Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center 2012

[Chris Knipp]

Rendez-Vous with French
Cinema 2012

To provide feedback to reviews and get day-to-day updates on screenings go to the Rendez-Vous Forums thread HERE.

Links to the reviews:

17 Girls (Muriel, Delphhine Coulin 2011)
18 Years Old and Rising (Fréderic Louf 2011)
38 Witnesses (Lucas Belvaux 2012)
Americano (Mathieu Demy 2011)
Delicacy (David and Stéphane Foekinos 2011)
Farewell, My Queen (Benoît Jacquot 2012)
Free Men (Ismaël Faroukhi 2011)
Gang Story, A (Olivier Marchal 2011)
Guilty (Vincent Garenq 2011)
Headwinds (Jalil Lespert 2011)
Last Screening (Laurent Achard 2011)
Louise Wimmer (Cyril Mennegun 2011)
Low Life (Nicolas Klotz 2012)
Moon Child (Delphine Gleize 2011)
Painting, The (Jean-Pierre Laguionie 2012)
Paris by Night (Philippe Lefebvre 2012)
Pater (Alain Cavalier 2011)
Screen Illusion, The (Mathieu Amalric 2011)
Smuggler's Songs (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche 2011)
Snows of Kilimanjaro (Robert Guédiguian 2011)
Unforgivable (André Téchiné 2011)
Well-Digger's Daughter, The (Daniel Auteuil 2012)


Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2011 at Lincoln Center: Press screening schedule
(WRT=Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, IFC=IFC Center, Sixth Ave. @ 3rd St.)

The press screenings schedule was announced Feb. 8, 2012 and is as foillows:

Monday, February 13
NO SCREENINGS

Tuesday, February 14
9AM – SMUGGLER’S SONG (97 min) - WRT
11AM - THE SCREEN ILLUSION (80 min) - WRT

Wednesday, February 15
10AM – THE WELL-DIGGERS DAUGHTER (107 min) - IFC
1PM – FREE MEN (99 min) - WRT
3PM – AMERICANO (105 min) - WRT

Thursday, February 16
10AM – THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO (107 min) – IFC

Friday, February 17
10AM - THE PAINTING (76 min) - IFC

Monday, February 20
NO SCREENINGS

Tuesday, February 21
9AM – THE LAST SCREENING (81 min) - WRT
10:45AM – DELICACY (108 min) - WRT

Wednesday, February 22
9AM - 38 WITNESSES (104 min) – WRT
11AM – 18 YEARS OLD AND RISING (96 min) – WRT

Thursday, February 23
9AM - FAREWELL, MY QUEEN (100 min) – WRT
11AM – 17 GIRLS (90 min) - WRT

Friday, February 24
10AM – UNFORGIVABLE (113 min)– WRT

Monday, February 27
10AM – PATER (105 min) - IFC

Tuesday, February 28
9:30AM – LOW LIFE (120 min) – IFC

[Chris Knipp]

RABAH AMEUR-ZAÏMECHE: SMUGGLER'S SONGS (2011)


JACQUES NOLOT IN SMUGGLERS' SONGS

Mid-eighteenth-century followers of the French Robin Hood

Smugglers' Songs/Les chants de Madrin, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche's fourth film, is an atmospheric and musical evocation of the pre-revolutionary spirit of mid-eighteenth-century France and of the period outlaw hero and French Robin Hood Louis Madrin. Madrin defied the fermiers généraux, the rapacious tax collectors for the King who had grown immensely rich and were widely hated for the way they were exploiting the whole country. He stole and sold goods cheap in illegal markets. His brutal torture and execution made him a national revolutionary martyr.

The film joins a band of Madrin followers after their hero's death. Zaïmeche himself plays Bélissard, the de-facto "chef" of this band though he says there is no "chef." We first meet a handsome young deserter who has been shot by the military who wanders across a field and collapses. Bélissard rescues him and later recruits him after shooting and killing three soldiers who come to get the young man. Then the scene shifts and we join an anti-establishment aristocrat, the Marquis de Levezin (a fine Jacques Nolot) who had become close to Madrin and is now engaged in writing his biography. The Marquis gives a ride in his carriage to an itinerant book peddler or colporteur (Christian Milia-Darmezin). This man is well acquainted with the Madrin contraband markets, and through him the Marquis finds his way to the friends of his hero.

The smugglers carry on Madrin's spirit, defying and fighting off the tax collectors' army, selling contraband. They collect songs in honor of their hero and get them published and distributed to the public (sometimes along with the 1001 Nights, in its unexpurgated form). Their spirited and well-armed band sets up temporary markets on the edges of villages. There they hastily sell tobacco, silk, and precious objects to willing buyers as well as books, including works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, and the Marquis travels with them The colporteur joins up too, selling books and transporting the song collection. He gets captured and imprisoned and nearly despairs, but is rescued in a bold attack by Bĺissard and his band.

The anti-establishment tone is set in the opening scene. It's pretty clear who the good guys and the bad guys are. Bias aside, Smugglers' Songs is atmospheric and pleasant, far from the usual costume drama and, in its ideological bent, a little like Rossellini. The focus is on lifestyle and spirit rather than an action-picture story line. The cinematography by Irina Lubtchansky brings out the nice costumes by Christiane Vervandier and the natural landscape; no set design needed, since nearly all scenes are set outdoors. Several sequences are beautifully shot entirely in silhouette, an effect that suggests events being transformed into legend in the eyes of the beholder. There is impressive musketry and handsome horseflesh and the regular musical interludes (arranged by Valentin Clastrier) make use of violin, flute, and a curious cranked instrument. It's all about the atmosphere and the camaraderie, despite some violent episodes when the military step in and must be repelled.

There's a notable sequence that further emphases the legend-making enterprise when Bélissard meets with anti-establishment printer Jean-Luc Cynan (Jean-Luc Nancy) to get the pro-Mandrin songs editioned and this also turns into a little lesson in period typesetting and papermaking: the wooden pulp-working machine in particularly is a marvel to behold in operation. There is a sophisticated sense of period here, but those hoping for the excitement of an action film may become uneasy at this point. Zaïmeche is in no hurry. One has the distinct impression that the filmmakers were having fun. There is much laughter on screen.

The spirit of Madrin hovers over events, and the climax shows the band and a group of pretty women indoors for once while the Marquis delivers the words of the famous "Complainte de Madrin." Set to music from an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau, the "Complainte" casts Madrin as a national hero, looking out on all of France as his unjust end approaches. In it, Madrin speaks of his robbery and selling and capture and execution and ends with the plaintive, elegiac lines, "Compagnons de misère/Allez dire à ma mère/Qu'elle ne m'reverra plus/J' suis un enfant, vous m'entendez,/Qu'elle ne m'reverra plus/J'suis un enfant perdu.""Companions of misery/Go tell my mother/That she will see me no more/I'm a child, you hear me,/That she won't see any more/I am a lost child." More than a dozen interpretations of this very famous song (including a period one from Le Chat Noir and a moving rendition by Yves Montand) will be found here.

Smugglers' Songs exudes a gentle French "after May" spirit here of 1968 -- the year in fact that Zaïmeche was brought from his native Algeria to France, at the age of two. "Revolt meets poetry," one French review summarizes; "an alliance between a quasi-insurrectional theme and a very sweet tone," says another. There are killings and three armed encounters (which the Mandrin-followers win against the army of the King and the tax collectors) but a gentle, humanistic sprit reigns: there is a lot of hugging and pauses to play music and hints that these men living off the land are eco-warriors who've gone green long before the creation of the Sierra Club.

This film won the Jean Vigo Prize, an award that itself tends to favor eccentric and revolutionary work. A similar recent winner was Serge Bozon's La France, an even more eccentric and less strictly historical film, also full of musical pauses, also set outdoors, about a World War I band of deserters and a woman posing as a man hunting for her soldier husband. Les Chants de Mandrin may be less appealing to avant-gardists but it is more accessible and pleasant. It debuted at the Locarno festival August 11, 2011 and entered French theaters January 25, 2012, receiving generally favorably reviews (Allociné 3.6).

Smuggler's Songs is part of the joint UniFrance-Lincoln Center Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, March 1-11, 2012. The film was shown to press and industry at the Walter Reade Theater, where it was screened for this review. Public screenings:

*Wed., March 7, 9:30pm – IFC; *Thurs., March 8, 6:15pm – WRT; Fri., March 9, 1:30pm - WRT
*In person: Rabah Ameur-Zaïméche

[Chris Knipp]

MATTHIEU AMALRIC: THE SCREEN ILLUSION (2011)


LOÏC CORBERY AND DENIS PODALYDÈS IN THE SCREEN ILLUSION

Youthful Corneille as a cool crime drama, for television

Amalric's Screen Illusion/L'illusion comique is a shortened modern dress for-TV adaptation of the play written in 1636 by the French playwright Pierre Corneille. It's the third in a series commissioned by the Comédie Française using only their actors doing plays they've been performing on stage, made away from the theater in an original format in only twelve days, and requiring that for the revised text words may be cut, but not altered or added to. The previous two adaptations were by Claude Mouriras, and by the team of Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau.

L'illusion comique uses a play-within-a play structure with an interestingly modern and Nabokovian twist: one man actually watches a play, deluded into thinking it is a privileged version of the real. L’Illusion comique runs through a gamut of genres that sound like Polonius speaking of the players: pastoral followed by comedy with a farcical character at the center, followed by tragicomedy – it’s a dramatic tour de force in which Corneille, still early in his career at 28 and just starting to become famous, shows himself to be already at the top of his theatrical game. Or so Wikipedia says. It's a youthful work. But it's notably adventurous and ahead of its time and surreal, and that makes it good material for a modern transformation. And perhaps safer for Amalric, not to be risking accusations of mangling an absolute top classic, even if it's by one of France's greatest playwrights.

This is a seventeenth-century play in alexandrine couplets. That has not changed in the least, though the actors, who are trained to perform the lines on stage, deliver them with maximum fluency, and adapt to the modern settings and reinterpretations like the consummate pros that they are. The visuals are consistently and realistically modernized -- set in the present time and mostly based in the posh Hotel du Louvre, with farcical scenes in the rooms, and other action at a parking garage, a shootout happening on the roof, and a nightclub confrontation when reality finally replaces illusion. But the language remains the same as it was.

To begin with Pridamant (Alain Lenglet) has lost track of his son Clindor (Loic Corbery) for a decade and desperately misses him and (in the original) enlists a magician Alcandre (Herve Pierre), to help him see where his son is and what he is doing. The magician in this version is replaced by a concierge/security guard/detective at the hotel, and the magic visions are replaced by a battery of security camera screens and cassettes that Alcandre shows to Pridamant. The important thing is that Amalric finds something cinematic -- and perhaps also telivisory, as an equivalent, particularly, with the security cameras and screens. But I honestly did not on one viewing know the play well enough or follow this filmed-for-TV version with sufficient understanding to appreciate the transformation. It seemed a little like slight of hand to me, a series of assumptions we agree to go along with that may not in the end be all that convincing. How stupid or gullible is this Pridamant? We do not, of course, watch everything on CCTV monitors. We get a glance at one, or at a playback, and then we shift to the actors in the rooms, and have to pretend Pridamant is, what? still watching the monitor? Amalric expects us to take big leaps here, and it's all just as artificial as alexandrines or as a 17th-century play performed in 17th-century costume.

Clindor is working for a video game exec Matamore (Denis Podalydès), the man behind "Modern Warfare 2." In the original Matamore is a boastful military officer. Matamore claims to adore Isabelle (Suliane Brahim), but her father Géronte (Jean-Baptiste Malartre) plans for her to marry Adraste (Adrien Gamba-Gontard). Meanwhile Cindor and Isabelle are in love with each other. But another woman, Lyse (Julie Sicard), is opposed to this relationship because she is in love with Clidor too and wants him for herself.

Clindor is attracted to one woman but desirous of the other because she has the wealth and the power he wants. And he flirts with additional ladies. And other people are plotting whom he should be hitched to. The play is more complicated in the original than this simplified version: Amalric has cut out subplots. The main lines are easier to follow on screen thus simplified, but at times a scene seems to lack a proper introduction. And it can be hard to follow the basic action as well. I felt as I do at the opera, which is to say out of my element.

Nonetheless one can see Corneille himself as the magician; and Amalric as a meta-magician in transforming the play into a still more stylized modern version that reinvents something quintessentially theatrical into something set out in a realistic modern world. And in turn the actors, who were peroming the play in its more traditional mise-en-scène on stage every day at night while shooting the film version during the day, perform prodigies of imagination and energy and collaboration of their own. In an interview on stage at Rotterdam Almalric described the cast as his collaborators.

A Screen Daily article suggests comparing this reworking of Corneille to Michael Almereyda’s 2000 "slacker" Hamlet . Yes, but we know Hamlet and we don't know this play. As English speaking viewers we are lost.

We could compare Ralph Fiennes' current filmed updated Serbian Coriolanus, which is so realistic and gritty (it took more than 12 days and a lot of explosions, more I think that were necessary) with its tattooed serbian hunks, and Fiennes' performance is so in-your-face, you forget, at key moments anyway, that you're listening to Shakespearean English, or cease to care. Not sure that happens with Corneille's 17th-century French here, but it might happen for French viewers and not for us.

Amalric is a supremely intelligent and thoughtful actor and director, but his directorial projects have not been as good as his acting, so far. His On Tour/Tournée (SFIFF 2011,done only a little before this project) was ecstatically received in France, but seemed contrived to me, and Screen Illusion seems another fascinating idea that unfortunately fails to engage us as fully as it engaged Amalric. But my respect for Amalric remains enormous.

L'Illusion comique AKA The Screen Illusion, was screened for this review at a press and industry showing at the Walter Reade Theater of Lincoln Center. The film, only 77 minutes, made for French public television, will be included in the 2012 joint UniFrance and Film Society of Lincoln Center presentation, The Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Today. The public screening schedule will be as follows:

*Sun., March 4, 6:15pm – WRT; *Sun., March 4, 9pm – BAM; *Mon., March 5, 8pm – IFC; *Tues., March 6, 4pm - WRT
*In person: Mathieu Amalric

[Chris Knipp]

DANIEL AUTEUIL: THE WELL-DIGGER'S DAUGHTER (2011)


MERAD, BERGÈS-FRISBEY AND AUTEUIL IN THE WELL-DIGGER'S DAUGHTER

Auteuil brings back Pagnol

Old fashioned, arguably retro values dominate Auteuil's Pagnol remake The Well-Digger's Daughter/La Fille du puisatier, a story of bad fortune reversed and meanness turned into decency. Nothing earth-shaking here, but the kind of movie that leaves mainstream audiences feeling good. There is an affirmation of simple country values and a look at the issues of class and illegitimacy and the vicissitudes of war. This version adheres closely enough to the 1940 original, but despite the well-digger and his assistant's preserving their heavy Provençal accents, otherwise the film is less naturalistic and more mainstream than the original, also glossier and better looking, with higher production values. Do we need this done over again? Somebody obviously thought so.

Auteuil's return to Pagnol material marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of his debut in the two-film Pagnol novel adaptation of Jean de Fleurette and Manon of the Source (directed by Claude Berri), a French series hugely successful with US art house audiences. This time it's the now 62-year-old actor's show: he stars, wrote the adaptation of the original film, and directed. And he has made the well-digger Pascal Amoretti's character even stronger -- and more intensely conflicted -- than the blocky, gruff figure embodied the first time by Raimu.

The story's pretty simple. Amoretti calls his titular 18-year-old daughter Patricia (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) back from being educated by nuns in Paris to take care of his five other younger daughters in Provence. Her good looks and manners and proper French much attract Jacques Mazel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), the putatively dashing pilot son of M. Mazel (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), the rich local owner of a hardware store. A couple of dates and rides on a motorcycle get Patricia pregnant. She has fallen for Jacques, but the war's breaking out and Jacques is off to the front, and so is Pascal's simple, good-humored assistant Félipe (Kad Merad), who wanted to marry Patricia before this happened. Mazel senior and his ditzy, hysterical wife (comedic vet Sabine Azéma) are not friendly when Pascal comes with all his daughters to inform them of Patricia's condition and the fact that their son is responsible. Then Jacques is shot down and they are devastated. And things change, and change again.

Darroussin adds an authentic severity to his part; Azéma and Merad are a little too light and comedic, and Azéma really overdoes it. The formerly bad-boy Duvauchelle is a bit too low-key: he's more slinky and creepy than really dashing here, alas. Bergès-Frisbey has a delicacy and sensitivity that are good for the role of Patricia, but she's also a bit bland. In truth though the story line is so simple, involving, and well worked out than no one actor, or character, is crucial. Auteuil does not hesitate to make his role and performance even more central, creating a Pascal more solid and intense than Raimu's 1940 version. Auteuil's Pascal is violent and almost cruel with Patricia when he thinks he must abandon her cause, and melting and sweet when he has a change of heart . His big encounters with M. and Mme. Mazel are peculiarly emotional and dramatic. He winds up being the most interesting actor to watch, but he keeps the cast and the tone nicely balanced (with the slight exception, again, of Azéma).

As is usual with Pagnol, the south of France material is warm and humanistic, and is a time capsule, a portrait of cultural values much changed since. With its bell-ringing musical background, the London Symphony strings coming in at appropriate touching moments and the super-happy ending, this is a movie that offers little for sophisticates. But its still a good story well told and like those earlier movies it's likely to delight the segment of the art house audience that is looking for charm rather than edginess. Those who can't wait for the film's summer 2012 US release can watch it during the Lincoln Center-UniFrance Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series. And the producers were so pleased with Auteuil's handling of this Pagnol outing, they hired him to do the earlier Pagnol film trilogy, Marius, Fanny and César, which will come out later this year.

This film opened in Paris to generally good reviews, which approved Auteuil's directorial debut and were justifiably impressed by his own strong performance. Knowledgeable observers however still consider the Pagnol originals, overall, superior. And there is no denying, and some French critics affirmed, that this is very far from being a fresh and exciting new work or approach.

La Fille du puisatier will be released by Kino Lorber in the US in the summer of 2012. It is also part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-UniFrance Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series for 2012 and was screened for press and industry, when it was observed for this review. The series runs at several venues in New York City from March 1-11. Public screenings for this film are:

*Thurs., March 8, 8pm – IFC; *Sun., March 11, 3:45pm – WRT
*In person: Jean-Pierre Darroussin

[Chris Knipp]

ISMAËL FAROUKHI: FREE MEN (2011)


TAHAR RAHIM AND MAHMOUD SHALABY IN FREE MEN

Muslims and resistance in German-occupied Paris

The young star of Audiard's amazing 2009 A Prophet/Un prophète is back in the 2011 Free Men/Les Hommes libres, a film about a young Algerian in Paris in 1942 inspired to join the resistance by his friendship with a Jewish man. In 2009 Tahar Rahim won Best Actor at the French Césars; A Prophet won the Grand Prix at Cannes. Free Men again gives the young Rahim the central role. This is two or three films. Again, it sets up Rahim as a young man being formed into something stronger. Come from Algeria to work in a factory, his Younes got TB and recovered but lost his job. As a black marketer getting by, he's caught in a raid and recruited at police headquarters where it's believed the muslims are issuing false documents.

But this is also indirectly a biopic about Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit (played by the venerable and monumental Michael Lonsdale of Beauvois' Of Gods and Men and many other great films), founder and rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, who aided the anti-Nazi resistance. It's the story of the resistance, of which Younes becomes more and more a part. The friendship that leads him to want to help protect Jewis is with Salime, a superb Algerian singer and musician, reputedly the best in Europe, who turns out to be Jewish. While Jews and Arab Muslims are seen as at each other's throats, it is interesting to learn that their twin outsider status made them allies in Paris under the Vichy government.

Des hommes libres is also a celebration of the marvelous Arab music of the period, and its musical interludes are the highlights of the film and symbolize music's power to transform and unify and transmit culture, even under the most repressive conditions of German occupation.

And Les hommes libres' undercurrent is the birthing of the Algerian independent movement, which all the Algerian political activists in Paris at this time are aware of and involved in, and which gains great impetus by the Liberation, which made the Algerians see allies in the Americans and their own liberation from French colonial oppression in the liberation of the French from Nazi occupation.

The essentiality of Free Men is that it represents an unrecognized story of a role played during the war by maghrebins, North African Arabs, in the attempt to save Jews from Nazi extermination. It's another story that needed to be told and it's an interesting one. After all, France has the biggest muslim population of any country in Europe. They matter. And the Algerians' relationship with the French is a complex one.

Tahar Rahim again has the role of a tabula rasa, a young man of little personality or character who is changed by strong events as he was changed by prison in A Prophet and by his association with the Corsican capo played by the great Niels Arestrup in Audiard's film. Little by little Younes, who spends more and more time at the mosque to satisfy his Vicny police handlers gives up trading on the black market. He does it for profit, and then begins to care.

The singing of the charismatic, popular and blue-eyed Salime Halali delights Younes. He also is attracted to Warba Shlimane alias Leila (Lubna Azabal of Incendies), who turns out to be a communist activist in hiding, and he saves a couple of Jewish children turned over to him where he lives. The Grand Mosque Rector is increasingly menaced by the Nazi officer Major von Ratibor (Christopher Buchholz), whom he wards off with deftness and aplomb.

Free Men is an interesting picture of historical events, but its meandering structure is in search of driving central action or more intense development on the part of Younes, a composite character created to pull together all the action of muslim resistance volunteers gathered around the other specific historical figures. It's going to be hard for Tahar Rahim to get another role as strong as the one he played in A Prophet -- unless he can work with Audiard again or someone of his caliber. Israeli-Arab actor Mahmoud Shalaby, who plays Salime, seems promising. Unfortunately the writing falls short. Two many paths in too many directions.

Too bad, because this is a worthy subject and Free Men has its own unique atmosphere of an unseen world inside occupied Paris. The film sings literally and figuratively during the passages of live musical performance. When an actor playing great Egyptian singer-songwriter Mohamed Abdel Wahab, thin and in dark glasses, appears performing with Salime at a cafe, it recreates a magic moment for fans of modern Arabic music.

Les Hommes libres opened in Paris September 28, 2011 to fairly good reviews (Allociné 3.0) that recognized an honest effort, but some spoke of "missed opportunity" and a plot and a too diffuse plot. It's a "modest recreation" -- perhaps too modest. But this is not a dead end for Rahim, who has been in Kevin Macdonald's The Eagle; will be in Lou Ye's Love and Bruises; and in another shot during the Turnisian revolution. He describes himself in an Inrocks interview: "I continue to grow. I'm finding a focus for my anxiety."

Free Men was observed at a press and industry screening for this review in preparation for the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, the joint festival of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and UniFrance, March 1-11, 2012. Public screenings:

Fri., March 2, 1pm – WRT; *Sat., March 3, 9:15pm – WRT; *Sun., March 4, 4pm - IFC
*In person: Ismael Ferroukhi and Tahar Rahim

[Chris Knipp]

MATHIEU DEMY: AMERICANO (2011)



A man seeks his lost youth in America

This directorial debut (in which he is the protagonist) is by the son of two French cinematic icons, Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda, and it contains elements of both of them, a documentary quality from his mother and a romantic idealism from his father. The mysterious woman Martin (Demy) stalks in a Tijuana dive has the name of Jacques Demy's glamorous object of desire played by Anouk Aimée, Lola. Martin's girlfriend in Paris is played by Jacques' muse Catherine Deneuve's daughter, Chaira Mastroianni. Martin's exploration of his childhood is illlustrated with actual clips of Documenteur, a film by Varda showing her with a childhood Mathieu. And with these credentials, this film was well received by French critics and richly resonant for French audiences. But it may seem pretty sketchy and unsatisfactory to American audiences. Selma Hayek adds sexiness as Lola, and Geraldine Chaplin plays a family friend. Images are shot in a grainy, hot-colored 16mm, and music is supplied by Georges Delarue. The mixture of elements here is both haunting and disappointing. The film was acquired at Toronto for US distribution by MPI.

As Americano begins Martin learns that his mother has died in Venice, California. A dual US-French citizen who now sells real estate in Paris with a not very committed relationship with his girlfriend, he decides to go back and sell his mother's place and clear up her things, arranging for her body to be sent back to France for burial. He harbors lingering resentments against her out of a sense of abandonment. She had a nervous breakdown when he was of eight, when his father (director, actor, screenwriter Jean-Pierre Mocky) left her and took the boy to live permanently in France. Martin arrives in L.A. and is met by the annoying Linda (Chaplin), a friend of his mother who insists she was a joyful person and not the depressive Martin has always imagined. Throwing things out, Martin finds an old photograph that shows him as a child with a Mexican girl he used to play with. A returned letter from his mother indicates this Lola was the one his mother wanted to leave her place to and an American lawyer has told him a deceased person's inheritance wishes should be met. He then grabs Linda's red Mustang convertible and goes hunting for Lola.

The rest of the film is a sequence of vicissitudes in which a dogged Martin pursues the actual (or is she?) Lola, whom he played with as a child twenty-five years ago, and mentally explores his lost early childhood. She denies the past and he is repeatedly rebuffed by a heavy called Luis (Carlos Bardem), who beats him up. A boy who has directed Martin to the club called Americano where Lola is a pole dancer does not prevent Linda's red Mustang from being stolen, and with it Martin's money and passport. He is not in very good shape. He keeps calling Claire (Mastroianni) from pay phones, which she finds odd: he has never been that loyal and their relationship had reached an impasse.

This film in retrospect has, certainly, many suggestive elements, but it didn't work very well in the actual unreeling. The various elements do not hang together well enough and the protagonist is hard to get a grip on. As the glamorous, sexy, but scarred Mexican babe, Selma Hayek has a certain attraction, but the flashbacks are arbitrary; events including a snowy burial in France seem unrelated, Geraldine Chaplin (perhaps happily) forgotten, Chiara Mastroianni just an occasional flicker at the end of a phone line. It is difficult to make a story out of a void, and Demy's Martin has been estranged from his mother for much of his life (though his dual background has left him bilingual).

The film debuted at Toronto in September 2011, and opened in Paris November 30 to generally favorable reviews, though one French critic remarked that nothing is more frustrating than a road movie that leaves the viewer on the road. The iconic elements that go into the film as well as the sun-drenched American images of Venice, California and Tijuana may resonate with any audience looking more for atmosphere than structure.

Americano is a part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, March 1-11, 2012, staged by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and UniFrance. Public screening schedule:

*Sat., March 3, 6:30pm – WRT; *Sun., March 4, 6:45pm – IFC; *Tues., March 6, 7:30pm - BAM
*In person: Mathieu Demy