FRENCH CINEMA NOW (SFFS Nov. 19022, 2015)

[Chris Knipp]

General Forum thread.

November 19-22, 2015 the SF Film Society presents French Cinema Now, a program of 11 films, at the Vogue Theatre, San Francisco

Full details on the SFFS's website here. The ones I will review or have reviewed are marked with an asterisk. Click on titles of those to find the reviews.
The films and festival blurbs are:



Asterix – The Mansions of the Gods/Astérix – Le domaine des dieux (Louis Clichy, Alexandre Astier 2015)
All Cats Are Grey/Tous les chats sont gris (Savina Dellicour 2014)
Disorder (Alice Winocour 2015)
*Gaby Baby Doll (Sophie Letourneur 2014)
*The Great Man/Le Grand Homme (Sarah Leonor 2013)
*In the Shadow of Women/L'ombre des femmes (Philippe Garrel 2015)
*My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin 2015)
*My Friend Victoria (Jean-Paul Civeyrac 2015)
Maestro ( Léa Fazer 2014)
*The Measure of a Man/La Loi du marché (Stéphane Brizé 2015)
*Valley of Love (Guillaume Nicloux 2015)

[Chris Knipp]

VALLEY OF LOVE (Guillaume Nicloux 2015)

Showing in San Francisco at Vogue Theater as part of the SFFF's 2015 French Cinema Now series, this brings together for the first time in 35 years two icons of Gallic movies, Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu, as versions of themselves but long divorced and saddled with a recently dead son, Michael, a suicide in San Francisco, who calls them mysteriously from the grave to Death Valley where he promises to appear to them. It's very hot in Death Valley, especially for the obese Gérard, and this is a wearisome tale leading nowhere in particular, interesting mostly for the celebrity pairing, the desert scenery shot in widescreen, and Charles Ives's eerie extraterrestrial-sounding music. You would be spending your time in this series much better watching MY GOLDEN DAYS, MY FRIEND VICTORIA, THE GREAT MAN, THE MEASURE OF A MAN, or IN THE SHADOW OF WOMEN, all worthy recent French films.