attack, and the Japanese gentleman, Monsieur Ozu (no relation to the director, we learn later) moves into a flat miraculously and instantly converted into a palace of Zen minimalism with gray walls, black ceramics, and other delights, an oasis of quiet, aesthetic calm, and Japonism. Even the concierge, or building janitor (though the term today is usually "gardien," concierge being considered outmoded), Madame Michel (Josiane Balasko), has a place that's rather handsomely decorated; quite lovely wallpaper. Paloma's room is a throwaway, we get only glimpses of it, but it's obviously as elaborately crafted.

Madame lets Monsieur Ozu into his new place, and he discovers something: she has read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. And judging from the fact that her cat is named Léo, he correctly concludes she's a great fan of the Russian writer. He begins wooing her, starting by presenting her with an elegant two-volume edition of the novel. Other gifts and invitations follow, with dinner in Ozu's flat prepared by him, a private screening of a classic Japanese film on video that Madame Michel has, and finally a date at a posh sushi bar. With the help of a pal who's a lady dry cleaner, Madame Michel gets a complete makeover, with a fashionable haircut and nice clothes.

Paloma is ridiculously and ultimately unbearably clever, most of the other characters are mere objects, Monsieur Ozu is just an attractive gadget to draw Madame Michel out of her shell. Her place is full of books -- but TV-friendly too, though she probably keeps the set on with the sound off merely to play the role of the classic concierge -- an aging, overweight, ugly, irritable old bag who sits around watching TV all day. Madame Michel sits with a purring Léo (though Monsieur Ozu has even better cats, by the way) reading good books -- when she is not cleaning up in the courtyard and sidewalk and being wooed by the wealthy, mysterious Japanese gentleman (we never learn where the dough comes from).

Paloma, who partakes of some of the wisdom of novelist Barbery, a teacher of philosophy resident in Japan, announces during one of her monologues that she is sure Madame Michel is a "hedghog" (hérisson), prickly on the outside but possessed of an interior that's subtle and kind.

The Hedgehog/Le hérisson itself partakes of some of the essential qualities suited to international bestsellers. Its simplifications are satisfying, if you don't go too deep. Its world is appealing and somewhat exotic. Its truths are self-evident. To do her credit, the excellent Josiane Balasko gives a degree of complexity to her performance one could hardly expect from such material. She is, of course, the film's most many-layered character. At least she has the outer and inner layers Paloma attributes to the hedgehog. Paloma admires her because she has "found the perfect way to hide." She can spend hours in her back room with her great books, while appearing on the outside to be a frumpy old creature that people don't even see and never bother except to have her hold a package for them.

But the artificiality of ideas and the stereotypical nature of most of the characters make this, whatever its homely message of love and acceptance of life, altogether less humane and alive than a little film like François Dupeyron's 2003 Monsieur Ibrahim/Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran. That too was simplistic, but it had moments of life in it, especially the scene when Momo (Pierre Boulanger) rehearses how he'll introduce himself to a prostitute down on the street now that he's legally old enough to get laid for the first time: "Quel chaleur! C'est combien?"/"What a heatwave? How much do you charge?"

Monsieur Ibrahim holds up better, but both these films fade a bit when compared to that other movie about a precocious girl's views, Julie Gavras' 2006 Blame It on Fidel/La faute à Fidel, which works through a child's sensibility to depict how -- from her viewpoint, anyway -- her family life goes quickly and irrevocably downhill when her parents become communist revolutionaries. Political realities stretch further than life lessons delivered in a completely contrived environment, even one in which a teenage boy can get laid.

This film received indifferent reviews in Paris after its summer (July 3, 2009) release, particularly from the more sophisticated media, but it looks like it might have good American arthouse potential. It was part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (jointly sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Unifrance) and screened at the Walter Reade Theater and the IFC Center, New York, in March 2010.

[Chris Knipp]

André Marcon, Yvan Attal, Anne Cosigny in Rapt

Lucas Belvaux: Rapt (2009)

The prison of release, the illusion of trust, ironies within ironies

The Belgian-born Lucas Belvaux, who began his career by running away to Paris and becoming an actor, has over 45 TV and film acting credits and is in the cast most recently of Robert Guérdiguian's Army of Crime. As a director he's best known for his "Trilogy," three films with interlocking stories and characters, each filmed in a different genre. Cavale/On the Run is a policier, or thriller; Un couple épatant/A Terrific Couple is a comedy; Après la vie/After Life is a melodrama. For this now-famous project Belvaux won the Prix Louis-Delluc in 2003.

Rapt is a thriller, and an elegant-looking and beautifully made one that is both breathtaking and thought-provoking. It stars a riveting Yvan Attal, a hot actor this year who also stars in another high-energy 2010 "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema" film, Cédric Kahn's amour fou tale, Regrets. Through the course of Rapt one is drawn into a closer and closer identification with Attal's character and his complex, disturbing, very modern fate.

The English word rapt of the title, used for this French-language film, carries with it a hint of shock. It's meant in its basic sense of transported, carried away. It sounds like "raped." It's more arresting and harsh than the French word for kidnapping, enlevé. The subject is just that, the kidnapping of a rich and powerful corporate head so high up he deals directly with officials of the French government on a day-to-day basis. At first the movie promises to be a conventional thriller: rich guy held for ransom, bargaining, tension, threats -- and the diminutive, swarthy Attal doesn't seem totally convincing as Stanislas Graff, a mover and shaker of the French establishment. What's he running around about? The rapid sequence of opening scenes also fails to define fully who exactly Graff is, whether government or business. His being constantly called "Président" throughout may confuse us as American viewers. But it doesn't hurt the film too much for his identity to be somewhat generic.

This is because once Graff is captured things become much more convincing, and after (spoiler!) he's released, things become interesting and surprising. Rapt is another stunning example, like Guillaume Canet's 2006 star-studded version of the Harlen Coben novel Tell No One, that the French now can do American thrillers better than Hollywood, giving a spin to them that's both classic and fresh. Belvaux's ingenious film succeeds very economically -- without wasted expense on explosions or special effects -- both as an intense nail biter and a tale that reaches for the philosophical and heroic. The kidnapping of Stnaslas Graff is seen as a primal trauma that irrevocably alters his life, his family, his company, perhaps his culture. Nothing can be done to right the changes this act has wrought, and nothing can ever be the same in Graff's world again.

He's someone very high up, someone very powerful, and someone those closest to him hardly know. Graff's chauffeur-driven car is stopped, he's carried off, and very rapidly hidden away, terrified, humiliated, hurt, and mutilated. A finger is sent off to prove the kidnappers really have him. The confinement goes through stages. At first he's continually masked and not allowed to look in the face of the (also masked) guardians, and he must hover in a tiny tent inside what may be some vast abandoned prison complex. Later he's moved elsewhere, fed properly, talked to pleasantly, allowed to move around in a cell, and his chief kidnapper, still masked, lets him look. Meanwhile frantic activity goes on in Paris. The ransom demanded is 50 million euros. His family can't access his money. His company agrees to advance a sum, no more then 20 million. Later it goes higher.

The police enter the picture massively, but against the wishes of the company and Graff's attorney, an elegant black man, Maître Walser (Alex Descas of 35 Shots of Rum, also in The Limits of Control). The rest is a story of warring forces and shifting loyalties, with female family members (Anne Consigny, Françoise Fabian, Sarah Messens as loyal mother and reproachful wife and daughter) tested by revelations of Graff's secret life, his gambling debuts at poker and the casino, his mistresses and posh glass hideaway above Paris. All this is in the magazines and tabloids. It's even suggested by people in the company and the police that Graff could have contrived the kidnapping to settle his debts. His influence at the company is seriously dented, and during the two months of his confinement, the interim CEO gains power. When it's all over, Graff has only his red setter to love him and to love. And yet there is a rebirth. But it may be illusory.

The accomplishment of Rapt is to carry its story beyond the conventional climax into a kind of heroic struggle for identity and power, a drama of the essential loneliness of man and the dominance of image in the modern world. Some of the speeches in the last segment might come from a contemporary version of Corneille or Racine. Attal is remarkable, suffering, Christlike in confinement, also resembling the death mask of Marcel Proust; then reborn, fiery, but surrounded by confining police protectors and intimate betrayers of trust so his freedom seems anything but that and the real brutality may be in release, the real prisons wealth, power, and fame. But it's not that simple: Rapt isn't preachy or tendentious; it supplies you with a damn good time but leaves you pondering. It may be a better film than it seems, or even than its makers realized. In his famous "Trilogy" Belvaux played with genres. Here he uses a single genre to transcend genre. Like Cantet's Tell No One, this plays very well as a mainstream film, but is much more.

(Based on the personal story of the 1978 kidnapping of the Belgian industrialist Baron Édouard-Jean Empain, whose testimony on TV struck Belvaux and inspired the film. A searing performance by Attal, who incidentally lost 20 kilos in two months for the role, taking him down to 106 pounds, what he weighted when he was 14. A strong cast, tight editing, striking camerawork by regular Belvaux cinematographer Pierre Milon, and an atmospheric score by pianist Riccardo Del Fra all add up to a highly polished package .)

Rapt was released in Paris November 18, 2009 to very good reviews, and shown at the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, jointly sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Unifrance, with screenings both at the Walter Reade Theater and the IFC Center, New York, March 2010. No US distributor yet listed, but an American remake is already planned by a new company, Smuggler Films.

[Chris Knipp]

FRANÇOIS CLUZET AND EMMANUELLE DEVOS IN IN THE BEGINNING

Xavier Giannoli: In the Beginning (2009)

A petty swindle becomes an economic bonanza and a little news item turns into a great film

In the Beginning/À l'origine is the story of a small time crook who falls into a big con and thereby becomes both a hero to the locals and a mensch in his own eyes. The con and the project are doomed, but both are sweet while they last.

This suspenseful and curiously moving film includes a virtuoso lead performance by François Cluzet, was in competition at Cannes, and received eleven nominations at the French César awards. Director Xavier Giannoli (of The Singer) has again made a picture that's a sensitive study both of in individual and of a region. He also succeeds, like Lucas Belvaux in Rapt, in turning a news story that might seem on the face of it rather trivial into a psychological and philosophical thriller. It makes you think, it keeps you on the edge of your seat, and it shows once again that the French still really know how to make movies.

Paul ( Cluzet), who uses the fake name Philippe Miller, is a petty con man who travels all around France Xing off construction projects on his highway map of the country. Taking down names and phone numbers from roadside signs and making deft use of product catalogs, he steals and resells parts and equipment from suppliers by pretending to be a project manager.

Miller hits pay dirt, and ultimately gets in much deeper than he plans, when he comes upon a highway project abandoned two years earlier due to its invading the habitat of a protected beetle. Juggling company logo initials he pretends to be the representative of an invented subcontractor connected to the huge conglomerate originally involved in the shut-down highway segment. He meets the locals and hears about their needs. Sniffing around and making contacts, he gets payoffs from local agency heads and suppliers, assembling a small fortune in cash which he "launders' by ironing it flat to make it look new and erase fingerprints. These folks all stand to gain by the project's renewal, which they think he can make happen. In fact everybody in the region deeply wants it to happen; they've been going through hard times for a good while, and the cancellation of the highway was devastating to the whole region.

Miller meets the eager, energetic Monika (Stéphanie Sokolinski, the singer known as Soko), who works at his motel, and her fresh-faced, sensitive boyfriend Nicolas (Vincent Rottiers). Before long he also meets the local mayor, Stéphane (Emmanuelle Devos, as always bringing something extra and very special to her role). By now rumors have created a mounting energy and hope. Everybody wants to get hired in some aspect of the project. Nicolas has been a bad boy, once dealing drugs and now still delivering them, but he wants to better himself. He becomes Miller's driver and confidant. Having lived a bit on the dark side himself, he's the first to pick up that Miller's staging a con. In the background is the evil Abel (Gérard Depardieu. star of Giannoli's 2006 The Singer, grubby and despicable here), who's bought stolen tools from Miller and knows all about him.

The renewed highway project begins to happen just because Miller hints that it might, or just doesn't say it won't. Everybody wants it so much. Miller gets the suppliers he's conned out of money to start supplying and sets up an office, moves equipment onto the old project. A project boss steps forth, Louis (Brice Fournier). Monika is trained as an accountant and takes on the accounts. There are lots of IOU's, lots of faked stationary. Eventually Miller gets a local bank to issue him checks and advance funds for payments to suppliers that demand immediate payment. The bank wants a piece of the action too. But they will require authentication that Miller can never provide.

Cluzet is energetic but repressed. At first his Miller seems to be imploding. When asked embarrassing questions, he has a dozen ways of deflecting them. If all else fails he just says he has another appointment and runs off. The situation is too tempting for Miller to resist. He knows he's getting in way over his head. But isn't it the nature of the con man to seek bigger and bigger deceptions? Actually nobody loses much here. The inevitable happens as Miller and the mayor are drawn to each other. Both are lonely, and they begin an affair. The highway construction begins. There are celebrations, articles, champagne, speeches, and children do dozens of little paintings celebrating "the Boss," "Mr. Philippe."

The whole thing that terrified Miller begins to delight him. For once he is somebody. "I have wasted a lot of time" is one of his saddest lines to Stéphane, in bed. Of course ultimately Miller is going to go to jail, but he starts desperately trying to get the segment of highway completed before the time limit on payments ends and many bills become due. He has been paying out all the many thousands he accumulated at the outset in salaries to the workers. The money doesn't matter to him any more. He becomes a worker himself, pushing a broom to spread the asphalt in the rain. It's winter and the project is becoming more and more difficult to finish.

In the Beginning is a nail-biter all the way through, and in the end you will react as the local community did to the real con man in this story: some of you will take him for a real S.O.B. Others will believe him to be a pretty nice guy. Environment and action create identity. We are what we do. Here, Miller is what he makes happen. Workers don't always care about the utility of their employment. They don't much care about beetles. (What happens to them is barely mentioned. In fact they were transplanted to a forest.)

Cluzet, an extremely busy and popular French actor most recently seen by American audiences in Guillaume Canet's Tell No One (another hit thriller), is a neutral Frank Capra everyman, an individual who can seem shut down, but with a twinkle in the eye, a grump with a jovial chap hiding inside waiting to be let out. The film gradually lets out that chap, and then, when the big corporation comes in and the police descend, the highway project lit up at night like a film set, Miller is a little man who's strangely triumphant in defeat, waving the battered flag of his fake company.

This is another marvelous French film that transcends genre, turning a crime thriller into celebration of work. Judging by this and Giannoli's The Singer/Quand j'étais chanteur, he has great sensitivity to solitary wanderers and paints rich psychological portraits in a complex social environment. He doesn't know so well how to end things. There is a little uncertainty whether we can take À l'origine as a mood piece about economic desperation (as Up in the Air partly is; but this is Down on the Ground ), a process picture, or a crime thriller. But it achieves success in each genre, because of the energetic world the director creates, the rich moral ambiguity he preserves. The secondary characters are of course a bit schematic, a bit obvious, but with such actors, they never seem that way. Like Laurent Cantet's study of a strike and of class conflict within a family, Human Resources, In the Beginning is about the human need to be doing work.

An official entry at Cannes 2009, as mentioned, with 11 César nominations, À l'origine opened in Paris November 11, 2009 to very, very good reviews; more than one calls it "a great film." Shown as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema co-sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Unifrance and screened at the Walter Reade Theater and the IFC Center in New York in March 2010.