Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center 2015

[Chris Knipp]

JEAN CHARLES HUE: EAT YOUR BONES/MANGE TES MORTS (2014)


JASON FRANÇOIS AND MOISE DORKEL IN EAT YOUR BONES

Tragicomic Gypsy noir thriller, enacted by themselves

Following up on his documentary/fiction hybrid debut, The Lord’s Ride/La BM du Seigneur, which portrayed the gypsy communities of northern France, director Jean-Charles Hue reunites some of that film’s nonprofessional acors to tell the story of another Romani family, by reports closely related to their own lives. It's the day before the eighteen-year-old Jason (Jason François) is to be baptized, and some in the tribe, including his mother, are ardent born-again Christians. But the day takes a huge detour. Jason's half-brother Fred (Frédéric Dorkel) arrives, just released after 15 years in prison for killing a cop. Riding in Fred's lovingly preserved BMW, the two, along with a third brother and a cousin, team up to steal a truckload of copper, but things go dramatically wrong in what turns out to be very much a short gangster film, only with more of a do-it-yourself flavor, actors from the milieu of the story recreating real events of Fred's life. Though the film image quality was disappointing, eventually in the night scenes the images turn out to be poetic and beautiful. No wonder Hue, who received a number of nominations for his first film, was awarded the 2014 Prix Jean Vigo, a prize reserved for a French director whose work shows a "spirit of independence and extraordinary style." A remarkable piece, something of a curiosity, a movie that enables real people who live partly cinematic lives to comment on those lives through enacting fiction. At the same time it's clearly filmmaker Jean-Charles Hue's homage to a people and a world whose romantic and heroically doomed existence he sees beyond their trailer-trash Harmony Korine facade.

Reviewing the film at Cannes for Hollywood Reporter, Jordan Meltzer observes the cast, whom he calls "the slang-spouting trailer park gypsies of Northern France," partly through an American lens, noting that their "love of beer, barbecue, crime and God are about the closest thing Europe may have to the gun crazy communities of America's Deep South." He also notes their similarity to the characters of Bruno Dumont's The Life of Jesus. Meltzer is also right in noting the film "meanders too much" in its documentary-style prelude by the trailers and the barbecue, and only really hits its stride when Fred roars off in his car with his compadres and night falls. This is when dp Jonathan Ricquebourg shows both his aesthetic and action chops, for shootouts and car chase that as Meltzer puts it have "the fury and energy of the early Mad Max movies." It goes without sayint ghat these gypsies and the Dorkel family in particular, whose partly Eastern European origins explain why some of them are blond, are natural thespian types, having no trouble at all ramping up their everyday behavior into something that fits a combination gangster and Western plot.

Eat Your Bones/Mange tes morts-Tu ne diras point, 94 mins., debuted at Cannes Director's Fortnight. French theatrical release 17 September 2014 led to excellent reviews (AlloCiné press rating 4.0). Here this niche film even in its native France is more of a curiosity, and it is currently marred by very odd English subtitles in which certain consonants are consistently missing. Screened for this review as part of the March 2015 Film Society of Lincoln Center/UniFrance joint series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.

[Chris Knipp]

MÉLANIE LAURENT: BREATHE/RESPIRE (2014)


LOU DE LAÂGE AND JOSÉPHINE JAPY IN BREATHE

Poison girlfriends

The beautiful French actress Mélanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds), who is now 32, debuted as a director with the 2011 The Adopted/Les adoptés, where the steadfast triumvirate of a mother and two daughters is rocked after one sibling begins a relationship with a man. Her sophomore effort leaves men out almost completely, focusing on two mothers and (primarily) on their two daughters, the latter in a decidedly dysfunctional relatinship, cruel on one side, unhealthily obsessive on the other, which can only end badly -- as it turns out, very badly. I could only miss the subtlety and delicate moderation of Céline Sciamma's debut feature Water Lilies, also about girlish obsession, exploitation and dependency, but far more within the realm of the usual and the plausible. Having just watched Jacquot's 3 Hearts, which uses Catherine Deneuve, her daughter Chiara Mastroianni, and Charlotte Gainsbourg as an iconic triumvirate, I was struck by how well 17-year-old Charlie (Joséphine Japy, Gray Souls, R-V 2005) fits into the tradition. Japy has Charlotte Gainsbourg's fashionably disordered hair and a sad little face that could be that of Chiara Mastroianni as a girl. And these teenage girls still brandish long cigarettes the same way Charlotte, Chiara, and Catherine do.

Charlie (nickname for the derided given name of Charlene) is an exploited victim who occasionally lashes out. She is shy, serious, and saddened by the breakup of her parents. Her father is only glimpsed; her mother, seen occasionally, is played by César winner Isabelle Carré (The Refuge, R-V 2010). The vivacious villain of the piece is Charlie's new friend Sarah (Lou de Laâge of Jappeloup, R-V 2013), a new arrival at her lycée, where for both of them their key final year "bac" diploma exam eventually looms, but emotional game-playing frequently seems to make study barely relevant. Besotted by Sarah's charm and confidence, eager for distraction from her fighting parents, Charlie ignores warning signs.

Sarah tells Charlie her mother is away for six months working for an NGO in Africa, which makes her appear both needy and glamorous. Sarah is vivacious and social and may bring out the shy Charlie. But in the social whirl of a summer vacation with other students in Spain, Charlie grows jealous and suspects her intimacy with Sarah may be fake. Sarah is everybody's friend and nobody's, and doesn't respect the privacy of the secrets Charlie has shared with her. Charlie is too needy and timid to find friendship elsewhere -- but not too inhibited to retaliate.

In his Cannes Variety review Scott Foundas suggests this film achieves the "small but impressive triumph" of making us "feel complicity in Sarah's claustrophobic codependency" so that when Sarah is away from Charlie, we "long for her return, despite knowing that's probably not the best idea." That's the understatement of the year. Sarah is utter poison for Charlie. One might have appreciated a fuller look at the motives and mechanisms of the two girls' behavior. There could have been more about the causes of Sarah's cruel and deceptive behavior and more motivation for Charlie's willingness to submit to it. Breathe provides intense emotional portraits, but some elements seemed tacked on or flimsy. "Breathing" is a theme relevant to both Charlie and Sarah, but it hardly seems integral to the film. One wonders both why no other students develop personalities and why there are no boys to enter the two girl's world; alternately, why such a handsome boy suddenly offers himself to the drab Charlie at the end.

My subtitle is an allusion to Emmanuel Bourdieu's 2006 film Poison Friends/Les amitiés maléfiques (NYFF 2006), about a group of literature students at the Sorbonne duped into accepting as a mentor a cruel, exploitive fellow student who's a complete fake. Lacking the subtlety of Céline Sciamma's tale or the full cast of characters and interesting plot line of Emmanuel Bourdieu's, Laurent's film, adapted by Laurent with Julien Lambroschini from a novel by Anne-Sophie Brasme, is marked by an awkward alternation between periods of Young-Adult-novel blandness and noir extremism. Nonetheless the two young actresses, under Laurent's direction, show promise, and the widescreen cinematography of Arnaud Potier is consistently handsome.

Breathe / Respire, 91 mins. debuted at Cannes (Critics’ Week — Special Screenings) 17 May 2014; has shown in over a dozen other festivals including Toronto. French theatrical release 12 November 2014, with good reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.5). Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-UniFrance series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, March 2015.

[Chris Knipp]

JEAN-PAUL CIVEYRAC: MY FRIEND VICTORIA/MON AMIE VICTORIA (2014)


GUSLAGLIE MALANDA AND PIERRE ANDRAU IN MY FRIEND VICORIA

Cloying generosity

In My Friend Victoria Jean-Paul Civeyrac, who is on the faculty of the elite Paris cinema institute La Fémis, has produced a glossy, sweet, gentle adaptation of "Victoria and the Staveneys," a story by Doris Lessing about race, class, and privilege that focuses on the relationship that develops by chance between poor black girl and a well-off liberal-left white family, transposing everything from London to Paris. The eight-year-old black girl, Victoria, has no one to pick her up from her local school one afternoon when her aunt falls ill and is taken to the hospital, and Edouard of the Staveney family (now called Sauvinet), takes her home for the night. This brief experience is an awakening for the girl to luxury and comfort that stays with her; later she is astonished to learn the Sauvinets' roomy apartment is near her aunt's little one. Victoria remains as in the story "a construct rather than a character" (as a Guardian review put it) but the white family doesn't seem so clearly "skewered" as by Lessing. It's true, the mother still says she "always wanted a black child," and her husband (played by the always slightly odd Pascal Greggory) uses politically incorrect pet names, and their younger son Thomas fetishizes black women. Somehow it all seems rather adorable. A constant voice-over by Victoria's best friend adds a cozy Nouvelle Vague note. The story is beautifully told by Civerac; it's just lost some of its bite and gains French gloss.

Knowing where the Sauvinet family lives, Victoria (played as an adult by Guslagie Malanga) keeps an eye on their building and sees the younger brother Thomas (who always wanted to kiss her at school) grow up. She lacks motivation, drops out of lycée and takes a succession of jobs. It's her adopted sister and best friend Fanny (Nadia Moussa), the narrator, who goes on to study literature at the Sorbonne and wants to become a writer. When Thomas (Pierre Andrau) turns up at the record shop where Victoria has found a home, she tells him who she is, he asks her out and they become lovers. It's not a profound love but after they've drifted apart by mutual agreement when he goes off to college in the US, she discovers she is pregnant with his child, whom she chooses to have, and calls Marie. Later she has a black husband, Sam (Tony Harrisson), and they have a little boy, Charlie (Khadim Ka). Sam, a musician, whom she loves, is always away and dies in a car crash.

It isn't until seven years after Marie's birth that Victoria decides to tell Thomas he has a daughter. Not only is Thomas delighted with this news, and adoring of Marie, assuming his responsibilities as her father, but his whole family rallies round embracing both Victoria and Marie now as members of the family. Only Edouard, who's become an international big shot, is suspicious and insists on paternity being proven. But eventually he too accepts (paternity indeed being proven) and apologizes for his initial behavior. The heart of the film/story is the way the Sauvinets' means and their embrace of Marie (while ignoring Charlie) make Victoria feel her control kindly but inexorably usurped, swept away by the power of wealth, privilege and race. A crux is the old school in the neighborhood where Thomas and Edouard, then students there too, first met Victoria, and where Marie now goes. The school is a tougher choice for well-off liberals now, with weapons and drugs added, and the Sauvinets want to send Marie to a "good" school. Victoria agrees but rejects a boarding school, though knowing a boarding school is in the future.

One may feel sometimes that the Sauvinets have taken over not only Marie, but the film itself; but one has to recognize that despite Victoria's impoverished origins, she is a French native, not an immigrant with a grim past. Even if it may feel too glossy and too gentle in its depiction of the Sauvinets, its educated black woman's polished narration too lulling, My Friend Victoria is still subtly provocative. Civeyrac's well-written and edited film, coming from a somewhat schematic short story, is lightweight at its core, but richly textured and pleasing in its surfaces. It's certainly far different from his symbolic, fable-like work, exemplified by his first feature Through the Forest (NYFF 2005); evidently similar in its more realistic approach to his second feature, Young Girls in Black (2010), a film about teen angst.

My Friend Victora/Mon amie Victoria, 95 mins, debuted at Namur and showed at the London Film Festival. French theatrical release 31 December 2014 (AlloCiné press rating 3.4). Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-UniFrance joint series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema in March 2015 (North American premiere). US theatrical release 4 Dec. 2015 (NYC, IFC Center).

[Chris Knipp]

CÉDRIC KAHN: WILD LIFE/VIE SAUVAGE (2014)



Not so wild

This film, featuring one of director and actor Matthieu Kassovitz's more extensive roles in recent years, is a free adaption of the real-life story of Xavier Fortin, who became an outlaw for over a decade hiding with his two sons when his wife broke with their back-to-nature lifestyle and won a custody battle for the boys, and he refused to comply. I refer the reader to my review of another French film dealing with the same material, Jean Denizot's The Good Life/La belle vie (FCN 2014; released in France April 2014).

The French critics seem to prefer the Cédric Kahn film. Neither is an exact depiction of the events, which may be in dispute since the wife's account and the husband's differ. I think Denizot's film makes more sense, and shows more of the positive side of the boys' life in nature with their father. Both films use two sets of actors for the sons, for when they are seven and eight and when they are teenagers.

In Cédric Kahn's film, Carole (Céline Sallette and Mathieu Kassovitz) bonded because both had tired of propriety and consumerism and renounced civilization and chosen to live off the land. Calling themselves Nora and Paco, they have led a semi-nomadic life in a caravan, eventually having three sons. But Nora has tired of their itinerant lifestyle and wanting to give her their sons a conventional education and more of an opportunity to function in the world, she gains custody. But when Philippe comes to Nora/Céline's parents' house, the two younger boys escape and run off with their father, the oldest remaining behind.

The two younger boys are seven and eight when this happens, and the father takes them on the run, hiding from police, trying to continue living in nature and home-schooling the boys. This goes on for over a decade, whereupon both the boys begin to get fed up with the limitations of their life, and the father gets caught.

In Denizot's film, the boys and their father are largely on their own, and the positive side of the experience comes through better. In Kahn's film, there are a lot of times when the trio are living with hippies or punks, on the edge of a farm, and some chaos and conflict ensue. In Denizot's film, a change comes when the older boy meets a girl and falls in love with her, and finds a job, and leaves to be with her. The fugitive life has prevented him from experiencing sex, and he wants to have his own car and funds. In both films, conflicts eventually arise between the boys and their father.

Kahn takes us to the period when the father is arrested and the boys, seeking to gain his release, are confronted by their mother, who hasn't seen them for all these years. Even more than in her role of Jean Dujardin's spouse in The Connection, Céline Sallette plays a borderline hysterical, shrill wife. Her emotionality may be effective, but it's grating.

In my review of Denizot's film, I mention Sidney Lumet's moving 1988 film Running on Empty, featuring River Phoenix, which does not have spouses in conflict, but is also about a family on the run from authorities, moving from place to place and concealing their identity, and also involves an older son who reluctantly has to choose, in the interests of personal fulfillment, to break away from his fugitive family. The Running on Empty family are living in suburbs and cities, so living in nature isn't involved. But Running on Empty works better than these two French films, perhaps for the latter reason. It seems difficult to represent both the appeal of living in nature away from civilization while simultaneously showing a fugitive existence. The two work against each other. It becomes too complicated. In the case of Kahn's film, the action simply becomes too chaotic. In the focus on authentic milieux, one loses contact with where they are and what is gong on.

Nonetheless, Cédric Kahn's Wild Life has been perhaps the best critically received of all his films, and it won a special jury prize at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. Certainly this theme is a fascinating one.

Wild Life/Vie sauvage, 102 mins., after its San Sebastian debut, showed at a handful of other festivals and had its French theatrical relase 29 October 2014 (AlloCiné press rating 3.9.). The 2010 Rendez-Vous featured Cédric Kahn's Regrets. The director's 2004 adaptation of Georges Simenon's tense short novel Red Lights/Feux rouges is also worth watching. Shown as part of the FSLC/uniFrance-sponsored Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at the Walter Reade Theater and the IFC Center in New York in March 2015, its North American premiere, where it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

CÉDRIC JIMENEZ: THE CONNECTION/LA FRENCH (2014)



Drug war nostalgia

There's nobody as vivid as Gene Hackman's "Popeye" Doyle or action as good as the car chase sequence with Gene Hackman in the 1971 French Connection, but Cédric Jiminez's retro policier, set in 1975, deals with the actual French side of the French Connection referred to by William Friedkin's classic. It depicts a newly appointed Marseille investigator with crusading zeal called Pierre Michel. In a change of pace for him, Michel is played by The Artist's and the droll OSS 117 spoofs' Jean Dujardin. Michel's aim, which takes all he's got, is to destroy drug lord Gaëtan 'Tany' Zampa (Gilles Lellouche). This is an epic struggle, and though in an overstated effort at parallelism, Dujardin and Lellouche look a little too alike for my taste, there are many impressive scenes. There's also some dragged-out suspense that might have benefitted by tighter editing. Despite an implied reference to Jean-Pierre Melville right at the beginning, and similarities to a number of French gangster flicks and considerable ambition, The Connection/La French is at best a good mid-range effort, similar to Olivier Marechal's flavorful genre film A Gang Story/Les Lyonais (R-V 2012), which has more fully realized gangsters. Neither of these can compete either with the adept recent French crime movies like Tell No One (or Audiard's epic gangster coming-of-ager A Prophet, not to mention his Read My Lips and The Beat My Heart Skipped) or with French polar noir classics like Rififi-- or anything by Melville. It doesn't have the drive or the neat structure or the cool. Above all, with its over-active cutting and jumpy camerawork, it lacks the cool.

The festival blurb calls her "luminous," but Céline Sallette, who plays Michel's beleagered and occasionally complaining wife, quite lacks the glamor she had in Bertrand Bonello's House of Pleasures, and as a pivotal but in screen time relatively minor character "Le Fou," Benoît Magimel is wasted. Don't get me wrong: this is a well-made film. But it has some tough acts to follow, and it offers little that is new, beyond a gangster's disco Krypton opened by the cocky Zampa (to please his wife: it loses his money) and the music to go with it.

In his Toronto review for Variety Peter Debruge comments that this "manages to be both more upbeat and more cynical than William Friedkin’s loosely fictionalized policier." He also notes this film's "disappointingly generic approach" and "hard-to-follow narrative." For this one must blame Jimenez's screenwriter, his fiancée Audrey Diwan.

The cynicism comes in revelations about how the drug cartel has thoroughly infiltrated police and local government from top to bottom. Michel is bucked every step of the way, till Mitterand's rise to power and appointment of Marseille's mayor to a key government post causes the latter to turn reformist and back up Michel's effort to find out who the leading figures are and trap them in heir heroin-producing lairs.

There is good material here surely, but it needed to be pared down into something leaner and meaner. Debruge's review may be consulted for further examples of the various ways that Jimenez's attempt at an American gangster movie falls too much into obvious and repetitious genre conventionality.

The Connection/La French, 135 mins., debuted at Toronto; showed at a few other festivals. French release 3 December 2014, AlloCiné press rating 3.7. Screened for this review as part of the UniFrance-Film Society of Lincoln Center joint series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, March 2015 (US premiere). A US theatrical release is coming courtesy of Drafthouse.

[Chris Knipp]

THOMAS LILTI: HIPPOCRATES/HIPPOCRATE (2014)


VINCENT LACOSTE AND REDA KATEB IN HIPPOCRATES

Interning in a Paris hospital

Former physician Thomas Lilti's second film deals with matters he knows from work experience as a still-practicing physician: interning at a Paris hospital. He shows it from two angles, that of a privileged newbie, boyish, curly-locked 23-year-old Benjamin (Vincent Lacoste of French Kissers, R-V 2010), whose father, Professor Barois (Jacques Gamblin) is director of the ward he comes to serve in, and a disadvantaged Algerian doctor, Abdel Rezzek (the able Reda Kateb of A Prophet, Zero Dark Thirty)), forced to remain an intern through experienced, simply because of his nationality. The group-intern musical interludes are a needless effort to liven things up: the pleasure of this little film is how low-keyed it is compared to American counterparts. Instead of trying to impress us with high-powered efforts to show doctors' and hospitals' ability to use miracle tools and save lives under duress, Lilti is interested in other things.

The primary thing is the cornerstone of the Hippocratic Oath, strongly implied here but never mentioned: "Primum non nocere," "First do no harm." That is the pivotal issue in one of two cases in which Benjamin gets involved during his first days in the hospital. Well, two, really. Since he inadvertently allows an alcoholic, homeless, violent patient the staff call "Tsunami" (Thierry Levaret) to die on his watch the first night, that is certainly harm. But it's really not his fault the required EKG wasn't done and he didn't anticipate the risk of heart attack and only ordered a painkiller for abdominal pain. The EKG machine in this hospital wasn't working. But when both his supervising doctor and his father order Benjamin to pretend the EKG was done, this leads to a threat of scandal when the dead man's former wife (Julie Brochen) repeatedly comes around with questions.

The main case Benjamin is responsible for, and the greatest issue of "Do no harm," is Madame Richard (Jeanne Cellard), an old woman with cancer, needlessly operated on, surely never likely to walk again, whose children only want her not to suffer. Here Benjamin has allowed Abdel to help him and Abdel constantly fights to have Madame Richard put on a morphine drip, while the hospital system takes her off starts tube feeding her, causing her great pain, and ignores the "Do not resuscitate" order on her file.

The issues here are clear. A third one is a new trend toward inhumane and economy-based management: the hospital director comes from business. He previously worked at Amazon. He follows draconian budget guidelines that have seriously undermined service and equipment maintenance (hence the broken EKG machine). This leads to a lively scene -- ensemble acting stands out here -- where the interns stage an impromptu revolt.

The ending is silly, if feel-good: Abdel's doom is too easily averted and Benjamin's personal upheaval is over-dramatic and too quickly resolved. Reda Kateb is wonderfully understated and thoroughly convincing, though the audience might prefer somebody more overtly sympathetic, which can be said even more for the pouty, semi-adolescent Lacoste. But it is appropriate Lilti should end on an up-note, because this is a loving and understanding if realistic portrait, notable for its gritty portrayal of the intern's digs and dining area (apparently real) covered with pornographic, especially phallic, graffiti.

Hippocrates/Hippocrate, 102 mins., French release 3 September 2014, with very positive reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.8). Shown as part of the FSLC/uniFrance-sponsored Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at the Walter Reade Theater and the IFC Center in New York in March 2015, where it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

CHRISTOPHE HONORÉ: MÉTAMORPHOSES (2014)


AMIRA AKILI AND SÉBASTIEN HIREL IN MÉTAMORPHOSES

Honoré's mythological misfire

Perhaps this is an "ambitious undertaking" as a blurb says, but Christophe Honoré's foray into classical mythology is inexplicable and hard to make much sense of. Despite a lot of nice-looking young people, who look good naked and are often seen that way, Métamorphoses is a big disappointment. It brings to the screen, obviously "reimagined," a selection of tales from Ovid’s magnum opus. Honoré, whose films have mostly been light, though melancholy, and specifically rooted in everyday Parisian life, here tackles the great Latin narrative poem of transformation, mythology, and the history of Roman civilization, transplanting it to a, mostly vague, version of present-day France. The cast, when dressed, wear a motley assortment of informal modern-day clothes. Sometimes they take to the water, and dip in a lake. Sometimes they wander the woods. Sometimes they enter the banlieue, urban projects on the periphery, where police arrive seeking, without apparent success, to quell a large gathering. From time to time classical music, ranging from antique to modern, is heard.

As the film begins, Jupiter (Sébastien Hirel) absconds with buxom schoolgirl Europa (newcomer Amira Akili). Their courtship is the film's unifying thread, which is interspersed with interludes involving Narcissus (Arthur Jacquin), Orpheus and Eurydice, Bacchus (Damien Chapelle), and the Bacchantes, with humans repeatedly changed into animals. One such scene riskily staged on the floor of a mosque shows a naked couple making love, later turning into live lions, the female violently pawing the male.

Christophe Honoré's sublimely melancholy Parisian winter musical Love Songs, a Rendez-Vous 2008 selection, is a film I never tire of, and nearly all of his films have appealed to me, some very much. I like Honoré and I too am a fan of his muse, Louis Garrel. Perhaps the director needed a break from his usual stars and milieux. But this is the kind of thing Cocteau or Rohmer could probably have done better. Honoré succeeded (in La Belle Personne with an updating of the 17th-century Princesse de Clèves of Madame de Lafayette, but ancient Rome is too far afield for him.

Métamorphoses, 105 mins., debuted at Venice 30 August 2014, showing in a dozen other international festivals. This is a perfect festival film; it has almost zero theatrical release potential. AlloCiné press rating 3.2. Shown as part of the FSLC/uniFrance-sponsored Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at the Walter Reade Theater and the IFC Center in New York in March 2015, its North American premiere, where it was screened for this review.