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Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2025
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 02-09-2025 at 04:28 PM.
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WILD DIAMOND/DIAMANT BRUT (Agathe Riedinger 2024)
MALOU KHEBIZI, IDIR AZOUGLI
AGATHE RIEDINGER: WILD DIAMOND/DIAMANT BRUT (2024)
Reality dreams
Some thought Wild Diamond/Diamant Brut, Agathe Riedinger's first feature, was getting ahead of itself in being included as a Cannes Competition film. Its thinness feels more so because its subject, the nineteen-year-old Liane (Malou Khebizi) is a blatantly superficial girl, a live Barbie doll who thinks of little or nothing that's more than skin deep. A lot of her time is spent on how she looks, her enlarged breasts, her buttucks, her skin, her lips, her hair.
But the film demands our attention by the way it captures a phenommenon of these days: the self-made online personality who exploits social media, what Owen Gleiberman calls in his Variety review "the up-from-nowhere apparatus of fame." There are other things Gleiberman says that I like, such as his calling Liane a "glam trainwreck" and his comment that the various devices she uses, the tarty-sexy clothes, the hydraulic acid lip injections to create a pouty mouth, make her "heartbreaking." He grasps Liane's world wonderfully. Even as he pities her he's into her. But I can't agree with him that all this announces Riedinger as "a major filmmaker." Riedinger has found an excellent subject, perhaps a career-best one. But if this is all she can do with her, if these, even with the final time of Christian penance, are Liane's limits and Riedinger's best effort, this feels like a flash in the pan.
Liane has 40,000 Tik Tok followers. She aspires to being an "influencer," and she has applied to be included in a popular reality show called "Miracle Island" - and been granted a momentous interview. Though she has to wait over a month afterwards to find out if she's been officially chosen by the judges to be part of the show, somehow it's a bit of a disappointment for us when she is in fact chosen. Is that what we've waited an hour and 43 minutes for? And is the tragic low point merely the moment when Liane gives herself a disastrous tattoo?
Wild Diamond does have special redeeming features. For me the greatest one is visual. I was surprised what a beautiful film this was. The cinematography of dp Noé Bach makes the Côte d'Azur glow permeate everything, Liane, the light, and the world around her, all the time. The use of the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, confining us to Liane's intense world, is like an imprisoning jewel box. It's one of those films that glows with the sunny warmth of the Mediterranean: it's full of the atmosphere of Fréjus and the summery South of Franc. Here where Liane lives with her mother and little sister, there are other girls like her. These are her best mates who are hard to distinguish from her when they're together. With them this world of the French Riviera, familiar to us already from decades ago, is updated. Liane is responsible for the care of her younger sister, and and surges with resentment and a dangerous temper from the indignity and abuse she suffered when young by being put into a "foyer," a home, by her neglectful mother.
This experience handily provides Liane with a boyfriend, Dino (Idir Azougli), who appears from her past: he too was in that "foyer." And he like many others has found her and been attracted by her online "glamor." Malou Khebizi as Liane indeed has a seedy glamor - one feels that she would be more attractive if she toned down and washed off all the glitz - as she does to prepare for the interview. Dino shows her a vacant building he says he is saving up to buy. Later, he declares his love for Liane and says she will always be his "queen." Because she has just been humiliated and insulted by her mother, she lashes out in anger and repels him at a club where her girlfriends already suspect he is her "mec," her guy. And part of the feel-good finale of this film is that this comes true. Alone together later, she apologizes for her rudeness, they embrace, and there's almost a fairytale romance feel.
This finale is cheap, it's superficial, and yet it's somehow touching. But it fades compared to a Mediterranean doomed romance classic like Manuel Pradal's 1997 Marie baie des anges/Marie from the Bay of Angels, whose romance, also sunstruck, is simple and timeless. Riedinger depicts character, trends, and atmosphere well, but she is not a storyteller like Pradal. What makes this movie memorable is how freshly and vividly it depicts the wretched underside and dubious mystique of social media. And for that trendiness it gained entry into Cannes Competition.
Wild Diamond/Diamond brut, 103 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition May 15, 2024, showing also at Munich, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Cairo, and other international festivals including Mumbai and Two Riversides Film and Art Festival, Poland. It opened theatrically in France Nov. 20, 2024, resulting in AlloCiné ratings of 3.3 press (66%) and 3.5 (70%) spectators. Strand Releasing in the US. Showing:
Monday, March 10 at 3:30pm
Saturday, March 15 at 12:30pm – Q&A with Agathe Riedinger
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 02-22-2025 at 08:43 PM.
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MEETING WITH POL POT/RENDEZ-VOUS AVEC POL POT (Rithy Panh 2024)
IRÈNE JACOB
RITHY PANH: MEETING WITH POL POT/RENDEZ-VOUS AVEC POL POT (2024)
A surreal jumble of fact and invention portrays the world of a genocidal dictator
Not having learned any more about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge since seeing Rithy Panh's The Missing Pictdure in 2013 (NYFF), I was just as puzzled after watching his recent Meeting with Pol Pot, and found less explanation in reviews. This is more complicated, because it refers not to Panh's personal family history but three journalists' joint 1978 visit to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, based "partiallly" (the blurb says) on actual events, but again with Rithy Panh's use of hand-crafted clay figurines - a device that causes an already very weird moment to seem even more surreal.
On the one hand Panh stages this event with enough realism that it makes you wonder how he did it, where this was shot, who the Cambodian actors are. We know very well who Irène Jacob is, who plays a challenging French journalist called Lise Delbo, and who Grégoire Colin is, that Claire Denis regular who here plays a Pol Pot loyalist and "friend" who knew him in Paris and still correspnds with him, called Alain Cariou. We don't know who Cyril Gueï is who plays a fictitous photojournalist called Paul thomas; he seems mostly to have worked in French TV.
The question of why these three unrelated journalists, all with a marketdly different bent, would be risking their lives together may be answered simply by saying an opportunity for in-person coverage of Pol Pot was too good to pass up. The question arises though of why anybody in their right mind would enter into the world of a brutal dictator in the role such people hate most, someone aiming to report the truth about them. The answer is that war correspondents are risk-takers. In particular the friendly Cariou turns out to be just as much in danger of being offed as the other two, even though it's Thomas who's most outwardly provoctive, and he's the first to "disappear." It's hard to access the factual basis of this film, and other reviews in Screen Daily and Variety don't seem to try to.
Panh creates a convincing sense of place with long shots including what seems to have a plentiful number (for a low budget fllm) of uniformed Cambodians. He also uses black and white archival footage to suggest the presence a world that is being hidden from the journalists, or occasionally found by the photographer. At one point he's by himself in a storage space with large sacks of rice. He pulls out a pen knife and stabs the sack (but how would be be alone, and how would he have a knife? Panh doesn't handle Thomas, the photographer realistially) and he finds the large sack contains nothing but rice husks and dirt. This is after the journalists have been told the Khmer Rouge are producing a preposterously high yield of rice per acre in their farms. So, everythig is a lie. This is a portrait of the mechanics of propaganda.
An utterly surreal and horrible world emerges. The Vietnamese are blamed for every problem, danger, and wiping out of people. It's eplained that "Brother Number 1" will show up when he feels like it without prior warning.
This film is a surreal jumble of fact and invention that gives one, in some ways, a keen sense of what it might have been like to enter the world of this genocidal dictator of communist Cambodia during the three years from 1976 to 1979 1.5 to 3 million people were exterminated. But while Rithy Panh, the director, lost his own famly at this time, this is speculative, and that's perhaps why he makes it seem so intentionally artifical.
Meeting with Pol Pot/Rendez-Vous avec Pol Pot, 112 mins., debuted at Cannes May 16, 2024, also showing at Busan, Rio, the Viennale, Warsaw, and Hong Kong. It opened in French theaters Jun. 5, 2024. AlloCiné ratings: 3.3 (66%) press, 3.4 (68%) spectators. Screened for this revie as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center (Mar. 6-16, 2025). Showing:
Friday, March 7 at 8:30pm – Q&A with Rithy Panh and Elizabeth Becker
Thursday, March 13 at 8:45pm
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 02-22-2025 at 08:52 PM.
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VISITING HOURS/LA PRISONNIÈRE DE BORDEAUX. (Patricia Mazuy 2024)
HAFSIA HERZI, ISABELLE HUPPERT
PATRICIA MAZUY: VISITING HOURS/LA PRISONNIÈRE DE BORDEAUX (2024)
Friends of convenience
This somewhat oddball film should probably be discussed in relation to André Téchiné's recent Les gens d'à coté/My new Friends, which came out a liitle before Visiting Hours, in which Hafsia Herzi and Isabelle Huppert are also cast as an odd pair of friends, as here. In Téchiné's film, Herzi is part of an anti-police couple who move in next to Huppert, who is a bereaved policewoman, though she hides this from her new neighbors. But I have not seen this , wihch was less well received (AlloCine 3.1: 2.6 vs. 3.3: 2.8) but might cast more light on the pairing of. the two actors.
La Prisonnière de Bordeaux is interesting, and odd, and features two great actresses, if it's not wholly successful. It's a drama of class rather than ideology as Téchiné's appparently is. It resolves itself less successfully when it turns to a genre outcome, becoming a somewhat tongue-in-cheek crime thriller, but concudes in a way that neutralizes the dangers. Nobody gets hurt; but also various strands of the tale remain loose and unresolved, as if the scenarists were in too much of a hurry to finish things up.
Alma Lund (Huppert) and Mina Hirti (Herzi) meet as wives visiting men in the same prison - with this world nicely fleshed out for us. Alma is attracted to Mina's passion when she protests at being denied a visit because she isn’t on the schedule due to a clerical error, and can't come back the next day as requested because school kids and a long commute make that too difficult. Alma steps in and resolves this, inviting her to stay at her nearby mansion. This establishes a pattern, because Alma has time on her hands and finds in Mina an excitement and warmth she lacks in her own life. Huppert is superb as the bored, spoiled woman. It's a variation on many roles she has played before yet still an immensely watchable performance. Herzi, more in the background, is also fine in conveying the toughness and resentment of her lower status.
The husbands' different crimes define their respective class origins. That of Nasser (Lionel Dray) is "bijouterie," jewelry - not making it, stealing it. Christopher Lund, who is, or was, a wealthy neurosurgeon, was driving drunk and committed a terrible hit and run accident that permanently disabled one person and killed another. Alma lives in a chateau in the grand provincial style. It's near the prison. Attracted, she offers to let Mina stay with her to avoid a three-hour trip from far-off Narbonne, where she lives, and then engineers a greater connection so she can stay. She finds her a job. She worked at a dry cleaners. and now, thanks to Alma, she begins working (perhaps more comfortably?) at the laundry of the brain surgeon's former clinic.
Mina brings her two children, and the glib and privileged Alma talks their way into the local school in the middle of the session. The trouble for Mina is her husband's partner in crime Yacine (William Edimo), for whom Nasser took the fall, who thinks he's been cheated out of part of the haul and sees Mina's departure as a way of totally screwing him. He needs to be placated.
Memorable scenes simply show Mina and Alma sipping wine at the chateau, while Mina airs her more realistic view of life and Alma reveals an eccentric wit that has developed in a world of privilege. As Tim Grierson argues in his Cannes Screen Daily review, Mina accepts the relationship even though she may feel treated as a "charity case," Alma's "fix-it project," but "there is a level of mystery surrounding how much genuine affection there is between the women — or if each character sees in the other merely a means to an end."
The plot twist comes with an obvious giveaway scene that may make us wonder just how stupid Alma is (exactly what she says later to Mina) - or whether she is taking a wild risk out of such desperate boredom she is ready to throw her life away. As a French Letterboxd comment (from Antoine Devynck) says, "the scenario is well written" and the main characters are "well developed" thanks especially to the two "exceptional actresses," but "the only problem is in an excess of plot lines that remain unresolved at the end of the film," particularly with regard to the imminent early release of Christopher from his already privilege-based short sentence and that matter of missing loot from the jewelry heist and the angry accomplice. It's also been noted that the tone of this film is surprisingly mild compared to the bracingly harsh outcomes in Mazuy's haunting and dark previous film, Saturn Bowling (R-V 2022). Still, the two brilliant performers with Mazuy's help leave us with some memorable moments and an odd sense of the frangibility of lives while avoiding any conventional moralizing. Mazuy is an original.
Thomas Fouet wrote of this film inLes Fiches du Cinéma: "Convincing in her observation of a relationship transcending class, Patricia Mazuy is more hasty in her borrowings from genre films."
Visiting Hours/La prisonnière de Bordeaux, 112 mins., debuted at Cannes Directors' Fortnight May 18, 2024, also showing in São Paulo, Netherlands and the Viennale fests. French theatrical release was Aug. 28, 2024, with subsequent AlloCiné ratings of 3.3 press and 2.8 spectators (66%, 56%). It was screened for this review as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, NY. Showing:
Saturday, March 8 at 3:00pm – Q&A with Patricia Mazuy
Monday, March 10 at 8:30pm
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 02-24-2025 at 03:12 PM.
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HOLY COW/VINGT DIEUX (Louise Courvoisier 2024)
CLÉMENT FAVEAU (RIGHT)
LOUISE COURVOISIER: HOLY COW/VINGT DIEUX (2024)
A rough coming of age in the Jura gets an authentic treatment
Another Cannes 2024 French directorial debut by a female filmmaker like R-V's Wild Diamond, this is worlds apart from that portrait of a would be reality TV star and online influencer. This coming of ager instead is immersed in the traditional world of dairy farming and cheesemaking in the Jura mountains. Nowhere near the Côte d'Azur and nothing like the lip enhancement and breast enlargement of Agathe Riedinger's Wild Diamond here. This young woman, Marie-Lise (Maïwene Barthelemy), works seven days a week. She rejects the envy of Totone (Clément Faveau), the rosy-cheeked, red-headed party boy who's forced to support himself and his young sibling when his drunken father suddenly dies in a car accident. The first-time actor, Faveau, is a fresh face recruited in the region who this role fits like a glove.
Totone flails around. He takes a menial starting job at Marie-Lise's big dairy that's grueling and exploitive for him, and gets fired. Instead he tries to focus on making his own prizewinning Comté cheese - the field his late father was in - when he learns the gold medal is thirty thousand euros. He doesn't realize that he hasn't even gotten the certification that would allow his cheese to be considered. And when, despite a clash with Marie-Lise's brothers that gets him repeatedly beaten up, he starts getting sexual and then romantic with her, at first he repeatedly can't get it up.
All this, which uses non-actors from the region and real locations, has a richy authentic combination of clumsy earnestness and sincerity and good nature that is very winning, even if as a film perhaps Courvoisier's isn't as original or as striking as Riedinger's. What it has though, in spades, is old fashioned French rural spirit. Couroisier has told a story out of the region where she grew up using nothing but real people. And you feel this, but with no awkwardness: she coaxes natural performances from almost everybody.
You get a short course on how to make a wheel of Comté cheese, and you get the traditional cow birthing a calf with a young person helping pull it out. You get local partying, including the custom of a young man stripping his pants off and dancing in front of a sympathetic crowd. It's Totone. And though he keeps messing up, you get the feeling that he's going to do alright: he has shown he can take the hard knocks life deals him and come out with a smile.
The Screen Anarchy critic sees a Cannes Competition film in the future for this first-time filmmaker. Another reviewer calls Courvoisier an Éric Rohmer for the working class. And indeed this is a traditional working class world, not the class-escaping ploy of internet exploiters - though these folks too have wi-fi in their farmhouses, more accessible from what I've heard than what most Americans get.
Holy Cow/Vingt Dieux, 92 mins., debuted at Cannes Un Certain Regard, where it won the Prix de la Jeunesse, May 17, 2024, also shown at Karlovy Vary, Jerusalem, Hamburg, Angoulême, many other festivals. France released Dec. 11, 2024, with AlloCiné ratings of 4.1 (82%) press and 4.0 spectators (80%). In the US, it is a Zeitgeist Films release in association with Kino Lorber. Sceduled to open at Film Forum, New York, Mar. 28. (Subsequent Metacritic rating: 84%.)
Screened for this review as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center. Showing:
Saturday, March 8 at 12:30pm – Q&A with Louise Courvoisier.
Highest score. (3/28/2025 Metacritic rating: 82%.)
CLÉMENT FAVEAU (TOP LEFT)
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 04-09-2025 at 11:58 PM.
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BEING MARIA/MAIRA (Jessica Palud 2024)
MATT DILLON, ANAMARIA VARTOLOMEI
JESSICA PALUD: BEING MARIA/MARIA (2024)
Maria Schneider's unfortunate path to fame recreated
This is a movie about how Maria Scneider's life got wrecked by doing Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (and maybe we shouldn't like Bertolucci afer that movie). But Being Maria seems, however tumultuous and eventful, a banal piece of work in both style and outlook - in other words, a conventional biopic, though it may be informative; it may surprise uninformed members of its audience that a lot of it is true, although, as the critic for Le Monde wrote, this film is more "martyrology" than biography.
Why do it? Because it's more fun than reading a Wikipedia article. But this film is not as compete as a Wikipedia bio. The filmmakers can justifiably point to its timely nature. This is very much a #MeToo story. The sequences about the making of Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris show that in a rape sequence, where Marlon Brando uses a stick of butter as a libricant for implied anal intercourse with the young actress who was 29 years younger than him, she had not been told in advance what was going to happen. This was by arrangement between Brando and himself, Bertolucci latger admitted, so Schneider would be taken by surprise. Bertolucci "wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress," he said. "I wanted her to react humiliated." As Maria Schneider says here, after the "rape" scene was shot she felt as if she had been raped twice, by Bertolucci, and by Brando.
This very young and inexperienced actress, nineteen years old, was given an "opportunity" that allowed her to be exploited in a blatant way. How could she turn down the chance to costar with Marlon Brando? Incidentallly did Anamaria Vartolomei, the star of Audrey Diwan's excellent and celebrated 2021 illegal abortion story film Happening/L'Évènement set herself up for exploitation by consenting to play Maria Schneider? But again, how could she resist? As for Matt Dillon, he doesn't discredit himself as Brando. He even does good mimicry of the actor at times. Arguably it is brave of him (or is it simply, also, foolhardy?) to take on this role. There is talk of roles taking the actor rather than vice versa. But isn't this rather stupid? Shouldn't the point be made that actors must be careful to make the choice of their roles and not have it made for them? (Or am I being stupid?)
Since this is taking a personal turn, it may be the moment to recoiunt my relation to Bertolucci's controversial movie. I went to see it, but was too horrified by the whole idea of it to watch it, or at least the sex scenes, and stood out in the lobby of the theater in Honolulu, where I was living at the time, till they were over. I was an admirer and constant reader of Pauline Kael, but when she said Last Tango was "a bold and imaginative work—a great work," I did not read how she explained or justified such a claim. There are reasons for questioning many of Kael's opinions and actions, but nothing can take away from how stimulating she was and how much excitement she generated about cinema and film critism, which has not been equaled since, even remotely. The time, 1973, when Last Tango was released, was also a moment of energy and stimulation around movies that hasn't come since.
A Letterboxd French post on this film says "Je n’ai jamais vu 'Un dernier Tango à Paris' et après ce film j’ai encore moins envie de le voir" ("I've never seen Last Tango in Paris and after seeing this film I have even less of a desire to see it." Another entry points out the unkindness of recreating the worst moment of Schneider's life. A third notes that the excess of nudity shows female directors too can be guilty of practicing the "male gaze."
It does not feel to me that Jessica Palud's film recreates successfully or interestingly the making or conceiving of Last Tango in Paris or presents her successive dissolute life, her turn to heroin addiction, and her lengthy love affair with a younger woman she met doing a dissertation about her. In this vein one might compare Mia Hansen-Love's early film Tout est pardonné/All Is Forgiven (2007), for a thought-provoking and elegant treatment of similar lives; and Mia Hansen-Løve has made terrific films since that early one. No director in France today deals with more supleness and intelligence with difficult moments of a life than Hansen-Løve.
Relatively recently it has become a practice to have an "intimacy coordinator" on set whenever shooting scenes that involve nudity or sex, to "facilitate" an environment where actors "understand what is expected of them" and ensure that there is "informed consent." But after recently watching Halina Reijn's new film Babygirl, it has seemed more clear to me that sexiness on screen doesn't come from similating sex,or from nudity, anyway.
Being Maria/Maria 103 mins., debuted at Cannes May 21, 2024, also showing at Seoul International Women's Film, Rio, Malaga, and Thessaloniki. French theatrical release Jun. 19. AlloCiné ratings 3.2 (64%) press, 3.5 70% spectators. In the USA, a Kino Lorber release. Screened for this review as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, NYC. Showtimes:
Saturday, March 15 at 6:45pm – Q&A with Matt Dillon and Anamaria Vartolomei
Last edited by Chris Knipp; 02-22-2025 at 09:39 PM.
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