Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2020

[Chris Knipp]

CÉDRIC KLAPISCH: SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE/DEUX MOI (2019)


ANA GIRARDOT IN DEUX MOI

Depression meets rom-com in Klapisch's Paris-set new film

This film begins with a device that's at once neat and self-defeating: it continually oscillates between two lonely young people in Paris, a guy and a girl, with alienating jobs and resulting psychological issues who live next door and whose lives are in all ways parallel and depicted that way, but who don't come together or even notice each other till near the end. One can play with the parallelisms cinematically with shifts and cross-cutting, but where are you going to find depth working this timeline? The bulk of the film might almost be better as an abstract, wordless study, fifteen or twenty good minutes long. But we're dragged along for 110. This is one of Klapisch's least appealing movies. But given his innate curiosity and warmth, it has moments.

As Nicolas Schaller writes in Le Nouvel Observateur this is a director always chasing the zeitgeist who's made his "most lackluster" film in search of its anomie. Klapisch (Schaller goes on) has always oscillated between "truths and clichés," "poetic apercus and ad slogans," the "profoundly ordinary and the no-big-deal." But luckily, he adds, "there are the actors." They are known and they are attractive. But by definition things drag on for ages before they "come together." We are miles away from the ebullience of L'Auberge espagnole and Russian Dolls.

Klapisch has recently directed a couple of episodes of the popular Netflix series "Call My Agent" ("Dix pour cent") and he's recruited a couple of alumni for key roles, new French movie it boy François Civil as the depressed and insomniac warehouse worker Rémy Pelletier, and Camille Cotin (Andréa Martel in the show) as the shrink whom the similarly sad and listless young woman cancer researcher, Mélanie Brunet (Ana Girardot), is sent to by her doctor to consult. Rémy (an initially odd-seeming role for the usually affable and energetic Civil), who has a panic attack on the Métro and collapses after an unsuccessful rock climbing practice session, is sent to a shrink too, a chilly one who meets patients in what looks like a dirty hallway. He's played by the triumphantly glum François Berléand. Camille Cottin's office is decorative and cozy, with a Freud-style couch, no less. The contrast is playful given the other parallelisms and the shrink sessions provide background on the separated pair's lives and personalities, his survival guilt, her pain and the early departure of her father.

Anyway, Mélanie and Rémy are being emotionally prepared, perhaps cleansed, for their getting together, which the modern generation's dependence on electronic interfaces like Facebook and Tinder do nothing to advance. This point, and the clichés about the impersonal nature of city life, show Klapisch being a bore. As the anonymous Variety critic writes, this director's "notions of technology dependency and urban malaise aren’t new or insightful anymore."

Klapisch isn't wrong in suggesting that the nearby Middle Eastern market where both shop, with its tightly packed offerings and playfully combative but efficient Arab family team, could be a learning place and neighborhood contact point. The two live in a low-rent district near the Gare du Nord, and this provides chilly urban landscapes that provide welcome respite from conventional images of the City of Light.

It's made clear that both characters have warmth to give. Mélanie cuddles with her girlfriends who introduce her to social media hookup possibilities. Rémy gets only incomprehension from his family in the French alps, but he's adorable playing with a cuddly white kitten foisted on him by a neighbor. Little by little there are hints. He smells her cigarette smoke, then hears her singing along with a song in the tub. And then when their shrinks have shaped them up, in the last ten minutes: Kompa class. Et voilà! Meet cute. FIN.

Someone, Somewhere/Deux moi ("Two Me's), 110 mins., debuted Aug. 2019, Angoulême. It opened in multiple countries Sept. 2019-Mar. 2020. French release 11 Sept. , AlloCiné press rating 3.7 (74%). A Distrib Films release. The Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center was ended early due to the COVID-19 pandemic before I could see it, but it is now available as pay-for-view via Meetropolitan Virtual Theaters (Apr. 27, 2020).

Scheduled Rendez-Vous showings were:
Monday, March 9, 9:00pm (originally to include a Q&A with Cédric Klapisch)
Saturday, March 14, 6:30pm

[Chris Knipp]

NICOLAS VANIER: SPREAD YOUR WINGS/DONNE MOI DES AILES (2019)


LOUIS VAZQUEZ IN DONNE MOI DES AILES

113m
English, French, and Norwegian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Sulky teenager Thomas (Louis Vazquez) dreads spending summer with his father (Jean-Paul Rouve), an environmentalist in a rural, wifi-less hamlet. Much to his surprise, he grows attached to his father’s new project: an ambitious plan to train a flock of endangered geese to follow a new migratory path, avoidant of pollution and human-made threats. The duo embarks on a journey to the Arctic circle with an ultralight glider, which they’ll fly to guide the geese along their new route. Writer-director Nicolas Vanier (Loup) channels his passion for nature into this tale of our civic responsibility to protect it, a freewheeling adventure of both suspense and enlightening civic action.
French release 9 Oct., AlloCiné press rating 3.3 ((66%).
Sunday, March 15, 1:30pm

[Chris Knipp]

RABAH AMEUR-ZAÏMECHE: SOUTH TERMINAL/TERMINAL SUD (2019)


RAMZY BEDIA IN TERMINAL SUD

96m
The haunting, experiential latest from Rabah Ameur Zaïmeche (Story of Judas, Rendez-Vous 2016) centers on a doctor (Ramzy Bedia) in nineties Algeria, which is rapidly becoming a war zone. He spends his days tending to the wounded and comforting the suffering, yet maintains a stoic neutrality toward the ambiguous conflict, resolving that his job is simply to help those in pain. But once he starts receiving death threats and horrors begin to encroach on his own life, his moral position is shaken. As each day’s work wears on the doctor, the inhumanity of the violence turns his life into a purgatory, pushing him to question whether or not more drastic action might be called for.
French release 20 Nov., AlloCiné press 3.4 (68%).
Wednesday, March 11, 4:00pm
Sunday, March 15, 4:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

CÉDRIC KAHN: HAPPY BIRTHDAY/FÊTE DE FAMILLE (2019)


CATHERINE DENEUVE IN FÊTE DE FAMILLE

101m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Both buoyant and bittersweet, this perceptive ensemble piece directed by Cédric Kahn (whose Wild Life played in Rendez-Vous 2015) and headlined by Catherine Deneuve tests the ties that bind a family. Deneuve is matriarch Andréa, whose family comes together to celebrate her 70th birthday. Everything seems to be in order with her strait-laced son (Kahn) and his family, as well as with her more free-spirited son (Non-Fiction’s Vincent Macaigne), who plans to document the gathering on video. But when her mentally unstable daughter Claire (Emmanuelle Bercot, Cannes Best Actress winner for My King) reappears after three years, old resentments surface, not least from the teenager (Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Luàna Bajrami) Claire abandoned. Kahn coaxes mood swings of warmth and vitriol from his cast in a film that takes place over the course of one hectic day.
French release 4 Sept., Allociné presds rating 3.3 (66%).
Thursday, March 12, 9:15pm
Sunday, March 15, 6:15pm