Film Carew: Your Guide To The French Film Festival

The French Film Festival opens this week. It features lots of films. Your old pal Film Carew has seen most of 'em. So, here's a guide to the hits and misses of the 25th FFF.

11.6

In France, the real-life ballad of Toni Musulin - security-truck driver turned mastermind of the theft of 11.6 million Euros - is a well-known modern folk tale; his 2009 crime finding an ordinary working man thieving from banks in the middle of the global financial meltdown. Out of that context, Philippe Godeau's to-screen adaptation plays as a familiar-feeling crime movie, in which a semi-mysterious loner meticulously plans - then pulls off - an unlikely heist.

2 Autumns, 3 Winters

Sébastian Betbeder's cinematic scrapbook is a cut-and-paste, rom-com collage as rumpled and messy as the combovered bedhead of its leading-man - and French cinema's unlikely ascendant star - Vincent Macaigne. Playing like a kind of post-post-modernist riff on early Woody Allen, it's a device-littered, media-mixing, movie-nerd comedy in which Macaigne narrates in to-camera interludes, talking casually about art and cinema and bands, deconstructing the boys-and-girls-finding-and-losing-love narrative as it goes.

A Castle In Italy

“All this intermingling creeps me out,” Louis Garrel shudders, pissily, annoyed at getting roped into the sprawling, old-money-but-cash-poor, in-each-others'-pockets family of new lover Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi. Given they're off-screen squeezes - and, in A Castle In Italy, each playing mercurial actors - it's easy to see the autobiography in Bruni-Tedeschi's latest directorial effort. Which is another shaggy, amiable, episodic, uneasily-intimate, casually-bilingual film about weird families and their eccentric inhabitants.

Attila Marcel

The live-action debut from ace animator Sylvain Chomet, Attila Marcel finds its actors playing humans cartoons in stylised twee-French fantasias and candy-coloured musical-number flashbacks. Guillaume Gouix is the mute hero, an orphaned, arrested-manboy infantilised by his music-teacher aunts, kept in stasis as the eternal child prodigy. But when he discovers Anne Le Ny's weird old neighbour-lady, Madame Proust (!), her sweet herbs trigger a cavalcade of flashbacks that function as a form of narrative memory-regression-therapy. Chomet's background is present in the precise stylisation of every set and shot; and his inventive use of POV in the memory sequences shows a great visual mind at work.

Bright Days Ahead

Fanny Ardant and Laurent Fafitte get hot under-the-collar in this pleasingly-acted but entirely trivial adultery movie. Based on a novel by Fanny Chesnel, there are some interesting ideas at play in the subtext of their cross-generational coupling: she a recent-retiree from the last generation to get a Golden Retirement; he a boho part-timer with no such secure future. But it's really a minor, careful, non-feather-ruffling riff on those old clichés: steamy windows, scandalous fucking, a woman liberated, etc.

Camille Claudel 1915

One of 2013's great films, Bruno Dumont's latest study in Christian martyrdom and rural cruelty finds Juliette Binoche in career-best form as the tragic titular character, held against her will in a remote asylum in rural France. There's a vicious veracity at play - it's based on Claudel's real-life correspondence, filmed at a remote abbey, and filled with a cast of non-professionals suffering from mental illnesses - but Dumont's vision is no work of grim socio-realism, instead achieving Bressonian cinematic transcendence.

Cycling With Molière

Philippe Le Guay's gentle rural comedy finds Fabrice Luchini and Lambert Wilson as a pair of actors, old comrades whose careers have gone in divergent directions: Luchini now a hermit, Wilson a TV star. The two get together to rehearse Molière's The Misanthrope for stage, and art and life intersect as they read over the text; whilst Le Guay riffs on the real-life, off-screen personas of Luchini and Wilson to add another layer. It amounts to an amiable, conversational film about actors as eternal actors.

Domestic Life

Only self-flagellating fans of the coldest depictions of suburbia will warm to Isabelle Czajka's Domestic Life, a heartless portrait of the haute-bourgeois housewives of exurbia. FFF everywhere-woman Emmanuelle Devos stars as the depressed spouse of douchey Laurent Poitrenaux, but the narrative is passed to Julie Ferrier, Natacha Régnier, and Héléna Noguerra; all variations on the same disinterested mothers/dissatisfied spouses. All those totems of suburban isolation are here: glittering McMansions, an actual McDonald's, a faux-ritzy shopping centre in which the housewives wander like the undead. But there's little actual satire, and certainly no humour nor warmth; Czajka's suburbia an existential prison of affluent isolation.

The Finishers

Patently “inspirational” Opening Night picture finds a dickish dad (Jacques Gamblin) deigning to team with his stubborn, wheelchair-bound son (Fabien Héraud) for a triathlon. Director Nils Tavernier comes from a background in documentarymaking, and understands the need for veracity.  Refusing to condescend to his handicapped lead, his film a study in human bodies, the need to test and push them. But the swelling string music and the cheap tension-building drama keep it strictly PG and crowdpleasin'.

Friends From France

In Soviet Russia, a pair of cousins (Soko and Jérémie Lippman) go behind the Iron Curtain posing as French honeymooners, secretly out to aid and abet the Jewish refuseniks of an anti-communist underground. Writer/directors Anne Weil and Philippe Kotlarski - riffing on Weil's own teen-travel experiences - have rendered a pleasingly paranoid, wonderfully-wallpapered, dark and dingy version of a 1979 Odessa that feels both banal and sinister. The story's a tale of innocence-lost, and its two lead characters are all too innocent: wide-eyed babes heading into the utter unknown, their political ideals and sexual identity ripe for re-evaluation. For audiences, Friends From France functions as a form of cinematic time-travel, back into a pre-globalised, pre-internet past; but its surveillance-state themes are plenty timely, too.

Going Away

In one of those 'you can't escape the past' dramas, two lonesome, seasonal-worker souls unite in serendipitous circumstances: Louise Bourgoin a tattooed single-mother trying to run from her debts; Pierre Rochefort a semi-mysterious substitute teacher out to flee his family's vast wealth. And they're both, like, totally hot, so the audience is invited to cheer for them to shake free of money, and start over as a whole new family. It's at once anodyne and fierce; an earnest drama tinged with viciousness.

Homeland

In a reverse-fish-out-of-water comedy, Tewfik Jallab, a bourgie law-student raised in France by Arab immigrants, goes back to his father's Algerian-dustbowl hometown, gets stranded, and then falls under the sway of life lived outside of network coverage. “We're never curious enough about our past,” Jallab says, in voice-over, as if speaking aloud the film's theme; Homeland a film about second-generation kids as a generation caught between cultures.

It Boy

A romantic-comedy from the maker of Ils? After his Hollywood crossover combusted with the Jessica Alba-starring stinkbomb The Eye, David Moreau fled back to France, and got stuck directing this generic rom-com, that hits all the familiar three-act beats (a high-comic ruse, the rise of real feelings, falling out, grand public declaration) and betrays little of his personal touch. It gains minor interest by subverting traditional gender roles: its uptight-older-woman (Virginie Efira, glowing, making something from nothing), in need of a Manic Pixie Dream Boy (Pierre Niney, “Dujardin lite”); each cast as figures of changing social values.

Jappeloup

Jappeloup may announce, on opening, that it's based on the life and times of rider Pierre Durand, but it's named after his horse. Christian Duguay's crowdpleaser follows the rise of its small-horse-with-heart, the failures of its flawed rider (Guillaume Canet, jerkin'), and their inevitable heroic victory at the '88 Olympics, where bars full of frolicking French fans are brought together across lines of class and creed. Duguay's lowdown camera angles capturing showjumping's game-of-inches; but, mostly, its abundant horse-fetishry and fondness for nostalgic visions of softly-lensed, sunkissed Bordeaux vineyards give it the distinct whiff of a post-War Horse picture.

Just A Sigh

No matter how many times Emmanuelle Devos tries the ATM, she's banging her head against a brick wall: cash isn't about to magically materialise in her maxed-out account. In transit between a regional-theatre residency and an audition in Paris, Devos suddenly steps off the grid: with a dead mobile and no cash, she's freed to spontaneously stalk silver-fox Gabriel Byrne from a funeral to his boudoir. Jérôme Bonnell's film is alive and mercurial as its heroine: a film about the rareness of inhabiting-the-instant that dares make a female the agent of their own desire, and features family-drama fireworks that both explode out of nowhere yet feel decades in the making. It's brilliantly acted and fascinatingly written; a huge recommendation for fans of narrative unpredictability.

Michael Kohlhaas

Set to the solemn thump of martial drums, Arnaud des Pallières' pleasingly-grim slice of socio-realist medievalism is an existential tale of single-minded revenge. Mighty Mads Mikkelsen plays the 16th-century horse-trader who sets out to bring bloodied justice to the godforsaken hills in which he dwells, eventually leading him to crossing paths with a princess of pre-adolescent stature but unimaginable power. On the battle-lined road to retribution, Mikkelsen's titular character conflates personal vengeance with class-war uprising; his burgeoning folk-hero reputation - the man who's standing up to the vicious Baron - leading him farther towards anti-hero status.

Möbius

Möbius is a new-millennial internationalist-spy-thriller: all high-finance and shell companies and Russian oligarchs; the old Cold War tango given way to a hyper-modern interpretive dance where spies are all insider double-agents working - either by choice or by force - for various interconnected international concerns. Into this mix, somewhat weirdly, steps OSS 117 himself, Jean Dujardin; the Oscar-winning clown submitting a 'serious' turn that's frowny-faced and unshaven. He's the anti-hero out to sex Cécile de France, and for all its convoluted crosses and double-crosses, Möbius rather resembles a tarted-up take on the tawdry 'erotic thriller'.

Quai d'Orsay

There's shades of Armando Iannucci in this whipsmart political satire, a portrait of the backroom shenanigans and arcane jargon that run wild in French government's clandestine corridors-of-power. It finds Raphaël Personnaz as a newly-hired speechwriter toiling for Thierry Lhermitte's absurdist MP; the simple task of writing a speech becoming a Sisyphean Ordeal of increasingly ridiculous re-writes. For local audiences, Quai d'Orsay's snarky sitcommery'll seem symbolic, but some of its weirdest touches - like the political offices having no internet, only a cryptic intranet - are actually just accurate depictions of French-political reality.

Suzanne

Tender dramas about foolish girls falling for two-bit crims are a dime a dozen, but Katell Quillevéré's tale of its wayward heroine - wait for the Leonard Cohen song on the soundtrack, it's coming - is no generic number. Instead, it's a slippery saga that, effectively, shows a father (François Damiens, never-smiling) watching on sadly as his once-sweet daughter (Sara Forestier, moving like a fearful animal) loses her way, time and again, over the years. If the drama can feel familiar, Quillevéré charts the passage-of-time in unexpected ways; it fascinating to watch how and when time 'skips', and how the audience is 'told'.

Tour de Force

A dreary, textbook comedy about a deadbeat dad winning back the love of wife and teenager by cycling the route of the Tour de France. It's mounted as crowdpleasing, but it displeased me greatly.

Under The Rainbow

The latest film for Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri is a 'fairytale for adults', but their satirical eye doesn't let them inhabit that earnestness. Instead, they're interested in the toxicity of happily-ever-after tropes, with Agathe Bonitzer the milky-white waif sure a Prince Charming is in wait. Jaoui and Bacri, divorcées still working together, harbour no such romanticism, and no sooner has Bonitzer found her fresh-faced beau (Arthur Dupont) than she's seduced by Benjamin Biolay's louche lothario. Even as Under The Rainbow plays fairy-tale cute, its ensemble depiction of modern-day relationships in their manifold iterations - first love, new coupledom, unhappy-coexisting, mid-separation, divorced, re-partnering - serves as tonic to tired clichés of inescapable, foretold fate.

Violette

A companion-piece to Martin Provost's 2008 film Séraphine, Violette is another portrait of an outsider artist in the early 20th century; this time finding Emmanuelle Devos as Violette Leduc, a self-destructive, self-lacerating memoirist causing Sapphic scandal as homie of de Beauvoir, Camus, Genet, etc. Again, it's a kind of socio-realist period-piece, but if Séraphine played like the Dardennes let loose in a grim 1912, Violette is more melodrama leeched of all its colour, conveying the howls and the handwringing, but with none of the fluff or froth.

Wrestling Queens

A boisterous female-revenge-fantasy riff, Jean-Marc Rudnicki's broad comedy is a comedy about broads: four low-rent checkout-chicks who remake themselves as professional wrestlers. If you've ever seen a wacky 'ragtag-team-of-misfits' sports-movie, you know where this is heading: endless training montages, rounding into form for the Big Event, then pat resolutions for all involved.