Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center 2015

[Chris Knipp]

JEAN-PAUL CIVEYRAC: MY FRIEND VICTORIA/MON AMIE VICTORIA (2014)


GUSLAGLIE MALANDA AND PIERRE ANDRAU IN MY FRIEND VICORIA

Cloying generosity

In My Friend Victoria Jean-Paul Civeyrac, who is on the faculty of the elite Paris cinema institute La Fémis, has produced a glossy, sweet, gentle adaptation of "Victoria and the Staveneys," a story by Doris Lessing about race, class, and privilege that focuses on the relationship that develops by chance between poor black girl and a well-off liberal-left white family, transposing everything from London to Paris. The eight-year-old black girl, Victoria, has no one to pick her up from her local school one afternoon when her aunt falls ill and is taken to the hospital, and Edouard of the Staveney family (now called Sauvinet), takes her home for the night. This brief experience is an awakening for the girl to luxury and comfort that stays with her; later she is astonished to learn the Sauvinets' roomy apartment is near her aunt's little one. Victoria remains as in the story "a construct rather than a character" (as a Guardian review put it) but the white family doesn't seem so clearly "skewered" as by Lessing. It's true, the mother still says she "always wanted a black child," and her husband (played by the always slightly odd Pascal Greggory) uses politically incorrect pet names, and their younger son Thomas fetishizes black women. Somehow it all seems rather adorable. A constant voice-over by Victoria's best friend adds a cozy Nouvelle Vague note. The story is beautifully told by Civerac; it's just lost some of its bite and gains French gloss.

Knowing where the Sauvinet family lives, Victoria (played as an adult by Guslagie Malanga) keeps an eye on their building and sees the younger brother Thomas (who always wanted to kiss her at school) grow up. She lacks motivation, drops out of lycée and takes a succession of jobs. It's her adopted sister and best friend Fanny (Nadia Moussa), the narrator, who goes on to study literature at the Sorbonne and wants to become a writer. When Thomas (Pierre Andrau) turns up at the record shop where Victoria has found a home, she tells him who she is, he asks her out and they become lovers. It's not a profound love but after they've drifted apart by mutual agreement when he goes off to college in the US, she discovers she is pregnant with his child, whom she chooses to have, and calls Marie. Later she has a black husband, Sam (Tony Harrisson), and they have a little boy, Charlie (Khadim Ka). Sam, a musician, whom she loves, is always away and dies in a car crash.

It isn't until seven years after Marie's birth that Victoria decides to tell Thomas he has a daughter. Not only is Thomas delighted with this news, and adoring of Marie, assuming his responsibilities as her father, but his whole family rallies round embracing both Victoria and Marie now as members of the family. Only Edouard, who's become an international big shot, is suspicious and insists on paternity being proven. But eventually he too accepts (paternity indeed being proven) and apologizes for his initial behavior. The heart of the film/story is the way the Sauvinets' means and their embrace of Marie (while ignoring Charlie) make Victoria feel her control kindly but inexorably usurped, swept away by the power of wealth, privilege and race. A crux is the old school in the neighborhood where Thomas and Edouard, then students there too, first met Victoria, and where Marie now goes. The school is a tougher choice for well-off liberals now, with weapons and drugs added, and the Sauvinets want to send Marie to a "good" school. Victoria agrees but rejects a boarding school, though knowing a boarding school is in the future.

One may feel sometimes that the Sauvinets have taken over not only Marie, but the film itself; but one has to recognize that despite Victoria's impoverished origins, she is a French native, not an immigrant with a grim past. Even if it may feel too glossy and too gentle in its depiction of the Sauvinets, its educated black woman's polished narration too lulling, My Friend Victoria is still subtly provocative. Civeyrac's well-written and edited film, coming from a somewhat schematic short story, is lightweight at its core, but richly textured and pleasing in its surfaces. It's certainly far different from his symbolic, fable-like work, exemplified by his first feature Through the Forest (NYFF 2005); evidently similar in its more realistic approach to his second feature, Young Girls in Black (2010), a film about teen angst.

My Friend Victora/Mon amie Victoria, 95 mins, debuted at Namur and showed at the London Film Festival. French theatrical release 31 December 2014 (AlloCiné press rating 3.4). Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-UniFrance joint series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema in March 2015 (North American premiere). US theatrical release 4 Dec. 2015 (NYC, IFC Center).

[Chris Knipp]

CÉDRIC KAHN: WILD LIFE/VIE SAUVAGE (2014)



Not so wild

This film, featuring one of director and actor Matthieu Kassovitz's more extensive roles in recent years, is a free adaption of the real-life story of Xavier Fortin, who became an outlaw for over a decade hiding with his two sons when his wife broke with their back-to-nature lifestyle and won a custody battle for the boys, and he refused to comply. I refer the reader to my review of another French film dealing with the same material, Jean Denizot's The Good Life/La belle vie (FCN 2014; released in France April 2014).

The French critics seem to prefer the Cédric Kahn film. Neither is an exact depiction of the events, which may be in dispute since the wife's account and the husband's differ. I think Denizot's film makes more sense, and shows more of the positive side of the boys' life in nature with their father. Both films use two sets of actors for the sons, for when they are seven and eight and when they are teenagers.

In Cédric Kahn's film, Carole (Céline Sallette and Mathieu Kassovitz) bonded because both had tired of propriety and consumerism and renounced civilization and chosen to live off the land. Calling themselves Nora and Paco, they have led a semi-nomadic life in a caravan, eventually having three sons. But Nora has tired of their itinerant lifestyle and wanting to give her their sons a conventional education and more of an opportunity to function in the world, she gains custody. But when Philippe comes to Nora/Céline's parents' house, the two younger boys escape and run off with their father, the oldest remaining behind.

The two younger boys are seven and eight when this happens, and the father takes them on the run, hiding from police, trying to continue living in nature and home-schooling the boys. This goes on for over a decade, whereupon both the boys begin to get fed up with the limitations of their life, and the father gets caught.

In Denizot's film, the boys and their father are largely on their own, and the positive side of the experience comes through better. In Kahn's film, there are a lot of times when the trio are living with hippies or punks, on the edge of a farm, and some chaos and conflict ensue. In Denizot's film, a change comes when the older boy meets a girl and falls in love with her, and finds a job, and leaves to be with her. The fugitive life has prevented him from experiencing sex, and he wants to have his own car and funds. In both films, conflicts eventually arise between the boys and their father.

Kahn takes us to the period when the father is arrested and the boys, seeking to gain his release, are confronted by their mother, who hasn't seen them for all these years. Even more than in her role of Jean Dujardin's spouse in The Connection, Céline Sallette plays a borderline hysterical, shrill wife. Her emotionality may be effective, but it's grating.

In my review of Denizot's film, I mention Sidney Lumet's moving 1988 film Running on Empty, featuring River Phoenix, which does not have spouses in conflict, but is also about a family on the run from authorities, moving from place to place and concealing their identity, and also involves an older son who reluctantly has to choose, in the interests of personal fulfillment, to break away from his fugitive family. The Running on Empty family are living in suburbs and cities, so living in nature isn't involved. But Running on Empty works better than these two French films, perhaps for the latter reason. It seems difficult to represent both the appeal of living in nature away from civilization while simultaneously showing a fugitive existence. The two work against each other. It becomes too complicated. In the case of Kahn's film, the action simply becomes too chaotic. In the focus on authentic milieux, one loses contact with where they are and what is gong on.

Nonetheless, Cédric Kahn's Wild Life has been perhaps the best critically received of all his films, and it won a special jury prize at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Certainly this theme is a fascinating one.

Wild Life/Vie sauvage, 102 mins., after its San Sebastian debut, showed at a handful of other festivals and had its French theatrical relase 29 October 2014 (AlloCiné press rating 3.9.). The 2010 Rendez-Vous featured Cédric Kahn's Regrets. The director's 2004 adaptation of Georges Simenon's tense short novel Red Lights/Feux rouges is also worth watching. Shown as part of the FSLC/uniFrance-sponsored Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at the Walter Reade Theater and the IFC Center in New York in March 2015, its North American premiere, where it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

CÉDRIC JIMENEZ: THE CONNECTION/LA FRENCH (2014)



Drug war nostalgia

There's nobody as vivid as Gene Hackman's "Popeye" Doyle or action as good as the car chase sequence with Gene Hackman in the 1971 French Connection, but Cédric Jiminez's retro policier, set in 1975, deals with the actual French side of the French Connection referred to by William Friedkin's classic. It depicts a newly appointed Marseille investigator with crusading zeal called Pierre Michel. In a change of pace for him, Michel is played by The Artist's and the droll OSS 117 spoofs' Jean Dujardin. Michel's aim, which takes all he's got, is to destroy drug lord Gaëtan 'Tany' Zampa (Gilles Lellouche). This is an epic struggle, and though in an overstated effort at parallelism, Dujardin and Lellouche look a little too alike for my taste, there are many impressive scenes. There's also some dragged-out suspense that might have benefitted by tighter editing. Despite an implied reference to Jean-Pierre Melville right at the beginning, and similarities to a number of French gangster flicks and considerable ambition, The Connection/La French is at best a good mid-range effort, similar to Olivier Marechal's flavorful genre film A Gang Story/Les Lyonais (R-V 2012), which has more fully realized gangsters. Neither of these can compete either with the adept recent French crime movies like Tell No One (or Audiard's epic gangster coming-of-ager A Prophet, not to mention his Read My Lips and The Beat My Heart Skipped) or with French polar noir classics like Rififi-- or anything by Melville. It doesn't have the drive or the neat structure or the cool. Above all, with its over-active cutting and jumpy camerawork, it lacks the cool.

The festival blurb calls her "luminous," but Céline Sallette, who plays Michel's beleagered and occasionally complaining wife, quite lacks the glamor she had in Bertrand Bonello's House of Pleasures, and as a pivotal but in screen time relatively minor character "Le Fou," Benoît Magimel is wasted. Don't get me wrong: this is a well-made film. But it has some tough acts to follow, and it offers little that is new, beyond a gangster's disco Krypton opened by the cocky Zampa (to please his wife: it loses his money) and the music to go with it.

In his Toronto review for Variety Peter Debruge comments that this "manages to be both more upbeat and more cynical than William Friedkin’s loosely fictionalized policier." He also notes this film's "disappointingly generic approach" and "hard-to-follow narrative." For this one must blame Jimenez's screenwriter, his fiancée Audrey Diwan.

The cynicism comes in revelations about how the drug cartel has thoroughly infiltrated police and local government from top to bottom. Michel is bucked every step of the way, till Mitterand's rise to power and appointment of Marseille's mayor to a key government post causes the latter to turn reformist and back up Michel's effort to find out who the leading figures are and trap them in heir heroin-producing lairs.

There is good material here surely, but it needed to be pared down into something leaner and meaner. Debruge's review may be consulted for further examples of the various ways that Jimenez's attempt at an American gangster movie falls too much into obvious and repetitious genre conventionality.

The Connection/La French, 135 mins., debuted at Toronto; showed at a few other festivals. French release 3 December 2014, AlloCiné press rating 3.7. Screened for this review as part of the UniFrance-Film Society of Lincoln Center joint series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, March 2015 (US premiere). A US theatrical release is coming courtesy of Drafthouse.

[Chris Knipp]

THOMAS LILTI: HIPPOCRATES/HIPPOCRATE (2014)


VINCENT LACOSTE AND REDA KATEB IN HIPPOCRATES

Interning in a Paris hospital

Former physician Thomas Lilti's second film deals with matters he knows from work experience as a still-practicing physician: interning at a Paris hospital. He shows it from two angles, that of a privileged newbie, boyish, curly-locked 23-year-old Benjamin (Vincent Lacoste of French Kissers, R-V 2010), whose father, Professor Barois (Jacques Gamblin) is director of the ward he comes to serve in, and a disadvantaged Algerian doctor, Abdel Rezzek (the able Reda Kateb of A Prophet, Zero Dark Thirty)), forced to remain an intern through experienced, simply because of his nationality. The group-intern musical interludes are a needless effort to liven things up: the pleasure of this little film is how low-keyed it is compared to American counterparts. Instead of trying to impress us with high-powered efforts to show doctors' and hospitals' ability to use miracle tools and save lives under duress, Lilti is interested in other things.

The primary thing is the cornerstone of the Hippocratic Oath, strongly implied here but never mentioned: "Primum non nocere," "First do no harm." That is the pivotal issue in one of two cases in which Benjamin gets involved during his first days in the hospital. Well, two, really. Since he inadvertently allows an alcoholic, homeless, violent patient the staff call "Tsunami" (Thierry Levaret) to die on his watch the first night, that is certainly harm. But it's really not his fault the required EKG wasn't done and he didn't anticipate the risk of heart attack and only ordered a painkiller for abdominal pain. The EKG machine in this hospital wasn't working. But when both his supervising doctor and his father order Benjamin to pretend the EKG was done, this leads to a threat of scandal when the dead man's former wife (Julie Brochen) repeatedly comes around with questions.

The main case Benjamin is responsible for, and the greatest issue of "Do no harm," is Madame Richard (Jeanne Cellard), an old woman with cancer, needlessly operated on, surely never likely to walk again, whose children only want her not to suffer. Here Benjamin has allowed Abdel to help him and Abdel constantly fights to have Madame Richard put on a morphine drip, while the hospital system takes her off starts tube feeding her, causing her great pain, and ignores the "Do not resuscitate" order on her file.

The issues here are clear. A third one is a new trend toward inhumane and economy-based management: the hospital director comes from business. He previously worked at Amazon. He follows draconian budget guidelines that have seriously undermined service and equipment maintenance (hence the broken EKG machine). This leads to a lively scene -- ensemble acting stands out here -- where the interns stage an impromptu revolt.

The ending is silly, if feel-good: Abdel's doom is too easily averted and Benjamin's personal upheaval is over-dramatic and too quickly resolved. Reda Kateb is wonderfully understated and thoroughly convincing, though the audience might prefer somebody more overtly sympathetic, which can be said even more for the pouty, semi-adolescent Lacoste. But it is appropriate Lilti should end on an up-note, because this is a loving and understanding if realistic portrait, notable for its gritty portrayal of the intern's digs and dining area (apparently real) covered with pornographic, especially phallic, graffiti.

Hippocrates/Hippocrate, 102 mins., French release 3 September 2014, with very positive reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.8). Shown as part of the FSLC/uniFrance-sponsored Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at the Walter Reade Theater and the IFC Center in New York in March 2015, where it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

CHRISTOPHE HONORÉ: MÉTAMORPHOSES (2014)


AMIRA AKILI AND SÉBASTIEN HIREL IN MÉTAMORPHOSES

Honoré's mythological misfire

Perhaps this is an "ambitious undertaking" as a blurb says, but Christophe Honoré's foray into classical mythology is inexplicable and hard to make much sense of. Despite a lot of nice-looking young people, who look good naked and are often seen that way, Métamorphoses is a big disappointment. It brings to the screen, obviously "reimagined," a selection of tales from Ovid’s magnum opus. Honoré, whose films have mostly been light, though melancholy, and specifically rooted in everyday Parisian life, here tackles the great Latin narrative poem of transformation, mythology, and the history of Roman civilization, transplanting it to a, mostly vague, version of present-day France. The cast, when dressed, wear a motley assortment of informal modern-day clothes. Sometimes they take to the water, and dip in a lake. Sometimes they wander the woods. Sometimes they enter the banlieue, urban projects on the periphery, where police arrive seeking, without apparent success, to quell a large gathering. From time to time classical music, ranging from antique to modern, is heard.

As the film begins, Jupiter (Sébastien Hirel) absconds with buxom schoolgirl Europa (newcomer Amira Akili). Their courtship is the film's unifying thread, which is interspersed with interludes involving Narcissus (Arthur Jacquin), Orpheus and Eurydice, Bacchus (Damien Chapelle), and the Bacchantes, with humans repeatedly changed into animals. One such scene riskily staged on the floor of a mosque shows a naked couple making love, later turning into live lions, the female violently pawing the male.

Christophe Honoré's sublimely melancholy Parisian winter musical Love Songs, a Rendez-Vous 2008 selection, is a film I never tire of, and nearly all of his films have appealed to me, some very much. I like Honoré and I too am a fan of his muse, Louis Garrel. Perhaps the director needed a break from his usual stars and milieux. But this is the kind of thing Cocteau or Rohmer could probably have done better. Honoré succeeded (in La Belle Personne with an updating of the 17th-century Princesse de Clèves of Madame de Lafayette, but ancient Rome is too far afield for him.

Métamorphoses, 105 mins., debuted at Venice 30 August 2014, showing in a dozen other international festivals. This is a perfect festival film; it has almost zero theatrical release potential. AlloCiné press rating 3.2. Shown as part of the FSLC/uniFrance-sponsored Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at the Walter Reade Theater and the IFC Center in New York in March 2015, its North American premiere, where it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

ANTOINE BARRAUD: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST/LE DOS ROUGE (2015)


BERTRAND BONELLO IN PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

In search of the monstrous

Clearly director/musician Bertrand Bonello (House of Pleasure, Saint Laurent) is at home with decadence, and it's hard to tell how much of this exploratory, improvisational mood piece, which languidly flirts with grotesquerie, horror, and eroticism, is the work of Antoine Barraud and how much might simply be inspired by Bonello himself. In it he plays "Bertrand," an "artist" (filmmaker, photographer) who spends his days meeting with with an art eccentric female historian called Célia Bhy (alternately played -- inexplicably -- by either Jeanne Balibar or Géraldine Pailhas) chatting and visiting museums, where he's looking for a work of art, presumably a painting, that exhibits the qualities of the "monstrous," which will be a central element in his next film. In off-and-on conversations in various venues Bertrand and the two Célias discuss Diane Arbus as well as Bacon, Leon Spilliaert, Caravaggio, Theodore Chasseriau, Hans Bellmer, Bosch, and others. There are particular viewings and discussions of an 18th-century Brazilian painting by Joachim da Rocha of a slave with a skin disease and Balthus' large early portrait Alice dans le miroir (in the Pompidou Museum). Bertrand's wife is Barbe, Barbara (Joana Preiss), and from time to time he chats with "Pascal" (Pascal Greggory). Meanwhile he is developing red spots on his back that don't hurt, but keep spreading. About these he has an odd consultation with a friend who's a retired doctor, played by Barbet Schroeder. Is Bertrand's preoccupation with the grotesque showing up as a skin rash? The doctor isn't interested in answering, and doesn't even look. Apparently Bertrand is a victim of Stendhal Syndrome, "a psychosomatic disorder that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to an experience of great personal significance, particularly viewing art" (Wikipedia).

Bonello, on screen, is a shortish man with birdlike features, frail, boyish, slightly androgynous. A small unprepossessing director playing himself, energetic, with a quizzical, deadpan manner: one thinks of Woody Allen. And why would there not be a French Woody Allen, since the French admire the actual Woody so much? But the self-conscious intellectualism of the dialogue and Bonello's far-off, slightly sad look make one forget Woody. There is none of his quick-wittedness and humor.

This film is moody, atmospheric, beautifully photographed. But its scenes move slowly, and lack a discernible progression, and its two hours-plus run-time starts to feel long.

One lugubrious motif, among several, is an interminable interview, never completed satisfactorily, with a shy young gay man who appears to have a "thing" for Bertrand, and whose admiration Bertrand takes advantage of to pose him for stills shot with a Hasselblad posing semi-nude wearing a bra, after Diane Arbus. In one late episode Bertrand takes the train somewhere, perhaps Germany (Frankfurt?) with one of his girlfriends (a flirtation with Célia has begun) who disappears in the modern art museum they visit, and he must return to Paris on the train alone. The director, Antoine Barraud, and Bonello, play all sorts of games, which add to a surreal mood.

This film seems to have been sponsored by, or produced in collaboration with, several art museums. Unlike two such productions, produced by Musée d'Orsay, Olivier Assayas' (Summer Hours) and Hou Hsiao-Hsien's (Flight of the Red Balloon), which are superb (and one may also think of Jem Cohen's appealing Museum Hours), this darker and more peculiar film will appeal to a smaller, more special audience. A voice-over is provided by Charlotte Rampling. Bonello not only stars in the film, his first such performance, but composed the score; and in one scene he performs on an unusual and wonderful instrument.

According to an article in Variety, Barraud is "a tireless producer-director with a hectic one-decade career," and has "helmed a long series of experimental shorts on figures such as Kenneth Anger, Shuji Terayama and Koji Wakamatsu," as well as one previous feature, Les Gouffres ("The Sinkholes") with Nathalie Boutefeu and Mathieu Amalric (Locarno 2012).

Portrait of the Artist/Le dos rouge, 127 mins., is scheduled to debut at Berlin 2015. It is scheduled for French theatrical release 22 April 2015. Screened for this review as part of the March 2015 edition of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-UniFrance joint series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.

[Chris Knipp]

FRÉDÉRIC TELIER: SK1/L'AFFAIRE SK1 (2014)


RAPHAËL PERSONNAZ AND OLIVIER GOURMET IN SK1

Catching and trying a suspected serial killer the French way

Frédéric Tellier's debut feature is an elaborate polar-noir based on Patricia Tourancheau’s non-fiction book about "SK1" (Serial Killer 1,) the notorious French '80's-'00's Guy Georges case involving a series of rapes and brutal murders of pretty young women. Since it depicts a prolonged and frustrating police investigation, it's roughly speaking a Zodiac-style film. But it has cops and not newsmen doing the investigating, and it's resolved with DNA testing. In the foreground is a handsome young Paris Quei des Orfèvres police HQ inspector, whose progress and growing obsession we follow. There is the wife who feels abandoned, the competing older cop who usurps the case, and the mellow mentor. Tellier's use of such familiar elements doesn't mean this isn't a successful film. With an excellent cast, complex mise-en-scene, and constant action, this is an engrossing police thriller with a distinctive French flavor.

There are two overlapping chronologies. We follow "Charlie" -- the moniker assigned to the rookie detective (Raphaël Personnaz)-- as he comes under the wing of Bougon (Olivier Gourmet) and faces the case's takeover by possessive oddball officer Jensen (Thierry Neuvic). This is a story that covers a decade. But early on the film also joins a two-person team of defense lawyers, with a young advocate (William Nadylam) and the higher profile partner Maître Frédérique Pons (Nathalie Baye) whom he persuades to join him on the case, with her much more reserved about the prisoner's possible innocence.

We also get vivid glimpses and volatile courtroom testimony from the prisoner, (Adama Niane) who has confessed to police interrogators, yet now vehemently protests his innocence -- despite substantial jail time and conviction of rape. Colorful courtroom scenes of a very Mediterranean style of justice alternate with complicated police procedural stuff that includes plenty of images of bloody, nude young female victims (something David Fincer's film notably lacked). Eventually toward the film's end the two story lines and chronologies come together, just as "Fred" Pons and "Charlie" meet and express their mutual respect outside the Quai des Orfèvres building.

We don't know at first whether the killer has been caught or not, though the concurrent focus on the trial somewhat dampens the suspense of the investigations and turns them into flashbacks. What makes this movie interesting is the combination of camaraderie and infighting and the constant grim tastes of the rape-murders, giving us a strong sense of how obsessive such investigations can be and why. Tellier and his writers do an excellent job of keeping all the threads and characters clear. Personnaz is dashing but not the most emotionally rich of French actors -- but the always gritty Olivier Gourmet and the soulful Nathalie Baye make up for that. We may remember Baye as a cop working with an appealing rookie in Xavier Beauvois' touching cop film Le Petit Lieutenant (R-V 2006) -- one of her four César performances. As the orphaned, life-long victim suspect, Adama Niane is interesting, both sensitive and scary, and this is a terrific role for the actor.

SK1/L’Affaire SK1, 120 mins., debuted 24 August 2014 at Angoulême). French release 7 January 2015 to generally good reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.8) Some French critics found it striking, others thought its Zodiac à la française style a bit too cold and mechanical. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC/UniFrance-sponsored Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at the Walter Reade Theater and the IFC Center in New York in March 2015, its North American premiere.