Rendez-Vous with French Cinema

[Chris Knipp]

Some advance comments on the 2019 New York Rendez-Vous.


Daughters of the Sun/Filles du soleil

Mademoiselle de Joncquères Emmanuel Mouret
It was reviewed here briefly last fall in my Paris Movie Journal. It's a beautiful film, but the casting seems to have gone for charm and box office appeal over appropriateness. Neither Baer nor De France shows quite the necessary edge. Nonetheless it did well with French critics. The AlloCiné press rating was 3.9. The AlloCiné biography calls director Emmanuel Mouret "the heir of Rohmer, Guitry et Woody Allen." That combination seemed clearer in his 2007 Shall We Kiss? (R-V 2008).

Vincent Lacoste
He has become an important figure in French cinema seemingly in spite of himself. Plucked out of collège (junior high) the way Romain Duris was found in a lycée (high school), Lacoste debuted at 13 in the comically realistic 2009 adolescent drama French Kissers/Les beaux gosses (R-V 2010), and took to the medium. Ten years on, has appeared in around 25 films, and is more and more a known and popular actor in France. He has tended to play amiable slacker roles that seem to fit his own personality, but he has always sought new challenges. Last year's R-V showed him as the young would-be lover in Justine Triet's charming and frequently hilarious comedy, Victoria. In Amanda he's a young man dealing with tragedy, and in Freshman he tackles another medical-related coming of age story directed by medically-rained Thomas Lilti. He landed a leading role in Christophe Honoré's Cannes Competition film Sorry Angel, also part of the NYFF Main Slate, and Liti's medical school drama, which has got plenty of attention in France, completes a year that has made this offhand slacker guy with the cherubic face and mop of curly hair definitively one of the country's major stars.

Daughters of the Sun/Les filles du soleil Eva Husson
I was the laughing stock of Cannes last year. It was judged by many (not all, of course!) to be terrible in every respect. The AlloCiné press rating of 1.9 is off-the-charts bad. "Everything rings false in this film," said Le Monde. An unfortunate choice for the beautiful, versatile, and super-energetic Golshifteh Farahani,who has played in French, Farsi, and English language films with equal success and acclaim. She was the glamorous center of Louis Garrel's directorial debut, Two Friends/Les deux amis. What were they all thinking and what are the R-V organizers thinking? Completists like me will feel compelled to find out. The director's debut, the teen-sex orgy film Bang Gang, we all went out of our way to see (R-V 2016). This doesn't promise as good a payoff, but Les Inrocks said that though "not a success," it didn't deserve the ridicule it received at Cannes. Jay Weissberg of Variety simply said it's a wholly artificial treatment of real facts (a French journalist embedded with a female peshmerga unit) that will nonetheless be a "shoo-in for international distribution" because it's a "emme-centric film, directed by a woman, about a group of women courageously fighting ISIS."

Mia Hansen-Løve's Maya
Some of her early films were wonderful, namely All Is Forgiven/Tout est pardonné and The Father of My Children/Le pére de mes enfants, while others have been just very nice, i.e. Goodbye First Love, Eden and Things to Come/L'Avenir, the latter with La Huppert, and therefore perfect (Metascore 88), but really more conventional than her earlier stuff. This one seems in the "nice" category, or worse, since it's got a so-so AlloCiné press rating of 3.3, and concerns a hotshot war journalist - often a dubious screen subject - in an exotic place - India - that Hansen-Løve probably doesn't know anything about. See Joachim Trier's Louder Than Bombs,, with Huppert as a war journalist, in America, which didn't pan out very well. But it's always wrong to prejudge a film, and I do especially like Hansen-Løve.



Bruno Dumont's Coincoin and the Extra-Humans/Coincoin et les Z'inhumains
He is one of the most distinctive French filmmakers of the last twenty years. His earlier films - Life of Jesus, Hunanité, Flanders, the spiritual and violent Hadewijch (NYFF 2009) and Hors Satan command one's utmost attention, almost reverence, even if one is at times also repulsed. They are harsh, shocking, and unforgettable, rooted in the poor part of north central France of Bailleul (Nord) from which he comes, not too far from the equally harsh and poor town of Hallencourt Edouard Louis, author of the searing 2014 gay adolescent coming-of-age novel The End of Eddy/En finir avec Eddy Belleguelle comes from. Lately he has turned whimsical and nutty, but is still out there. This new oneis a TV miniseries sequel to Li'l Quinquin/Ptit Quinquin, and has gotten very good reviews in France. It's harder for Americans to get. A couple years ago R-V presented Dumont's Slack Bay/Ma Loute, which for the first time had some very famous actors in stunningly unflattering roles. Last year came his goofily spiritual Childhood of Jeanne of Arc, which made John Waters' annual top ten list.

En finir... and Edouard Louis

Edouard Louis' novel was made into a movie by Anne Fontaine, Reinventing Marvin/Marvin ou la belle éduction. Unfortunately it seems (I haven't seen it) a misfire which Louis has denied any connection with. Too bad for the promising young actor who starred in it, Finnegan Oldfield, who has been seen in two previous R-V films, Bang Gang and Nocturama.

The Summer House / Les Estivants
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, France/Italy, 2018
She comes from a privileged Franco-Italian background; her sister is Carla Bruni, Sarkozy's third wife. She is equally fluent in French and Italian and is in films in both languages and as an actress she has 90 credits. Her directorial efforts, much less numerous (six), often touch on autobiographical, family-related issues, like this one, which sounds particularly tangled and rich in that kind of connection. Her performance in Paolo Virzì's Human Capital, an entertaining thriller combined with a tale of class and personal meltdown (of Bruni Tedeschi's character), was a splendid performance that suited her perfectly. This certainly sounds promising.