Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2023

[Chris Knipp]

The 2023 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, March 2-12, 2023

GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD

LINKS TO THE REVIEWS:
BROTHER AND SISTER (Arnaud Desplechin)
DIARY OF A FLEETING AFFAIR (Emmanuel Mouret)
FOR MY COUNTRY (Raschid Hami)
FOREVER YOUNG (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi)
THE GRAVITY (Cédric Ido)
THE GREEN PERFUME (Nicolas Pariser)
HARKIS (Philippe Faucon)
MOTHER AND SON (Léonor Serraille)
THE NIGHT OF THE 12TH (Dominik MOll)
THE ORIGIN OF EVIL (Sébastien Marnier)
OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN (Rebecca Zlotowski)
SATURN BOWLING (Patricia Mazuy)
THREE NIGHTS A WEEK (Florent Gouëlou)
WINTER BOY (Christophe Honoré)
THE WORST ONES (Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret)

[Chris Knipp]

DOMINIK MOLL: THE NIGHT OF THE 12TH/LA NUIT DU 12 (2022)


BASTIEN BOULON, BOULI LANDERS IN LA NUIT DU 12

". . . ce sont tous les hommes qui ont tué Clara" (All men killed Clara)

In his Cannes review Jordan Mintzer of The Hollywood Reporter describes this new film from Dominik Moll, which just won the 2023 César award, France's Oscar, for Best Picture as "a brooding, serpentine investigative drama that brings to mind movies like Zodiac and Memories of Murder, though on a more intimate scale"; [it] follows two hardened French detectives trying to solve a gruesome murder that constantly eludes their clutches." On-screen titles lay it out at the start, telling us: "French police open 800 murder cases a year. 20% remain unsolved. This is one of those investigations."

Conveying to us this maddening frustration of intensively pursuing for months, even years, a case that cannot ultimately be solved, Moll delivers a smoothly crafted, seamlessly edited film that is haunting and strangely pleasurable, a film that dramatizes the torment and dedication of the investigating officers at work. The unobtrusive look of this well-oiled film contrasts, perhaps, with its dramatic physical setting. The original case this adaptation is based on has been transferred from the Paris region to near Grenoble, in the French Alps, providing vast, austere vistas suggesting an epic task and the solitude of the "PJ" (Police Judiciare) investigators whose obsessive task yields no fruit.

Contrastingly at the start, there is jollity and esprit de corps as, in a pleasant and informal gathering, we meet first the investigative team of the French Police Judiciaire. Touranchau (Nicolas Jouhet), the old "chef du groupe," retires and passes the torch on to Le capitaine Yohan Vivès (Bastien Boulon). The younger, almost boyish Vivès will lead the investigation that is the focus of the film, the inquest into the death of a 21-year-old woman. The methods are contemporary. This is a world of malfunctioning software, of Facebook meetings and omnipresent smartphones. The PJ staff tap many phones and use remote cameras. But the work is earth-bound, and there's a freak-out early on when a copy machine jams and can't be fixed by the officer.

After we meet the police we meet the victim and the crime and the growing list of men somehow involved with her who might be the murderers and for a while are suspects. She is Clara Royer (Lula Cotton-Frapier), whom we see murdered, suddenly set fire to with gasoline and a lighter walking home through a park after a party. She is young, happy, in a great mood. Her last words are a joyous declaration of eternal love to her best girlfriend. And then the torching, sudden, out of the dark, strangely, in a horrible way, almost beautiful. Clara becomes a human flame, running off into the darkness of the summer evening.

The investigation leads to a bewildering succession of men who have flowed in and out of the "uncompmlicated" Clara's life. There is Wesley Fontana (Baptiste Perais), her current boyfriend. There is Jules Leroy (Jules Porier), her longhaired, youthful "sex friend." There is Denis Douet (Benjamin Blanchy), a marginal jobless type she had sex with; her bgf, Stéphanie Béguin, "Nanie" ( Pauline Serieys) was ashamed to mention him, and this covering up makes her seem suspicious. Nanie, the best source on Clara's men, isn't very forthcoming.

There is Vincent Caron (Pierre Lottin), arrested for assault of a woman, who turns out to have been - he does not deny it - another temporary sex partner of Clara who turns up by leaving a bloody T shirt at the "shrine" for her. His girlfriend Nathalie Bardot (Camille Rutherford) covers for him. Gabi Lacazette (Nathanaël Beausivoir) is the rangy, bearded black rapper who wrote the rap threatening to torch Clara. Mats (David Murgia) is the wide-eyed mystery man who turns up on the third anniversary of Clara's death.

The viewer's constant companions of course are a pair, good cop-bad cop if you will, who head the investigation of the girls' murder. Marceau (Bouli Lanners) is the problem partner, unrestrained and stressed by a disintegrating marriage. The younger, solemn investigator is the group leader, Yohan Vivès. Periodic interludes where Yohan rides a bike around a vélodrome at night underline his loner, determined aspect. He also fit, cool. But dangerously obsessive, perhaps. He will have to switch to the open road.

The beauty of this superficially detailed, basically simple film is in two things. First, that this is an unresolved case: it shows how tormenting that is to the cops - and to Judge Beltrame (Anouk Grinberg) the examining magistrate (juge d'instruction), a woman, who emerges as a newly involved party later in the story. Thus we are invited over and over to ponder the crime and the victim. Secondly, this exploration brings out (a little over-explicitly, perhaps; but can it be anything but explicit?) the ways in which violence and gender are intertwined. Thus Yohan arrives at the conclusion that any man connected with Clara could have killed her, indeed any man could have killed her. This he delivers in a little speech to Judge Beltrame when she first summons him back to work with her on the case again: any one of the male suspects could have killed this beautiful, helpless young woman. In a sense they all did it, because any of them could have: "ce sont tous les hommes qui ont tué Clara" -"It's all men who killed Clara." "L'enfer, c'est les hommes," as one critic has quipped."C'est quelque chose qui clache entre les hommes et les femmes," "there's something wrong between men and women."

And so like Woman Talking or She Said this becomes absolutely timely. This is another current cinematic contribution to the gender wars, a #MeToo film, and a good one. We see why Moll and his co-writer chose this case to adapt from the 500-page volume by Pauline Guéna, 18.3 – une année à la PJ/18.3 - a Year at the PJ. This is fertile material. Compared to the fanatical work of David Fincher, La Nuit du 12 may pale a bit for some viewers. But this is different; by intention partly a thriller but also very much a meditation, an action film that makes you think. In Moll's oeuvre, it ranks up at the top with With a Friend Like Harry (2000) and Lemming (2005), and at his best, Moll is memorable indeed. A masterful film, not to be missed.

La Nuit du 12/The Night of the 12th, 115 mins., debuted in competition at Cannes May 20, 2022. A Film Movement release (France) July 13, 2022; AlloCiné press rating 4.4 (88%). Screened for this review as part of the FLC-UniFrance Rendez-Vous with French Cinema:
Tuesday, March 7 at 3:30pm
Friday, March 10 at 6:15pm (Q&A with Dominik Moll)

[Chris Knipp]

LISE AKOKA, ROMANE GUERET: THE WORST ONES/LES PIRES (2022)


TIMÉO MAHAUT IN THE WORST ONES

Joys and dangers of street casting

This film-within-a-film seeks to explore multiple aspects of shooting movies with underage non-actors - the beauties and charms but also the pitfalls and moral hazards of such work. The teenagers handsomely lensed by dp Éric Dumont - gorgeous light enhancing the beauty of fresh faces - are especially powerless because they come from poverty, being mostly residents of the "Picasso" housing project in the northern costal town of Boulogne-sur-mer. Local residents of the area object to the casting. Why don't the filmmakers pick more flattering representatives of their town? they ask. Why choose instead "les pires," the worst ones, the misfits, the disciplinary problems? Well, there is a reason, because Gabriel (Johan Heldenbergh, star of The Broken Circle Breakdown ), the Belgian-born director, on his first feature as such though 57, having long been a casting director who dealt with young non-actors - wants to tell a story about a hard luck family, and he finds them to play versions of themselves.

Fair enough. But the resuilts can be challenging for the audience too. The kids filmed here are unkempt, unruly, and spout torrents of the foulest language in today's French maudit lexicon. But more than that they seem to be lured into violence and sex, unsafe situations as risky as anything Larry Clark would have indulged in, and with a less clear point of view than his. Gabriel befriends and acts chummy with the kids. Maybe at first his ease with them is appealing. But over time it emerges as creepy. And some of them don't buy it. One small girl, Maylis (Mélina Vanderplancke) resigns from the production midway though Gabriel begs her not to and insists she's integral to it despite having no further lines of dialogue. At other times Gabriel is shown to be overstepping the boundary into the kid's private lives.

The Worst Ones winds up being one of the most uncomfortable watches in any Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (as part of which it was screened for this review). On the other hand, the teenagers chosen as the main performers are cute and full of life and can be charming. But it's a little surprising that critics were not more bothered by the fictional director's missteps and have greeted this film since its debut at Un Certain Regard with unmixed enthusiasm.

Ryan (Timéo Mahaut) is a key figure. At first he is inarticulate, but Gabriel wants him: he has a mother (alcoholic?) who's been barred from him with a restraining order, and a close relationship with a sister. Later, it's impressive to see how the responsibility of being given a central role in the film with hundreds of pigeons released behind him in a climax, Ryan behaves in a surprisingly mature and nuanced way. Also important is Lily (Mallory Wanecque) who - in the story but also in real life? the line isn't clear - has gained a reputation as a "whore" in school and admits more than once to having given blowjobs to two boys in the restroom. Now she - the character, not the girls - is pregnant. Lily, who has star quality and a winning smile (as does Ryan) is wanted by Gabriel for to co-play in story of first love with Jessy (Loïc Pech) a 17-year-old boy who is (again the line between fact and fiction fuzzy) just back after a jail sentence for hit-and-run driving.

The time when Gabriel screams at kids and incites a schoolyard battle that does on dangerously long is concerning. But it's the sex scene he directs between Lily and Jessy - with no intimacy coordinators - that achieves maximum audience unease. In The Cinema Show Alessandro De Simone suggests although Les Pires teeters between "patheticism and exploitation" "the latter" "is openly declared and effectively neutralized." He holds that the film was "shot with great dryness" and "edited with wisdom and rhythm." Is he saying its bad taste is in good taste? I've been a fan of Larry Clark, and know the noted cinematographer Ed Lachman shot with conviction the banned-in-the-USA Ken Park. Akoka and Gueret's vision of life-on-the-run and kids being manipulated is certainly intense here. (It grows from a happy experience like Gabriel's in their film, wrangling street-cast actors and making a short film with who they found. After watching, the messiness and boundary-crossing of Les Pires linger in the mind's eye. But one remembers Rod Paradot in La Tête haute in 2016, the strong performance Emmanuelle Bercot helped him to achieve and his joy at receiving the Meilleur Espoir Masculin award. Seeking out rough young talents still seems worthwhile, despite the pitfalls. (For more perspective see the review by Anna Smith in Deadline.)

The Worst Ones/Les Pires, 99 mins., debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes May 22, 2022 and played at Angoulême, Toronto, Hamburg, and Namur. A Kino Lorber release Mar. 24, 2023 Quad Cinema (NYC). Dec. 7, 2022 French release; AlloCiné press rating 3.9 (78%). Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Lincoln Center:
Sunday, March 5 at 12:30pm (Q&A with Lise Akoka and Matthias Jacquin)
Tuesday, March 7 at 1:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

NICOLAS PARISER: THE GREEN PERFUME/LE PARFUM VERT(2022)


SANDREINE KIBERLAIN, VINCENT LACOSTE IN LE PARFUM VERT

Nicolas Pariser’s "whimsical comedy adventure" underwhelms

When an actor dies onstage during a performance at the Comédie-Française, his final words to fellow actor Martin (Vincent Lacoste) are to say he’s been murdered, followed by the mysterious phrase "green perfume." This leads to Martin's being on the run partly from the cops, partly from bad guys, and partly in search of what "green perfume" means and how to expose the wrongdoers who go by this name. When Martin remarks ater that he's only a mediocre actor, that part is believable, but it's far-fetched to claim the goofy Lacoste as a member of the French national theater. Martin winds up in the posh home of an unknown big shot with a collection of cartoon drawings that night. When he emerges the next morning, staggering and confused, he goes to a bookstore trying to find out who this collector was. This is only the beginning of a string of inexplicable plot details that will make up the rest of the action.

After the political theorizing of The Great Game and the dive into local politics in Alice and the Mayor, Pariser apparently wanted to try something more on the light side, a sort of comedy-romance-noir. The travels and travails of Martin and Claire Cahan, the quirky comic book artist played by Sandrine Kibrerlain, who impulsively (and inexplicably) joins him on a busy train journey to Brussels, then Budapest, are all watchable enough. The two actors work well off each other. It's fun just seeing Lacoste rustle up p a pot of pasta.

But the action never acquites much mystery, excitement, or less still romance. The comedy is only very occasional. The writing is patchy. There's a sudden thread out of nowhere about being Ashkenazi Jews and her living 20 years in Israel that just doesn't fit in at all. One cannot blame Nicolas Pariser for opting for purer entertainment in the form of a spy comedy, and it makes sencd that he's evoking the thriving Fake News industry and growing anti-Semitism in Europe, subjects that could not be more serious, a priori. But this contradiction is not the main reason for the near-failure of this film. It's mainly that the plot has the twin faults of neither being exciting nor making much sense.

It is obvious from the start that Pariser has Hitchcock and his North by Northwest in mind, but it's dangerous to invite comparison of an effort as haphazard as this one with a masterpiece from one of film's most letter-perfect, high intensity mystery-action storytellers. This not only is not genius filmmaking. There are real continuity problems here, inexplicable costume changes, and a climax that makes very little sense.

This is one of those cases where a bad effort by a filmmaker makes one wonder if one had overvalued his earlier works. The talk about political manipulation by an ultra-right group and distributing software designed for the rapid spread of misinformation is certainly timely. And the fact that the treatment of it is superficial perhaps doesn't matter: the bad guys in North by Northwest are pretty simple bad guys; it doesn't have to be too specific. But in an action movie the demands are rigorous, the plot details have to work. And these don't, particularly.

Every so often somebody gets killed, though we don't see them. Claire gets shot in the leg (so we're told) and Kiberlain is seen intermittently limping, on crutches, or using a cane. When they get to Budapest Martin is scheduled to be in a Comédie Française production of a classic play in French rhymed couplets, the actors in ill-matched modern clothes. Somehow they come up with the notion that one of the actors who will on stage that night is an agent of the evil "green perfume" group andnd that he or she will signal someone in the audience about the location of a secret material (the "McGuffin" called 'Anthracite") by departing from the written text of the play. One didn't qite see how that works. It seems preposterous, but maybe Hitchcock could have carried it off. And he would certainly have made it ten times more exciting. Because of the colorful backgrounds, the busy action, the charm of the performers, and playing a lot of this - not all! - as "whimsical" comedy, we make allowances. But the final effect is just okay.

See Jonathann Romney's Screen Daily review for a more detailed explanation of how and why this movie doesn't work.

Le Parfum vert/The Green Perfume, 101 mins., debuted at Cannes Directors Fortnight May 26, 2022. Released in France in Oct., in numerous other countries since. AlloCiné press rating 3.5 (70%). Screened for this review as part of theRendez-Vous with French Cinema (Mar. 2-12, 2022).

R-V showtimes:
Wednesday, March 8 at 6:15pm (Q&A with Nicolas Pariser)
Saturday, March 11 at 1:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

EMMANUEL MOURET: DIARY OF A FLEETING AFFAIR/CHRONIQUE D'UNE LIAISON PASSAGÈRE (2022)


VINCENT MACAIGNE, SANDRINE KIBERLAIN IN DIARY OF A FLEETING AFFAIR

The feeling in this affair doesn't come till it's over

The title tells you what we're in for, no more, no less. A series of time-lines calibrates the affair's progression, end, and aftermath (possibly the best part), just like in an Éric Rohmer film. And as in Rohmer, the couple does nothing but talk about love affairs without ever making love on screen. The other element Mouret's identified with, the Woody Allen, is supplied by Simon (Vincent Macaigne), the shy, self-deprecating lover with a touch of French finesse and a physicality provided by his occupation: OB/Gyn prenatal trainer. But the sweetly goofy Macaigne has none of Woody Allen's intelligence and wit. (There is comedy, some of doubtless lost on the Anglophone viewer.)

In Rohmer, the people are young and attractive. Short, dark, bearded, stocky Simon and tall, blond, angular Charlotte (Sandrine Kiberlain) make an odd and no particularly sexy of attractive couple. Their "chemistry" seems more just acting skill, of which they have plenty. The writing, in French fashion, involves a lot of talk about love, but the drama of indecision and expectation in Rohmer or the excitement of plot twists in French farce are almost entirely lacking. Instead, this winds up being an attractively played discussion of the ins and out of a fleeting, or not-too-deep, love affair. Can it be pleasure without pain? (Of course not.)

The pair aren't much to look at but are nicely dressed, Kiberlain tweedy, Macaigne in a succession of impeccable suit jackets, and they discuss their affair's pros and cons and progression and limits in impeccably well-turned sentences. Simon is hesitant, then eager. Most of the conversations are about hat, and Charlotte's keeping him from wanting too much or getting clingy, and they get repetitious so fast the movie starts to pall before reaching the halfway mark.

Rohmer found more beautiful people and knew well how to play with temptation and expectation in ways Mouret hasn't a clue about. This film, like Rohmer's, is quite artificial, a minuet (this was carried to an extreme in Mouret's 2020 The Things We Say, The Things We Do). To see just how artificial it is, what the passion and cost of a real extramarital affair can be, compare Mia Hansen-Love's wrenching One Fine Day (note also how much sexier and better looking the stars, Léa Seydoux and Melvil Poupaud are; how much more a sense of their characters' surrounding lives we get).

This in contrast is an elegant, stylish, rather bloodless exercise with its Serge Gainsbourg songs and its sweet little intervals of Mozart piano, its lovely forests and parks and handsome interiors. Meant as a civilized entertainment, it unfortunately only entertains for a while. Apparently aware of the way it's started to get draggy and repetitious before midway, Mouret jazzes things up with a surprise out of the modern playbook: a third party met via a dating app, Louise (Georgia Scalliet). She's got kids and an architect husband, justifying the palatially minimal modern house she lives in, where after a meeting at a museum, the amorous encounter (unseen) takes place. And she shakes things up in a way the resolutely hetero Rohmer never thought of.

That third party destroys the couple, and the modest, wimpy, fatalistic Simon accepts that this was a fleeting affair anyway. But it is when he and Charlotte meet again by chance outside a cinema two years later, see a film together (ironically that most robust of couples dramas, Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage), then have a walk-and-talk after, that the film finally achieves some real emotional resonance. What's best is that both Simon and Charlotte have fond memories of their affair, both wish they could resume it, and go further, both sadly must accept that they can't. Looking nostalgically back on a love affair has rarely been handled so poignantly in a film. Too bad some of that emotion couldn't have come earlier.

Diary of a Fleeting Affair/Chronique d’une liaison passagère, 100 mins., French release Jan.. 24, 2022; AlloCiné press rating 4.0 (80%).
Friday, March 3 at 4:00pm
Monday, March 6 at 9:30p

[Chris Knipp]

VALERIA BRUNI TEDESCHI: FOREVER YOUNG/LES AMANDIERS (2022)



Lightning in a bottle: recreating a famous French acting school of the eighties

Forever Young recreates the youthfulness, the energy, and the risk of famous director-impressario Patrice Chéreau's regime in the 1980's at the Nanterre theatrical school of Les Amandiers. The young actors are beautiful and exciting. The action flows. In the director's version Chereau, played by Louis Garrel (with whom she was in a relationship from 2007 to 2012) is imperious and passionate. There is also another director, equally important, though two attractive young actors who are star-crossed lovers steal the show. Despite its slightly over two-hour run time, this is a vibrant ensemble piece that was presented in Competition at Cannes. Bruni Tedeschi, who collaborated on the writing with Caroline Deruas-Garrel and directdor Noémie Lvovsky , knows whereof she speaks. She was actine at the "dream space" avant-garde school at the time depicted along with, among others, Eva Ionesco, Agnès Jaoui, Vincent Perez and Bruno Todeschini.

There isn't much plot, more just stuff that happens. First there is the competition of a flurry of attractive and vibrant young people who perform or act crazy for the management seeking entry. It's their attractiveness and vibrancy that are this film's chief selling points; that the script and the direction don't get in their way. Forty chosen ones emerge, who will be narrowed down to twelve. A memorable sequence is simply the time when the young hopefuls crowd around the list of those selected, and the various exaggerated reactions when they learn they have or haven't been. One young women is so disappointed not to be, she winds up staying around as a waitress in an on-site restaurant. Some of the girls are pretty crazy, bragging that they're wearing no underpants, and lifting skirts to show their bare asses and farting.

Later, there will be drugs. The director is introduced to heroin by the most dynamic and dangerous student, Étienne (Sofiane Bennacer). Chereau is partial to coke. A girl who is pregnant turns out when she is in hospital to have her baby to have AIDS. Since her young husband, also an actor-student, has had sex with many who have had sex with everybody else, there is panic. This subsides, however.

The film has the temerity to give Etienne a girlfriend called Stella (blonde, bee-sting lippped Nadia Tereszkiewicz) and suggest not entirely humorously that he might be compared to Brando. Bennacer indeed generates energy and dangerousness in spades (he has since become controversial and #MeToo-type accusations have caused him to be scheduled for judicial action*). But Étienne's problem is that he turns out not just to be playing with heroin but a full-on addict who confesses to Stella that he has black moods, that he's a psycho, and she better stay away. Too late, of course. There is much drama in the private lives for the actors to focus fully on the on-stage kind.

The feature of Les Amandiers at this time is that the "students" immediately become a "company" and time is not wasted on the usual exercises: instead both directors immediately begin rehearsals for play productions. (Later they will have the opportunity to join Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio n New York, though.) Chereau, which really happened, decides because the actors are all so young themselves to stage a play Chekhov wrote when he was only eighteen. But we don't see much of this. What we do see is an lengthy tantrum Cheraau stages to complain of what he deems poor staging of an elaborate physical sequence involving restaurant tables moved together. It seems utterly pointless, indeed itself an acting exercise.

It's too hard, or too boring, to show a theater/acting school at work (just as it's too hard to show painters painting or writers writing or scientists discovering, or anybody doing work) and this, together with the energy of the specific actors, no doubt, that much of the excitement and focus of Foreever Young goes to the love of Étienne and Stella and the downward spiral of Étienne's too-exciting life. But while there are limitatiions here, the sweet English-language title is right to point the the chief feature, the youth, attractiveness and vibrancy of a group like this - as well as the inappropriate and dangerous behavior.

Some English-language critics hate this film. Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian finds its "perpetual pouting and nonstop narcissism" to be "epically tiresome," Jessica Kiange of Variety finds it "indulgent," and Metacritic comes up with a mmiserable rating of 44%. The French critics (and French public reflected on AlloCiné) on the contrary were charmed by the sheer life and energy of this film and the AlloCiné press rating is 4.0 (80%). I side with them. Les Amandiers captures lightening in a bottle. However some moments may fail or go over the top, the dynamism and energy of a young theatrical troupe are captured here. It's worth it for its best moments, because they're fun and exciting. Bruni Tedeschi, as Le Monde's critic puts it, "pays tribute to the magic of acting, to the mystery of the dramatic art." It is that je-ne-sais-quoi she captures that can't be condensed into a "Fame"-style collection of techniques, thumbnail bios, or storylines.

Forever Young/Les Amandiers, 126 mins.,debuted in Competition at Cannes May 22, 2022, showing at Munich, La Rochelle, 'Angoulême, and at least 18 more festivals. AlloCiné; Metacritic.

Sunday, March 5 at 9:30pm
Friday, March 10 at 1:00pm
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*In defense of the young actor, 136 well known colleagues signed a statement urging that he not be penalized without trial. "Rape is a crime," it says, and because it is a crime, a court of law must decide if someone is guilty of it.