Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2022

[Chris Knipp]

The 2022 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, March 3-13, 2022

GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD

LINKS TO THE REVIEWS:
Anaïs in Love/Les Amours d'Anaïs (Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet 2021)
Authentik/Suprêmes (Audrey Estrougo, 2021
Between Two Worlds/Le Quai de Ouistreham (Emmanuel Carrère, 2021)
Bruno Reidal: Confession of a Murderer/Bruno Reidal, confession d'un meurtrier (Vincent Le Port 2021)
Deception/Tromperie (Arnaud Desplechin 2021)
Everything Went Fine/Tout c'est bien passé (François Ozon 2021)
Fire/Avec amour et acharnement (Claire Denis 2022)
Gallant Indies/Indes galantes (Philippe Béziat, 2020
Guermantes (Christophe Honoré 2021)
Hold Me Tight/Serre moi fort (Matthieu Amalric 2021)
Horizon/L'horizon ( Emilie Carpentier 2021)
Lost Illusions/Illusions perdues (Xavier Giannoli 2021)
Madeleine Collins (Antoine Barraud 2021)
Magnetic Beats/Les magnétiques (Vincent Maël Cardona 2021)
Our Men/Mon légionnaire (Rachel Lang 2021)
Paris, 13th District/Les Olympiades, Paris 13e (Jacques Audiard 2021)
Petite Solange (Axelle Ropert 2021)
Rise/En corps (Cédric Klapisch 2022)
Robust/Robuste (Constance Meyer 2021)
Secret Name/La Place d'une autre (Aurélia Georges 2021)
A Tale of Love and Desire/Une histoire d'amour et de désir (Leyla Bouzid, 2021)
Undercover / Enquête sur un scandale d'État (Thierry de Peretti, 2021)

[Chris Knipp]

VINCENT LE PORT: BRUNO REIDAL: CONFESSIONS OF A MURDERER/BRUNO REIDAL 2021)


DIMITRI DORÉ IN BRUNO REIDAL

TRAILER

Poetry of madness

There is assurance of style in every frame of this austere, grim movie not unworthy of Dreyer or Bresson. This is a manner that suits the single-minded, devout, intensely troubled young protagonist with a compulsion to kill and equally well a more general theme: poverty in early 1900's France. As with those masters there is a severe, unifying beauty hiding behind the bleakness. Thus the soft autobiographical voiceover is a kind of plaintive song. The whole look of people, clothes, and the real settings is superb. Vincent Le Port, who is 36, using actual texts, has made an impressive feature film debut about this historical person, who, at seventeen, fulfilling a dream (or giving way to a compulsion) that had grown over many years and that he had resisted in vain, murdered and decapitated a boy of thirteen, then turned himself in to authorities.

This event and the desperation of Bruno's thoughts is not shirked but faced head-on by the filmmaker, with distinction. It's mistaken to perceive anything exploitative here. Not excessive but necessary also is these early criminologists and psychologists' extensive explorations of Bruno's sexuality, central to his case. Bruno's hateful, murderous thoughts of other boys date from a very early age. He's taught to masturbate traumatically by a shepherd who sexually molests him. Another primal experience is witnessing the slaughtering of a pig, an annual event of the villagers in Raulhac, in the Cantal in southeastern France where all this transpires. He runs away with hands over ears to shut out the screaming of the pig. Shortly after he hears of a man being killed and realizes that not just pigs, but men can be slaughtered. His hatred of other boys is a kind of violent envy - or desire - and he stimulates himself to masturbate, often many times a day, by imagining violent actions against them.

In the opening frames we glimpse young Bruno Reidal (excellent newcomer Dimitri Doré) committing the murder. From then on the focus is on his relation to a panel of psychologist-criminologists who interview him (this framework is a bit stiff, a convention we must accept). Since he was an excellent student, they ask Bruno to write about himself in prison and the words of this autobiography, spoken by him, form the voiceover for the rest of the film, a series of flashbacks tracing Bruno's life up to the murder and its immediate aftermath. Doré is fine, and also Alex Fanguin, as Bruno at six, and Roman Villedieu, who plays him at ten; and the two younger boys bear a remarkable resemblance to Doré. Also notable is Jean-Luc Vincent as the chief investigator, the memorably mustachioed Professeur Lacassagne, the French pioneer in criminal anthropology.

Bruno is weak, frail, and stunted looking, or seems so at first. The impression must be corrected somewhat, though, because this is no simple example of "failure to thrive." The boy was first in his class, or would be if he'd had better handwriting (it's little and pinched, but spreads smoothly across the page in well-spaced lines). In the last, crucial year of the story Bruno attends the minor seminary school of Saint Flour on a scholarship paid by neighbors of the impoverished farmer family from which he comes (and he is always dressed poorly than any of the other boys, whom he regards as beautiful but also hates. He is a misfit and loner as before, but at Saint Flour, working very hard to control his sexuality (and surely to succeed, to use his intellect), he wins seven prizes and is his happiest. And some of the other boys are friendly to him, notably Blondel (Tino Vigier), who comes to borrow a Latin dictionary during the, for Bruno, very difficult summer vacation, and comes back to go on a scholarly walk. Bruno wants to kill Blondel, but cannot do it. Rather than wait, he chooses a smaller boy, Francois (Tristan Chiodetti), who, also handsome and confident in Bruno's eyes as well as smaller and less able to resist, qualities almost equally well for the deed that Bruno is compelled to do.

All the while Bruno, as played by Doré, expresses himself in a style that's literary, formal, and poetic. It's almost as if he's seeking in speech and writing to reshape his unhappy, distorted intellect into something that, when looked at through words, is transformed into poetry, a killer poem, a poetry of madness and sickness. His devoutness makes him not a bad choice for a seminary. He long considered suicide, he tells his investigators, but chose murder because for that he could repent; after suicide he wouldn't be able to.

Allan Hunter at Cannes (July 13, 2021 ) in Screen Daily saw all the beauty and accomplishment of this severe, off-putting film (which some reviewers imperceptively, if in a way understandably, mistake for exploitative or one-note). Hunter calls this a "riveting debut feature," and praises the way Le Port takes a "true crime case" and changes it into something both "chilling" and "utterly compelling" as a "journey through the mind" of the young killer. He notes the "extraordinary central performance" of newcomer Doré that is essential to the (I'm talking here) soft sweetness of this troubled, sensitive, intelligent killer, whose formally elegant prose Le Port worked with in developing his script. Hunter's absolutely right when he notes how "the images of workers in the fields and farm life could have come from a painting by Pissarro or Jean-Francois Millet" - noting the achieved authenticity of all the visual aspects; but also the literary resonance, because "Reidal and his family could be characters from the pages of Victor Hugo or Emile Zola." An analogy I wasn't aware of that Hunter points to Rene Allio’s 1976 Moi, Pierre Riviere (1976); the subject matter and narrative sources of the two films indeed seem to have have parallels worth following up on. Bruno Reidal is trapped in a mental aberration he cannot control and his final speech in the film is the quiet, almost detached admission, "Quoique je fasse, des scènes de meurtre sont pour moi pleine de charme," Scenes of murder for me are full of charm." (The sparingly used score comes from the hand of Olivier Messiaen and Charles Ives.)

This is a story that is a search for understanding. The criminologists who are examining Bruno episodically through his own written text and their in-person interrogations conclude with a diagnosis that the final intertitles explain. If the film works for you as it emphatically did for me, the result will be insight into an alien being. This is a classic style masterpiece, but it may take some time to be recognized. There are detractors who mistake if to an exploitive film. It's certainly not an easy watch but it is a rewarding one, and Vincent Le Port and Dimitri Doré are both worth watching for in future. Le Port has received prizes (including the Jean Vigo award and a César for best short film) for his earlier short work. Doré who was born in Lithuania and brought to Paris at age one and is now 24, was heralded by France Culture in January 2018 as "the young prodigy of the theatrical scene." The French Wikipedia article on Doré shows that his acting career has exploded in the past few years. He will be remembered for this role if for no other.

Bruno Reidal, Confession of a Murderer /Bruno Reidal, confession d'un meutrier, 101 mins., coproduced with logo Capricci by Arte, debuted Jul. 12, 2021 at Cannes International Critics' Week, nominated there for the Camera d'Or and Queer Palm; Angers (Prix Jean Carmet for best actor for Dmitri Doré), Jerusalem, Merlinka, Reykjavik, all with nominations; also Bari, Paris (Chéries-Chéris Paris Gay Film Festival) and London (BFI Flare LGBTQ+ Festival). Scheduled for release Mar. 23, 2022 in France, it is included in the joint UniFrance and Lincoln Center series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (Mar. 3-13, 2022). After release the AlloCiné press rating was 4.1 (82%).

[Chris Knipp]

RACHEL LANG: OUR MEN/MON LÉGIONNAIRE (2020)


INA MARIJA BARTAITÉ IN OUR MEN/LÉGIONNAIRE *

TRAILER (FRENCH)

A woman's gaze on professional military life and its domestic toll

Louis Garrel stars as a second lieutenant in the French Foreign Legion leading a counter insurgency mission in Mali in this woman's look at professional military life and its toll on relationships. Costarring as his wife Céline is Camille Cottin of "Call My Agent. Rachel Lang, who wrote and directed and served in the army herself, follows two linked military couples in this cool and at times documentary-realistic exploration of French Foreign Legion life that closed the Cannes 2021 Directors’ Fortnight section. It's a nice outing for Garrel, a new direction for which he seems to have beefed up and gotten into great shape. Though some of the action puts men in mortal danger, there's a sunny lightness about many of the scenes; the contrast reflects a disconnect and an underlying weakness.

Peter Bradshaw gave it four our of five stars and spoke glowingly of the film's "intelligence, candor and unaffected artistry," acknowledging the "clear, cool lens" that leaves the action "almost drained of dramatic inflection or emphasis," omitting music (he means no score: there are rousing military choruses), closeups, climactic scenes or monologues, yet remaining nonetheless "entirely engrossing." As he says, through the "cool lens" we nonetheless provided with vivid glimpses of "Fear, death, violence, sex and infidelity," as well as brawny bare male torsos and repeated dark silhouettes of Garrel bathing frontally nude. But the film winds up feeling perhaps just a little too detached, none of those elements fully grabbing the audience, making it seem, despite some snappy military action, that Lang is more telling than showing, more commenting than bringing to life.

The exoticism of the legendary Legion comes through in languages, Russian, Corsican, French, Bambara. Corsica provides the Legion's beautiful if isolated training ground and HQ where also the wives live. Nika (Ina Marija Bartaité) and Vlad (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) are the secondary couple to Maxime (Garrel) and Céline's main one. Vlad is a tightly-wound soldier in Maxime's command. Maxime think's "worried" is good, for him, "Otherwise it becomes routine; that's the trap" (le piège). Nika, Vlad's fiancée, who has come from Ukraine to be with him, languishes at home where she meets Céline and begins to babysit their little boy, Paul (Léo Lévy), while Céline works as a lawyer. The fact that she wants her own child and Vlad doesn't makes Nika's lonely eyes wander to local men, including a soulful driving instructor (Jean Michelangeli). A key line comes when challenged by other military wives: "If I can't have a child, at least I can have friends." They become more than that, of course.

When leave comes midway, Maxime expresses frustration to Céline with a four-month mission that was withdrawn too soon "to do things right," he tells her. Lang gets across that while the mostly male military unit (there's a female superior officer) is having an exciting time on mission, coming back to home base still eager for more, the wives and kids at home, including lawyer Céline and Paul (who listens to a song about a soldier dad who dies), are bored, lonely, and worried. A little like William James, Jeremy Renner's sapper in Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, Maxime is drained and not quite present on leave, and Vlad has too short a fuse for domestic life. The Hurt Locker is about a military maniac and that would overstate the case, but it's a film whose intensity and artistry puts this one to shame.

It's clear where Rachel Lang is going with this, a little too clear: though she's not ultimately that into the military operations, she recognizes the discipline, the challenges, the danger of Foreign Legion life on active mission is damned exciting, but the politics behind such a career can be faulted, and for sure it's hell on domestic life. In fact this is so well acted out that despite impeccable mise-en-scène, casting, and acting and some nice individual scenes the storyline never quite builds up much emotional value. Even the death of one of the main characters feels remote. Lang rounds things out artistically with a brief homoerotic fantasy sequence of Maxime's unit tussling shirtless in combative slow motion duos to a background of French rap, a sequence obviously reminiscent of the mother of all female-directed French Foreign Legion films, Claire Denis' Beau Travail. But it feels tacked on, too late to raise the military side of this binary picture to a higher level either emotional or aesthetic.

Garrel has actually been in ten films since this one already, two of which (The Crusade/La croisade and L'Innocent) he directed, and the recent film one in which he appears that I still would most like to see is J'Accuse/An Officer and a Spy, the highly acclaimed if (because by Polanski) controversial account of the Dreyfus Affair, another earlier and better film in which Louis Garrel, as Alfred Dreyfus, got to dress up in a military uniform.

Our Men/Mon légionnaire, 106 mins., debuted in Cannes Directors Fortnight Jul. 15, 2021, showing also at 'Angoulême, Jerusalem, Naumur, BFI London, Stockholm, and in Jan. 2022 Rotterdam (virtual). It opened theatrically in France Oct. 6, 2021 (AlloCiné press 3.3, public 2.9), and is included in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema of UniFrance and Film at Lincoln Center Mar. 3-13, 2022.

*Sadly Ina Marija Bartaité was run over and killed while riding a bike on Apr. 7, 2021, aged 24.

AlloCiné press rating 3.3 (66%).

[Chris Knipp]

ANTOINE BARRAUD: MADELEINE COLLINS (2021)


QUIM GUTIERREZ AND VIRGINIE EFIRA IN MADELEINE COLLINS

The excitement of living crazy

Antoine Barrau's accomplished new film (coauthored with Hélena Klotz of Atomic Age) is about a woman who is trying to live two lives and two identities, one in Switzerland and one in Paris, and who is deceiving herself that nobody knows she is doing this but herself. What exactly she is doing and how she is doing it unfolds for us, the audience, only gradually, so at first the film is an intriguing mystery. As the deception begins to unravel and she struggles to save it, we enter thriller territory. And it's a psychological thriller as we wonder what is going on in her mind that led to this. All the while there is the delicious excitement of something exciting and mad, a little like entering the mind of someone who is manic. There's the hint of association with spies or criminals - the Bonds, the Ripleys, who do this sort of thing for a dangerous purpose, which makes this a bit of a genre-shifter. The beautiful Virgnie Efira, the star, has an inimitable and cozy gloss of glamor and hysteria that carries it all along. Her character pretends to be liberated - she justifies her being too-much absent from both families every week as she shiftily commutes between them as the right of a woman to be just as career-obsessed as a man. But her freedom is a prison whose protective wall we see starting to crumble.

French critics agree that in this film Efira (Victoria, Elle, Sibyl, Benedetta) returns to form and, more internationally famous now through starring in Verhoeven's lurid nun drama, finds a role equal to her immense talent; that she is the only French - well, francophone (Belgian) - actress of her generation who could do what she does here. Everything revolves tensely and deliciously around her and the two men and the children whose lives she separately shares.

In Switzerland it's Abdel Soriano (Catalan actor Quim Gutierrez, in his first major French-speaking role), who is a mover, and their little daughter, Ninon (Loïse Benguerel). In Paris she has a much more glamorous life as the wife of conductor on the rise Melvil Fauvet (Bruno Salomone), with whom she has two boys a little older than Ninon. To justify her back-and-forths she claims to be going to separate gigs in her work as an English-to-French interpreter, to Warsaw, to Spain (Ninon wants to be taken along; she's fragile and not at the age when being left alone to her dad every week is easy to take.) She is not going to Warsaw or Spain or anywhere of course but between Switzerland and Paris.

More and more the deceptions crack, the separate identities, Judith or Jude in Switzerland and Margot in Paris, getting confused as fake ID's fail to pass muster with traffic cops, friends who know her by different names run into each other at a concert hall, and children, who have instinct, start to suspect things they hear her say into her smartphone - and, as the French blurb says on AlloCiné, "Caught in a trap, Judith chooses to escape into a headlong flight."

Arguably as things unravel so does the glamor and the film loses some of its attraction. But a teasing prologue sequence that runs absorbingly during the opening credits sets things up very neatly. It is a piece whose place in the puzzle is revealed only later, but that little failing, fainting spells that Judith-Margot suffers in public places neatly link with and remind us of. The other key elements in the success of Madeleine Collins (another name, another identity, incidentally, whose meaning will be unveiled in the final frames) are the solid ones of the separate family members. These include Thomas Gioria, the young lead from the French domestic hit thriller Custody, as Margot's older son with Melvil, and Ninon's grandparents, played by Jacqueline Bisset and François Rostain, and other strong supporting players including director and comedienne Valérie Donzelli as Madeleine Reynal, a major collaborator with conductor Melvil, and a shifty character called Kurt played with conviction by Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid of Synonymes, that flashy shape-shifter tale set in Paris with whose protagonist Lapid has confessed a certain personal identification.

Madeleine Collins leaves a pleasant glow of giddy thrills that's heightened by a sense of unease, something of the same excitement that makes Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley novels so enjoyable - the uneasy pleasure of entering intimately into the mind and world of someone crazy and wrong. Except that Efira's busy character isn't a criminal; the only harm she is doing is to those close around her and to herself - and to our own mental ease. This film gives pleasure while, for a while at least, also undermining our own sense of identify and psychic balance. It's all wonderfully cinematic.

Madeleine Collins, 102 mins., debuted at Venice Giornate degli Autori Sept. 2, 2021, with only four other festivals listed on IMDb including Chicago and Philadelphia. It was in a hurry to be a Christmas present for the French, opening in Paris theaters Dec. 22, 2021 and receiving an AlloCiné press rating of 3.7 (74%). It is included in the Mar. 3-13, 2022 UniFrance-Film at Lincoln Center Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series.

[Chris Knipp]

VINCENT MAËL CARDONA: MAGNETIC BEATS/LES MAGNETIQUES (2021)


THIMOTEE ROBART IN MAGNETIC BEATS

The boom of youth

In this engaging film Philippe (the winning Thimotée Robart) is a bizarre, but also grand and mignon (tall and cute) young Eighties Breton French everyman imbued with extravagant sound-studio skills, the kind to make a pirate radio station sparkle and crackle. These are the last days of analogue technology before digital came to dominate. The film revels in the tapes and mikes as much as a very different movie celebrating this era for film, Stirckland's Berberian Sound Sdudios. (Tall Timouthé and stubby Toby Jones: now there's an odd couple.) It also revels of course in the music of the era.

For a little while in this swift-flowing tale there are lots of guys around, lots of music and dancing. Mitterrand, the socialist, has just won, and that provides hope also for most of the boy.s Working at their feisty father's garage, "Philou" is never far from his confident, mustachioed older brother Jérôme (Joseph Olivennes, son of Kristen Scott Thomas) and the two of them love playing and broadcasting music at their pirate radio station installed in the attic of a bar. That's what this coming-of-age tale entails: growing into personal flowering during the pirate radio renaissance of the period, after the usual bouts with love, sex, the army, and fraternal rivalry for a girl. More interested in the charismatic Jérôme, she's called Marianne (Marie Colomb), and has come from Paris for a stage in hairdressing, at which she's yet a novice. At pouting and teasing she's a pro. Philou longs for Marianne, but is rather overshadowed by Jérôme in that as at the broadcasting. He has no confidence in his voice. This film is about how he finds it. For now, he lets Jérôme talk into the mike and is content just to "push the buttons."

This is the work of half a dozen writers, and this time that works well. The sense of small-town community and collective energy pervades the busy scenes. A year of military service is still mandatory and will be till 2001 - unless you can get out of it. All his pals seem to land a P 4 (mental) release but a clever ruse of the army examiners, drawing out Philippe's humanity, shows he's only faking and off he goes - to Berlin.

There, away from the town guys and Jérôme, Philippe begins to bloom, meeting the first real friend of his own, Edouard (Antoine Pelletin), who introduces him to British Overseas Radio, whereby he'll avoid early curfew and other onerous military things. His effort to show off a knowledge of spoken English to gain admission is unimpressive - but it doesn't matter after he goes into a display of improvisatory sound sculpture, whipping tapes in and out of slots, flipping switches, weaving sound magic. This scene, a triumph, is one of several dazzling set pieces that make you forget this is the kind of low budget film whose depiction of barracks life has to content itself with the corner of a room and some two-tiered beds. This is the spirit of bricolage, the kind of inspired improvisation and magic-weaving at which Derek Jarman excelled. Magnetic Beats is a movie that reminds you cinema can be at its best when it's hints and suggestion. Look at the voiceovers, where Phliippe's recounting to Jérôme after the fact how it all was. They're a conventional touch whose meaning, not so obvious, is revealed in the final minutes. It's then we come to understand how thoroughly Philippe has become a full-on animaterur, a show emcee, taking on the voice that was once only his brother's, addressing the micro bravely now, at last, in his own voice. For Cardona (and his coauthors) animateur sort of means auteur.

Philippe gets his chops and takes on his own voice at the Berlin British radio broadcasts. Back at home after his year of service, rejecting Édouard's invitation to Paris, other major figures in Philippe's life must depart for this to continue. The drunken Jérôme speeds off toward Spain, and, surprisingly, perhaps - the action keeps you guessing for a while what he will do - Philippe doesn't jump in the car to follow Marianne, who has introduced him, in the flashing rays of a car headlight, to the ways of love. He remains in the little Breton town to run the pirate radio station and become, in his small way, famous.

Given the references to that leading figure of late-Seventies, early-Eighties music Ian Curtis of Joy Division, referred to here as "a young god who departed early," it's hard not to think of him and of Anton Corbijn's splendid black-and-white ode to him, his debut film Control. But Philippe's disposition is sunny, and so is Cardona's film, which folds away rough moments in swift transitions and makes good use of Thimotée Robart's physicality. With his tall frame and baby face, he seems like he's been thrust unawares into life and surprised but not unhappy with what he sees. He's a bit passive, but that seems to protect him and save him for his pirate radio career that begins as the film ends. Often framed at the middle distance, we see him and others in semi-silhouette, picaresque heroes in small genre scenes enjoyed with pleased detachment. Yes, Les magnétiques wallows in retrophilia, and its voiceovers and its basic structure (the rival bros, the love triangle) are conventional. Bit it's a lyrical, joyous nostalgia, in a film that flows with a light touch and a distinctive visual style. Deft and sure, it's a great debut both for the director and for his star.

Magnetic Beats/Les magnétiques, 98 mins., debuted at Cannes Directors' Fortnight (Quinzaine des Réalizateurs), Jul. 9, 2021. It was in festivals at Deauville, Namur, Busan, Leiden, Taipei and Singapore. Released in France Nov. 17, 2021 (AlloCiné press rating 3.7 (74%). It was included in and is reviewed here as part of the Mar. 3-13, 2022 UniFrance-Film at Lincoln Center Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.

[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.