[Sent from Paris.]

I certainly can't compare the oriiginal Cannes version of Brown Bunny with the edited one shown currently in US theaters, as Ebert can. I suspect that his relatively kind review of the new one is due to embarrasment over his clash with Vincent Gallo. He went a bit overboard and said philistine things with nasty implications about avantgardiste cinema, which he sometimes in some forms champions. And while Ebert tends to be a bit too accepting of too many things, that is also one of his strengths, his openmindedness.

I'll paste in here some notes I emailed to Oscar just now:

I've seen the following new French films over the past few days in Paris theaters:

5 x 2 (Cinq fois deux) (Francois Ozon)
Mensonges et Traisons (Laurent Tirard)
Adieu (Arnaud de Pallieres)
Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants (Yvan Attal)
La Femme de Gilles (Frederic Fonteyne)

I am making notes on them and will write them up when I get a chance. It's rather challenging to see French films without subtitles of course, since I miss a good 30% of the dialogue in many cases, but I get enough to tell if I like the film. I don't know if I ever saw the actor, Clovis Cornillac, who Le Monde today says "On ne cesse de trouver formidable de film en film" (one never ceases to find [him] formidable from film to film"). He is in both Mensonges et Traisons and La Femme de Gilles (he's Gilles) and he is incredibly powerful and talented, and his looks are interesting too, not conventionally a matinee idol, but not a plain John either. . . In Femmes de Gilles, he's a disturbed adulterous factory worker; in Mensonges, he's a spoiled football star in a comic role that he makes lively and droll. As Le Monde says, "and suppose they start to give him really big roles?" Another Gerard Depardieu? A powerhouse actor. Emmanuelle Devos gives a complex, self conscious and much praised performance in the film as Elisa, the wife.

Adieu is more avant-garde than the others, adventurous and challenging in its editing and use of sound, and I'd like to see it with subtitles to have some of the complex philosophical and religious discussions clarified for me, but I found it to be a powerful meditation on death, God, and the existence of evil in the world as well as the issue of an international "class system" of nations. Mensonges et Traisons has the very appealing Edouard Baer, and is likely to do quite well in the US, as will La Femme de Gilles, a disturbing and intense study of adultery in the northwest of France (I judge) during the 1930's. I didn't care for 5 x 2 at all, found it tedious and affected; but since Swimming Pool was so popular, and it opens with a brutal sex scene, it may get some successful play in the US too.

There are plenty of good new French films opening here this fall. Who knows when we'll get to see them stateside, though?