Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2022

[Chris Knipp]

CHRISTOPHE HONORÉ: GUERMANTES (2021)



Between the scenes of a play that. . . almost wasn't?

Though this film has been a bit better received by the French critics, it's something from director Christophe Honoré like his 2014 Metamorphoses(R-V 2015) that takes him out of his usual zone, with different subject matter and cast, sketchy structure, and limited success. This one is indirectly about the pandemic, as well as a foray into impressionistic documentary territory. It also shows a side of Honoré the French know but his Anglophone fans are unaware of.: besides being a filmmaker he's also a novelist, playwright and theater director. He's shown his attraction to literary classics before. His film La Belle Personne is a modern adaptation of the 17th century novel by Madame de La Fayette, La Princesse de Clèves. Other plays he's authored include the 2012 Nouveau Roman, which brings to life novelists of that school; and Les Idoles, which celebrates writers who died of AIDS. They may be interesting, and so may Honoree's Proust play. But this film, despite its ostensible celebration of a large cast of actors, has the feel of a directorial vanity project.

The title Guermantes refers to a stage adaptation based around volume three of Marcel Proust's seven volume In Search of Lost Time, Guermantes Way (Le Côté de Guermantes). Honoré was brought in as a guest director at the French national theater, the Comédie Française, to put on his work. A New York Times article (Oct. 8, 2020) shows it was performed (from September 30 to November 14, 2020, as a web page of the Comédie Française also indicates. But in the film, rehearsals have been interrupted by lockdowns and reversals only to have a council of the theater vote for it to be permanently shut down. In the film, the cast members, or some of them, elect to camp out in the Théatre Marigny, where the Comédie Française had been temporarily moved during renovation of its main stage, and continue rehearsing, just for the experience.

The film purports to be an impressionistic, meandering (and a little over-long) record of this confusing experience for the actors, in which Honoré partly participates. There are a few moments from the play itself, notably the death of an old lady, which is hard on the actress doing the dying; a conversation between two men where a young third man manipulates a boom mike, with Honoré carefully managing the arrangement of the three figures. And there is a big, rather drunken outdoor picnic at a long table using plates stolen from the theater where various actors "act out." Though hardly any anecdote carries from scene to scene, we get ample evidence of the esprit de corps that binds these formidable performers and also the petty backstabbing and games they play.

From the relatively few glimpses we get of it, it's clear Honoré's Proust adaptation is modern and inventive and makes use of cinematic effects. Personal stuff is going on with actors. An actress is overheard in an emotional phone farewell, which the other cast members think is her resignation from the company. But when this is spread about she tells them they're wrong, that it was her longtime psychiatrist she was ending the relationship with. There are also some interesting moments with Honoré, who seems a kind of cherished outsider among the privileged actors. Not surprisingly, there's some gay stuff, involving him and others, including an older actor's much younger guy called Léolo (Léolo Victor-Pujebet). At the boisterous picnic Honoré withdraws, huddled on the floor (as he sometimes is), and asks one of the actors to say goodbye to the actors because he doesn't want to rejoin them. At a candid moment he says he never attends performances because he feels jealous of the public's being allowed to share an experience that previously was for him alone.

In what AlloCiné ranks as the most favorable review of this film, by Jean-Marc Lalianne in Les Inrockuptibles (Sept. 28, 2020), the writer declares "Christophe Honoré has created a beautiful poetic essay on the endangerment and resistance of art in times of health catastrophe." He asks "Is rehearsing a show that you know will never be performed in public, continuing the work just for the sake of it, a waste of time? And what is the point?" Honoré, he says, was "making a film of the tumult encountered by his show on Proust caught between two confinements." And he declares the director here "orchestrates a reconquest, an endless expansion of the powers of representation spreading its euphoric seeds over our sick world." He acknowledges that Honoré is "playing himself" - that this is an improvisatory fiction using cast members, not a documentary.

Generally Proust has defeated all adaptors, and that's arguably what has happened again here. But the Proust adaptation is only local color, making way for the main focus which is - what? As somewhat naive fan of Proust and his famous long novel, I might have preferred a film that was simply a transcription the play itself, to this glamorous but sketchy invention of actors playing actors. Perhaps in some future time when the pandemic is finally a thing of the past we may welcome a poetic evocation like this, of a period when time was "lost" in senses different from Proust's and much more mundane. But that would be with a total reedit.

Guermantes, 139 mins., debuted at Deauville Sept.11;, 2021 and was broadcast on French TV Sept. 24. It was included in the Mar. 3-13, 2022 UniFrance-Film at Lincoln Center Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.

[Chris Knipp]

AURÉLIA GEORGES: SECRET NAME/LA PLACE D'UNE AUTRE (2021)


LYYNA KHOUDRI AND SABINE AZEMA IN SECRET NAME

Fond deception

Drawn from Wilkie Collins novel The New Magdalen, Aurélia Georges' Secret Name/La place d'une autre is a Victorian melodrama that becomes a thriller and ends with emotional sweetness. The picaresque protagonist Nélie Laborde (the quietly protean Lyna Khoudri) starts as a guttersnipe, goes from streetwalker to maid and back, then, urged by a lesbian recruiter, joins the Red Cross and braves the front as a litter-bearer and nurse's aide in the early days of World War I. It is there the thriller begins when she encounters Rose Juillet (Maud Wyler), a penniless Swiss woman of gentle birth whose dying father has given her a letter of introduction to a wealthy French woman, to whom she is going to offer her services as a live-in reader. When Rose is apparently struck dead by a mortar wound, Nélie becomes Rose and is allowed free passage as a Swiss to join Eléonore de Lengwil (Sabine Azéma), a rich lady in provincial France. Later, Rose will turn out not to have been so dead after all.

How can the guttersnipe Nélie become the well-born Rose? Perhaps Rose's being from Switzerland, where Eléonore has not traveled, covers any roughnesses of accent; but above all, Nélie has always been, in fact, a great reader, and so her vocabulary and knowledge are good. She arrives with Victor Hugo in her little satchel, and her literacy wins over Eléonore, who will be ever more in her thrall.

We must add that this is a film that uses its budget well. The scenes all are richly realized. One of the stars is Eléonore's big rectangular ivy-draped mansion. When she stages a social with a pianist and singer, the fine dresses of the ladies, a matter of laces and overlays, are subtly magnificent. No matter that they may look all designed by the same stylist, costume designer Agnès Noden. Nélie, now "Rose," dresses simply, but Khoudri (I said she was protean) now has a proper late-Victorian look - and body-shape. Azéma, after all those Rivette films with wildly flaming hair, now wears a tight network of blonde-gray braids and a mild expression, but her face becomes a mirror or altering moods when we learn to read it, mostly pleasure and approval as she grows to dote on Rose.

Being a melodrama means emotions never stop being on edge and the tension never lags. Aurélia Georges, whose script with Maud Amneline is most attentive not only to the significance of class but to the vulnerable position of women in World War I Europe, directs a distinctive group of supporting male cast members, especially the relatively unfamiliar Laurent Poitrenaux as Julien, the local minister and Eleanor's nephew, whose comings and goings grow worrisome for "Rose" because as his sermons show, he sees the complexities of things. Poitrenaux is a pleasingly odd and ambiguous figure. So is a plump, insecure police commissioner (Olivier Broche) later on.

But it's the women who count. Azéma impresses for her warmth and subtlety as the goodhearted but stern woman of wealth, and Khoudri is continually relatable as the female picaresque gutter-to-posh-to-gutter heroine whose intelligence, good looks, and proclivity for reading enable her to step into the role of an impoverished young woman of good birth. Before we find this implausible we must consider that lonely rich old ladies may often be subconsciously crying out to be duped by the right person; people are conned because they want to be. Rose," who never does or says anything unkind or devious, likes Eléanore, and above all loves living in the security and comfort of Eléanore's ample home.

Cahiers du Cinéma, with the most enthusiastic review according to AlloCiné, admires the film for its "classicism" and a narrative structure whose straightforward "linearity" produces a "pure emotion" in the viewer. Indeed everything narrows down to the sentimentalism of loving sympathy in Eléonore de Lengwil, who wants to adopt Nellie even when she knows she is an imposter.

Is this, finally, a study of class, of morality, of identity, or just a suspenseful crime story? With Collins' tale and still with this updated period adaptation, it's all working together. In his Variety review ("An Imposter Shakes Class Hierarchy"), Jay Weissberg argues that due to the decreased importance of class today, Georges is obliged to subordinate Collins' original theme of class to the moral issue: Nellie's willful exploitation of the kind rich lady, Eleonore, who trusts her and loves her so much in her pose as "Rose." He also finds the complete success of the deception somewhat implausible.

Actually Nellie's success as "Rose" is shown to be very much a matter of luck. She and Eleanore click. "Rose" discovers a natural ability to slip into a new, higher role - we've seen her go through a lot of changes early on - and Eléanore wants this new relationship to be right and true. And thus the impersonation works beyond "Rose's" wildest expectations. This heightens the suspense, because we know it's too good to be true.

It's clear that the distinction of the film owes a lot not only to the classy mise-en-scène, costumes, and World War I era atmosphere, but landing Sabine Azéma in the key role of Eléonore de Lengwil, the well-off lady the gutter-born young Nellie (Lyna Khoudri) deceives. Khoudri, the at-risk picaaresque heroine, has a neutral, willing, cuddliness it's easy to identify with. Notice the tremendously suspenseful scene (though it's not completed with total deftness) where she's seen from behind, naked, vulnerable, and beautiful, in a bath waiting for hot water to be brought to her, and the real Rose approaches.

There is a deep irony too about the real Rose and the vicissitudes she encounters when she attempts to challenge her impersonator in the face of "Rose's" firmly established position of the darling of the lady of the house - a sequence that eventually drags us into the vagaries of the pre-war era mental health treatment scene. Individual scenes in multiple milieux sparkle because of the film's assured mise-en-scène. Wait for the long alley Rose, now back to Nélie, traverses with a gleaming white car parked at the end of it. It's a beautifully set up emotional climax and surprise framed with shiny hardware and dramatic space.

Secret Name/lLa place d'une autre, 112 mins., debuted at Locarno Aug. 8, 2021 (reviewed there by Weissberg), shown at a few small European festivals. French theatrical release Jan. 19, 2022 (AlloCiné press rating 3.4.

[Chris Knipp]

CONSTANCE MEYER: ROBUST/ROBUSTE (2021)


DÉBORAH LUKUMUENA IN ROBUST

Waltz of sleepy titans

The obvious appeal of Constance Meyer's debut feature is that it dares to be understated and to have little in the way of an evident agenda. We can relax and enjoy little details, get lost in it the way one does in a familiar classic. It could be considered unambitious, but the director has taken on two heavy hitters for her two-hander relationship portrait, a French mega-star and a powerful up-and-comer.

But Depardieu is just being a version of himself (though he's called "Georges," as cover). Déborah Lukumuena, who costarred in the excellent Divines, here as Aïssa, Georges' temporary minder while his regular man Friday is away for a few weeks, is a powerhouse but plays it very low-keyed.

So nothing is happening, except the usual things: Georges is bored with being in movies; frequently loses scripts; eats all the time; shows up late, drunk; hangs out and feels lonely and isolated in his unique, luxurious house; has attacks of terrifying (real or imagined) tachycardia. He gives his little boy a cute puppy, but then the boy's mother won't let him keep it at her house and Georges is stuck with it. Aïssa goes about her wrestling practice, and has a match. She hangs with a woman friend and she has a friend with benefits, Eddy (Lucas Mortier). And in following these activities we hang with this odd couple and see them get comfortable with each other until, when it's time for Aïssa to let Lalou (Steve Tientcheu) take over minder duties again, George doesn't want her to go.

There is no central action or climactic moment to remember. One remembers instead some moments, like the bad scene in the Asian restaurant with Eddy and Aïssa, who were starting to have a good time when Georges, drunk, somewhat implausibly arrives to get the house key he has lost, and sits down and wears out a welcome he never had: this discomfort of this. One remembers Aïssa's bulk, because Déborah Lukumuena is big too, strong enough to knock Georges back with a punch and pull his whole frame back to relieve his tachycardia, another image remembered, because repeated. I remember Eddy's face, shown repeatedly in closeup, changeable yet basically blank. Unfortunately - because this is the only element that's unnecessary - one remembers George's huge deep-blue tank containing rare fish that live in total darkness. This flowery bit of decor seems a bit de trop, but it's the only thing that is.

Jessica Kiang in Variety, one of many generous reviews of the film, begins with very broad irony saying the main character, "an aging movie star with a reputation for uninsurable off-set shenanigans" is "played in a staggering coup of against-type casting" by Depardieu. Yes it is obvious, and the actor has played himself before. But he doesn't always and it's not necessarily easy, or anything you can do without a lot of experience. As for Déborah Lukumuena, there is something curiously alive and magnetic about her, warm, expectant, coiled, genial, humorous. She is very relaxed but a flick of her eyes can be memorable. Above all, since this is necessary for a movie "about nothing," both these great actors are constantly fun to watch.

And so indeed Robust (thanks, for once, for an English title that doesn't reinvent) is a most promising debut - even though it risks feeling a little ho-hum, a little anticlimactic. But this is a wise and promising film.

Robust/Robuste, 95 mins., opening film at Cannes Critics' Week July 7, 2021. Only a few other festivals (Bari, Chicago), French theatrical release Mar. 2, 2022 (AlloCiné press rating 3.6 (72%). Screened for this review as part of the FLC-UniFrance Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (Mar. 3-13, 2022).

[Chris Knipp]

AXELLLE ROPERT: PETITE SOLANGE (2021)


JADE SPRINGER IN PETITE SOLANGE

Ropert's drama of a teen's sufferings from her parents' divorce is a misfire

Axelle Ropert is esteemed by some French film fans for her work with her partner, oddball writer-director and actor Serge Bozon (La France, Tip Top), Her two first significant features as a director, The Wolberg Family and Miss and the Doctors are odd but interesting and also beautiful, with good scores and cinematography by Celine Bozon (Serge’s sister); her new one, Petite Solange lacks these virtues and is mostly just odd and surreal. Viewers/critics who simply find it a touching portrait of a teen girl's sufferings at her parents' breakup seem to be seeing the film they want to see, ignoring many oddities, wrong notes, and failures to connect. The costumes are off and the score is conventional and intrusive. Axelle Ropert has gone astray here.

Solange (Jade Springer) is a 13-year-old girl who lives with her older brother Romain (Grégoire Montana-Haroche) and her parents. Mum Aurelia (Léa Drucker) is an actress. Dad Antoine (Philippe Katherine) has a guitar shop. After 20 years of marriage, however, the parents' love seems to be fading. They quarrel, and eventually Antoine, terribly sad, starts sleeping on the living room couch. He assures Solange it's temporary; it isn't. In the course of a year, the couple decides to divorce and sell the house.

When the fighting stats, brother Roman sees the trouble coming and goes on a long trip to Spain. Solange hasn't that option and just stays in the heart of the family and suffers silently.

In the way Ropert illustrates these conventional developments she is even odder and more surreal than before. The casting signals this. Léa Drucker, who resembles a lower keyed Sandrine Kimberlain, plays her role of a moderately successful actress in the provincial world of Nantes as always cheerful and hopeful but a little insecure. Philippe Katherine is a peculiar dad. Jay Weissberg who reviews this film for Variety ("No Surprise That Divorce Is Hard on Teens in French Drama") thinks the actor resembles David Crosby; but if so, he's David Crosby coming apart at the seams, always seeming on the verge of tears. He is only safe among his guitars. His speech early on at the couple's 20th anniversary celebration is peculiar: notably, his description of his two kids bears no relation to reality. The problem with Jade Springer is that she has a sad, drawn look from the start, so her decline holds no surprise and awakens no sympathy. She's a sad sack who gets sadder.

Jade is held in check by the filmmaker and the examples of her coming apart are feeble. She tries to connect with a cool boy with long hair who Solange and her best friend Lili (Marthe Léon) both long for. He noodles around on an electric keyboard at school and they agree they don't like the noodling but they like him. Solange talks to him a few times and longs to get him a deal on a keyboard for home from her dad. But this goes nowhere. Solange shoplifts a red brassiere much too large for her (this awkwardly calls attention to how flat-chested she is) and successfully begs off the shop attendant from calling her parents.

The climax (though it's a letdown) comes when she's made to read a Verlaine poem aloud in French class and stumbles doing it and looks even more pathetic than usual. Later the teacher even calls her parents to tell them their daughter has started weeping while reading Verlaine. But in the scene, she does not appear to weep. The film is full of little disconnects like this. And again, so what? Maybe she's just moved by poetry.

The final sequence, where Solange declares, very unconvincingly, that she has come to terms with her parents' being apart now, may be the strangest of all. It seems Solange has been somewhere else but this is not made clear. She shows up at the now sold, near-empty house and sits in the patio with her brother and parents. They say she should not have come. Why they would say that and what's been going on must be on the cutting-room floor.

As several reviewers have pointed out, notably Weissberg, the film's time is out of joint. That is, while its current status is signaled by cell phones and other contemporary details, the get-up of the people is reminiscent of the eighties, when Ropert grew up - perhaps signaling, awkwardly, an autobiographical element. It's just another way the film is off-kilter.

This is a stilted, airless, disjointed film that appears conventional on the surface but just a little below is slightly off key. The coming-of-age plot-line lacks the interesting twists and turns of Ropert's more complex earlier films to drive toward a simplistic message about teen life, yet that message is weakly conveyed because the teen in question doesn't change strongly or visibly enough. And why is the family's name Maserai, which Solange tells someone is the mark of an Italian luxury car? It's just another of the film's inexplicable red herrings.

Petite Solange, 86 mins., debuted at the fest of odd flicks, Locarno, Aug. 21, 2021, showing also at Vienna. It opened in France Feb. 2, 2021 and was screened for this review as part of the UniFrance-FLC Rendez-Vous series (Mar. 7, 2022 showing). No Metascore yet but the average so far is 63%. AlloCiné press rating 3.6 (72%); audience rating 2.7 (54%).

[Chris Knipp]

MATTHIEU AMALRIC: HOLD ME TIGHT/SERREE MOI FORT (2021)


VICKY KRIEPS IN HOLD ME TIGHT

This melodrama is a showcase of editing tricks

SPOILER ALERT: From the review by Marin Gérard in Criticat (translated from the French): "From the outset, the film takes the form of a sometimes incomprehensible whirlwind of more or less connected vignettes, but it really comes into its own when, after about forty minutes, we learn what it is all about: an impossible mourning."

Matthieu Amalric still will always be primarily remembered as an actor both in American blockbusters and in art films by Arnaud Desplechin, but with a lot of short films under his belt, he's also assembled some admirable and celebrated outings as a director, including On Tour , which won him the Best Actor award at Cannes, and the beautiful,, dreamy homage to a French songstress, Barbara. Hold Me Tight, surprisingly, since it's so cinematic, adapted by Amalric himself from a play (Je reviens de loin by Claudine Galea), stars the actress Vicky Krieps, who came to notice with Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread and seems to be the It Girl of late, having featured in Mia Hansen-Love's much-admired Bergman Island also last year. She has the perfect blend here, it would seem, of fire and ice. Clarice, her character lost and wracked with stifled emotional pain, running away from her life, but protesting it was not she who fled.

What is she talking about? Well, the "impossible mourning" mentioned above. One can love this film and yet find its central emotions leave one unmoved. This I think is because of two things. The subtlety of the puzzle-composition of those "more or less connected vignettes," which include past, present, and imagined, only temporarily masks a conventional weepy melodrama. Second, the emotion fades because the film is not so much in love with Clarisse, her family, and her grief as with its own facile artistry, its beautiful score, the complexity of its editing, the interweaving of threads, the overlay of voices.

Marc (Belgian actor Arieh Worthalter), Clarisse's husband, works in a factory, but mostly is at home, where his wife and his son Paul (Sacha Ardilly), who as a teenager ( Aurèle Grzesik) savors his dad's new tattoos, and has him sketch one on him; the camera and Clarisse admire his hairy chest. Paul is a regular boy, who gets a tree house approached by pulley. His older sister Lucie (Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet; later Juliette Benveniste) is another story, a talented pianist, whose ambitions form a central thread of the interwoven "whirlwind" of "more or less connected vignettes."

The only other central character is the family's late-70's maroon station wagon, flowing through many scenes and never aging - which gets its moment, appropriately at an imposing gas station, its pumps spaced wide apart, where another customer admires it. "What about me?" says Clarisse. "What am I, a stuffed tomato?" "Cars are just my thing," the innocent fellow protests.

It appears the girls are doing at least a good deal of their own piano playing. Somewhere at some point on TV there appears by chance a film about Martha Argerich, surely the most important woman pianist and a force of nature and worthy inspiration for any girl with talented fingers. Does Lucie flaunt a mop of grey-dyed hair later in homage? Are there rapid teasing references about mothers and daughters of pianist blending Martha and Clarisse? This film, complex and cerebral to a fault, is in love with its own cleverness. It is glamorous and sexy about tragedy, as movies can be. One can enjoy its initially quite incomprehensible flow, and identify a tiny bit with Vicky Krieps, but then one may find the cleverness has buried the people, events, and emotion that have turned into the filmmakers' playthings.

Hold Me Tight/Serre moi fort, 97 mins., debuted in the Premières section at Cannes Jul. 21, 2021 and was included in a half dozen important international festivals, Jerusalem, Brussels, Hamburg, Busan, Vienna, and Rotterdam. Screened for this review as part of the Mar. 2022 UniFrance-FLC Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. Its FRench theatrical release Sept. 8, 2021 led to a generally favorable reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.8, 76%).

[Chris Knipp]

JACQUES AUDIARD: PARIS, 13TH DISTRICT 13/LES OLYMPIADES, PARIS 13e (2021)


LUCIE ZHANG, MAKITA SAMBA IN PARIS, 13TH DISTRICT

Émilie meets Camille who is attracted to Nora, who crosses paths with Amber. But it's more than that. . .

Audiard undercuts - a bit - the effect of his film about young thirty-somethings as involving entertainment by doing an anthology picture - shot in classic, romantic black and white - with four or five different stories linked by a common - built up, high rise, unglamorous - arrondissement of Paris, the 13th, in the outer south-east segment of the city. But by this structure the film provides more of what it seeks, perhaps: a panorama of a younger generation of French people.

And this tradeoff isn't as limiting as it might be because the skilled writers, headed by scenarist-director Céline Sciamma, working with the graphic novels of Japanese-American artist Adrian Tomine, provide story lines that intermingle: the two characters introduced at first are threaded through the whole. These are Émilie Wong (Lucie Zhang) and Camille Germain (Makita Samba), an Asian woman raised in France with Taiwanese family background and a young black man respectively (wherever his people are from, his father, played by Pol White, speaks fluent, idiomatic French too).

Émilie takes in Camille as a flatmate, and they promptly start having energetic sex; then things slough off and coolness begins on her part when he, who's busy with his university studies, says "Not tonight." Then we meet the cheerful Nora, from Bordeaux like one of the co-writers, Léa Mysius, a white woman, very enthusiastic to have found an apartment 10 minutes from the faculty of law of a branch of the Sorbonne. Nora is played by Noémie Merlant, star of Sciamma's 2019 Cannes Best Screenplay and Queer Palm winner Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Basically Camille tries to penetrate Nora's frigidity; she becomes his "project," which Émilie mocks him for. She is a bystander of this process, because she and Camille sort-of-love each other and stay in regular touch. A curious adventure of Nora fills a middle section, drawn from Tomie's graphic novel ideas. She goes to a riotous, giant, widely promoted "Spring Break" dance party (the name in English) in a skimpy, skin-tight dress and wearing a blonde wig. There, she is mistaken for a famous online porno figure known as Amber Sweet (Jenny Beth, who composed the score of Ex Machina). Cell-phone photos of her taken at the club go online and are spread around at the Faculty of Law and she becomes a laughing stock, and drops out of school. She meets Camille applying for a real estate agent job to him as he's running the little agency of a family member. His studies are now on hold because he needs to raise money. Émilie has been fired from her telemarketing job and now is a waitress in a big Asian restaurant, while pursuing anonymous sex via a hookup app.

Nora and Camille amusingly pretend to be formal and correct as real estate business associates but that quickly breaks down and their intense but abortive sexual relationship begins. Is it because Nora is frigid; a virgin; just out of practice; or a lesbian that makes Camille's warm and adept love-making efforts fail to awaken Nora's sexuality or give her an orgasm? Émilie hears about this with amusement. Meanwhile there are little scenes between Camille and Eponine (Camille Léon-Fucien), his sister, a large young woman with a stutter whose love is standup and who loses her stutter when she's on stage. And there are also several scenes showing Émilie and relatives, notably her grandmother (Xing Xing Cheng), who is slipping into dementia. Émilie can't handle this and is neglectful, even though her grandmother's care center is not far away.

Nora contacts Amber Sweet - it's easy to have a private session with her, if you pay - and this odd relationship becomes a satisfying and "real" one for both of them, so they start connecting frequently on Skype and finally meet up in person. The relationship is meant to be touching but always feels a bit far-fetched.

If you're been paying attention to the frequent hints you'll not be surprised that the film will end with Émilie and Camille back together and acknowledging their mutual affection. Zhang and Samba are relaxed and sympathetic actors. Zhang is very good at rendering the cynical, at bottom forgiving, frankness of her character. Samba is tall, not particularly handsome, but good natured-seeming, with a ready smile. With his convincing sexual action, reading glasses, and pleasant way with dialogue, he makes a new kind of French leading man (appealing also for some of us because his character has been a schoolteacher and plans to return to that work). Zhang makes a new kind of main secondary character in a French film. She's Asian, and has the family and the Chinese language skills to prove it, but she often comes off as just as French as anybody else.

This is a new direction for Jacques Audiard, who got his start with genre-mixing films that reached a brilliant peak with the stunning remake of James Toback's debut film Fingers, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which made Romain Duris into a bigger, more serious star, and the gangster coming-of-age epic A Prophet, which made nobody Tahar Rahim into an offbeat heartthrob. Rust and Bone, which came next, was also compelling; but I was not quite sure I wasn't praising it because the previous two films had been so great. The director triumphed critically with his Tamil immigrant drama Dheepan (though it felt to me like a bit of a letdown). He seemed to be floundering with his stab at an English-language comic Western, The Sisters Brothers.

Paris, 13th District doesn't try for the excitement of The Beat My Heart Skipped or the grandeur of A Prophet or the seriousness of Dheepan but it's remarkably fluid, fluent, specific, and entertaining. The narrative flourishes, sometimes far-fetched, don't go terribly deep. It seems the character of Nora is singularly unappealing, and it's not clear if that is intentional or not. Wang and Samba in contrast are extremely likeable actors and one hopes to see more of them. If you look at the usual run of current popular French romantic/sexual comedies, this film is massively more real, specific, and intelligent. That's despite its essential superficiality, which reflects the commitment-averse millennial generation it depicts. Shooting in this unglamorous dramatically un-Haussmannian part of Paris and in black and white and with unusually graphic sex are effective ways of clearly setting the film apart from the usual glossy French rom-com product.

Paris, 13th District/Les Olympiades, Paris 13e, 105 mins., debuted in Competition at Cannes Jul. 2021. Numerous Cannes and César nominations. Over two dozen other festivals including four in the us, Chicago, Philadelphia, AFI, and Frameline. Screened for this review as part of the NYC Mar. 3-13, 2022 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. AlloCiné press rating 3.7 (74%). Metacritic rating 78%. US release Apr. 15, 2022. On that date chief New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane published a rave rievew.

[Chris Knipp]

CÉDRIC KLAPISCH: RISE/EN CORPS (2022)


MARION BARBEAU IN RISE

An up-and-coming ballet star gets injured and saves her career by switching from classical to less demanding modern dance in this visually enjoyable but cinematically clichéd new feature from Cédric Klapisch.

Let's make a feature film about dance, thought Klapisch, who the year before did a documentary about the Paris Opera Ballet. He indeed provides some gorgeous early classical dance shots early on and some soulful, relaxed modern dance ones later on. The dialogue rings false or is cliched throughout; Klapisch and his co-writer Santiago Amigorena don't seem to have gone to great trouble to construct a wholly credible, un-cliched plot. The subject has seemed to lend itself to lurid conceptions like Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan: the early scenes bear out the notion that classical ballet is exquisite torture, combined with emotional suffering, since Elise, KLapisch's lead, played by the very winning Marion Barbeau, herself a dancer both classical and modern, pointedly learns she's been dumped by her dance company boyfriend just before she slips; the dumping is either a portent or a cause. Her "kiné", plaayed by It Boy François Civil, who featured in several previous Klapisch features, mouths a lot of nonsense about body and mind and magically restoring her: actually he's just got the hots for her, of course, and is hoping to get her on the double-rebound, having just been dumped himself, as he shows by a comically exaggerated fit of crying.

But though Yann's man-bun and granny glasses are adorable, Elise is more interested in a partner in her new thing, the modern dance company she just happens to fall into while on a trip to her native Brittany to help out a cook at an arts center. One male interest is Robinson (Robinson Cassarino), Elise's new dancing partner. Another man in her life is Loïc, the arts center's virtuoso chef, played by busy actor Pio Marmaï. But the guy she's interested in now is Mehdi (Mehdi Baki), also in the modern dance company. When Yann learns this after returning from Goa and come to Brittany just to see Elise, he has another fit of weeping, this time off stage. Action at the arts center is grounded by its director, Josiane, a Simone Signoret type with a limp and crutch played by Muriel Robin who spouts wisdom about life.

Elise's annoying and unsympathetic father is effortlessly performed by the prolific Denis Podalydès. It's a perfunctory role as well as performance that arouses little interest in the viewer.

Since Klapisch wanted to make a movie about dance, it has to be full of dancers - real ones, and here, the film shiines. Notable is the person who plays himself more or less as Hofesh, the director of the modern dance company Elise falls into, Israeli choreographer, dancer and composer Hofesh Shechter, director of his own titular company based in London, whose reputation there is signaled by his OBE (order of the British Empire). (He received a 2016 Tony nomination for the choreography in Bartlett Sher's revival of Fiddler on the Roof.) He talks to his dancers in English. They practice and develop ideas at the Breton arts center, where Elise joins in, and they have a climactic Paris performance, in which Elise triumphantly performs. By now her injury seems miraculously cured, aided by the psychological and physical benefits of dancing and love-making.

Letterboxd review: leno

Review by leno ★★★ (translated from the French):
i think the adjective to describe this film is nice. it's a nice film. we laugh at François Civil and Pio Marmaï, we're a little moved, we find it beautiful, it's nice. then it's about dancing so it's impossible for me to be insensitive to it...
The [3/5-star rating is] for the dialogue which sounded very false I find, very personal development, seen and seen again, and the color+costumes of the film which gave a rendering much more aesthetic than realistic. It was very similar to [Someone, Somewhere/Deux Moi, his previous film, in that respect.
The dance performances are to die for.
I feel a bit mean writing my review because there were some great actors and great scenes (the one with Muriel Robin and the pear!)

Rise (its French title is a bit of untranslatable word play) seems more enjoyable than Klapisch's previous feature, the drawn-out meet-cute Someone, Somewhere/Deux moi (R-V 2020)(2019), which seemed just a glib conceptual tease. Here there is lots of warm, engaging action and above all, lots of dancing. The actual fictional structure is rather perfunctory, however; this isn't up to his best work but it gives some engaging actors something to do. One is kept well amused till one realizes how conventional and perfunctory the story arc has turned out to be.

Rise/En corps, 117 mins., debuted at Paris Cinema Club Jan. 31, 2022; its second appearance, where it was screened for this review, was at NYC's UniFrance-FLC Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (Mar. 3-13) on Mar. 9, 2022. The French theatrical release was Mar. 30, 2022; the AlloCiné press rating was 3.5 (70%) and the spectators' rating was 4.0 (80%).