PARIS MOVIE REPORT (May 2012)

[Chris Knipp]

I'm just getting started. Last night I saw Julie Delpy's new one 2 DAYS IN NEW YORK. It's half in French and half in English.

This time I'm a week ahead of Cannes. It doesn't start till May 16, so I'll only ve here for six days of it. However Jacques Audiard's RUST AND BONE, a Cannes competition film, opens in Paris May 17 so I should be able to offer a preview of this film which is certain to have US distribution. I'll give more information on Cannes in a Cannes 2012 thread.

Possibly interesting local prospects:

SISTER/L'ENFANT D'EN HAUT (Ursula Meier)
TWIXT (Francis Ford Coppola)
VIVA RIVA (2010m Djo Munga.)
WALK AWAY RENEE (Jonathan Caouette)
AVE' (Konstantin Bojanov 2012)

Others that may be of interest:

BABYCALL (Pål Sletaune) Norwegian scare flick starring Noomi Rapce of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
NANA (Valérie Massadian 2012) French
QUERELLES/MOURNING (Monteza Farshbaf 2011) Iranian


And there are thesre popular French comedies:

THE VACATIONS OF DOCUBU (Philippe de Chauveron )
LA CERISE SUR LE GATEAU (Laura Morante)
DEPRESSION ET DES POTES (Arnaud Lemort)
LE PRENON (Alexandre de La Patellière, Matthieu Delaporte )

And more. We'll see what I can find.

[Chris Knipp]

Just saw Ursula Meier's L'ENFANT EN HAUT/SISTER. It's good. I will post comments on it and 2 DAYS IN NEW YORK shortly.

[oscar jubis]

Viva Riva had a theatrical run in the US almost a year ago.

[Johann]

Keep those reviews a-comin'...

:)

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks J and O for the encouragement and tips. Viva Riva is gone now anyway but I never heard of it and might have gone; not sure. Schedules change on Wednesdays. Those were just what I saw offered at cinemas i go to, when I arrived.

[Chris Knipp]

PARIS MOVIE REPORT (MAY 2012)

Ursula Meier: SISTER/L'ENFANT D'EN HAUT (2011)


KACEY MOTTET KLEIN, LÉA SEYDOUX IN SISTER/L'ENFANT D'EN HAUT

High and low: life as a hustle

Ursula Meier is a new Swiss director who rejects the glamorous picture of her country as a place of heroic mountain climbers and perfectly functioning watches and rock solid banks. In her world, nothing is particularly certain. In her debut film, ironically called Home, a family (headed by Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet) lived along an unfinished highway and must make extraordinary accomodations when it's built. In her strong and absorbing second film, Sister, or L’Enfant d’en haut, a skinny blond boy called Simon (Kacey Moette Klein, also in Home), who claims to be 15 but is really 12, squats in an anonymous flat located in an ugly industrial plain with his shapely older sister (Léa Seydoux). They have a roof over their heads, but their lives are catch-as-catch can. Her boyfriends last no longer then her odd jobs. Simon is more the breadwinner, because he has skills. He knows a lot about skis and ski equipment. Saving up enough cash for a pass to get there, can weave his way among rich alpine ski vacationers up above on the snow-covered mountains. There, he steals any of their stuff he can get his hands on, starting with flashy new skies and pricey sunglasses. He sells them to pals or workers. With the money he buys such luxuries as pasta, so they can eat. Nothing finally is stable in their lives, or their relationship either. Or really in the world as we experience it through them. As some said of Home, this may be a prophetic vision with wider implications. But it has a tonic freedom from generalization. Everything is precipitous, kinetic, and compulsively involving. One is dropped into a new world and stays till the last heartstopping moment, which offers a haunting hint of the end of René Clément's Forbidden Games.

Meier is well served in young Klein, who was also in Home and has been said to have learned from Olivier Gourmet, during that shoot, how to embody rather than merely enact his role: when he is on screen, which is most of the time, he is totally absorbed in what he is doing and so are we. He’s slippery as a eel, and you’ll certainly never catch him "acting," a fact that underlines the director's commitment as well as his. His face is both impassive and expressive. Simon hides his feelings. In one astonishing and appalling scene toward the film's end, he e literally buys affection. Earlier, he gloms onto a rich, long-haired blond vacationer (Gillian Anderson), to whom he pretends that his parents are super-busy running a "very big hotel." He wishes she were his mother. He wishes he had one. He grabs her the way Thomas Doret, the orphaned and abandoned boy in the Dardennes’ The Kid with the Bike, grabs Cécile de France and won’t let go. But rejection is something Simon gets a lot of, and from all directions.

L’Enfant d’en haut captures a picaresque life of survival and denied lostness whose specifics we’ve never quite seen before. Like any good film of this kind this one’s spaces and shots stay with you. Simon is always getting dirty or wet and stripping and running his clothes through the washer. Only later you may realize he doesn’t’ have many clothes. Things are always coming and going. There is a row of snappy looking skis along one wall, but soon they’ll be gone. This is almost a world of barter. Simon is a good player of a game he has himself invented. But he hasn’t fully learned the rules of the world’s -- the real world's -- games. His affective life is missing and so is a moral compass. Léa Seydoux, who despite her privileged background keeps taking challenging roles, can just almost keep up with the mercurial Klein. She is cold, distant, childish, and helpless here.

The Swiss don’t often come up with a great director but Meier looks like becoming one. Her debut was the Swiss nominee for the 2009 foreign-language Oscar. Sister/L’Enfant d’en haut won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale. Meier has something social and psychological to say, and they're both related, but when you're watching the film you are in the moment. Sister, which is in French with some English dialogue, achieves something quite fresh. This is the best film I've seen in Paris this time. It debuted at the Berlinale in February, then opened in Paris April 18, 2012. I hope Meier gets the wider international audience she deserves.

Screened for this review at MK2 Hautefeuille, Paris, May 8, 2012.

Released Oct. 6, 2012 in NYC. This has 16 reviews listed on Metacritic and a collective rating of 81.

The official US trailer of SISTER is on YouTube here.

Make every effort to see this great film.