The Best & Worst Of The French Film Festival

This week the French Film Festival opens all over Australia, bringing 50 films to local screens in an annual show of French cinematic force. Being faced with such a vast selection can be daunting, but, oh, lookie here!, your old bro Film Carew has already been diving deep into the FFF program.

3 HEARTS

Benoît Jacquot’s 3 Hearts is, at heart, a good old-fashioned melodrama; in which Benoît Poelvoorde falls for Charlotte Gainsbourg, only for fate —and a quasi-racist lost-in-translation tax-meeting with smiling Chinese stereotypes— to keep them apart. Instead, he marries Chiara Mastroianni, who audiences already know is —coincidence alert!— Gainsbourg’s sister. Whilst the premise is pure soap-operatic froth, the top-shelf Euro-cinema-royalty cast —Mastroianni’s real-life mother, Catherine Deneuve, plays her screen mother— expertly play the contradictory emotions, and Jacquot metes out the drama like a slow-burning thriller, with a sparsely-used, doomy score loaded with foreboding. Everything so borders on underplayed that, by the time Poelvoorde finally gets hysterical at shit-hits-fan climax, 3 Hearts has earnt the right to let the melodrama loose.

THE BLUE ROOM

Adapted from a Georges Simenon novel, Mathieu Amalric’s latest directorial feature is a huge change from his last, the brash, burlesque-troupe ensemble-piece On Tour. Though nominally set in the modern-day, it’s an old-fashioned thriller built around salacious infidelity, with Amalric and Stéphane Cléau a pair of adulterous lovers suspected of offing their respective spouses. The script unfolds in police interrogations and legal briefings, pirouetting back into the past with an impressionist quality; leaving audiences forever in doubt as to Amalric’s innocence and/or complicity. The Blue Room is persuasively-mounted, and Cléau makes for a brilliantly-unhinged femme fatale, but it’s hard to get too rah-rah re: a flick that ultimately culminates in a courtroom showstopper in which spectators in the gallery gasp with theatricality.

BREATHE

Mélanie Laurent makes her directorial debut with this striking tale of obsessive adolescent friendship, in which Joséphine Japy and Lou de Laâge play good-girls-gone-bad, the outside world receding away in their ongoing game of mutual truth-or-dare. Laurent, as director, hews towards naturalism —in staging, lighting, and performance— essentially making the choice to be an ‘actor’s director’; the real revelation of Breathe being the breakout-worthy performances of its two young starlets.

THE CONNECTION

For those who like their cinema Scorsese Lite will love Cédric Jimenez’s take on the Franco-American heroin-trade of the ’70s (so famously chronicled in William Friedkin’s The French Connection). Jimenez wheels out all the old clichés —montages set to blaring soul music; gangsters going about their daily domestic duties; weary cops hamstrung by bureaucracy; the codes of the streets a morality of their own— with the ’70s setting only adding to its familiar feeling. Beyond its own endemic lack of inspiration, The Connection has one great failing: its hero —an honest-man magistrate out to drag Marseilles out of its lawless malaise— is played by Jean Dujardin. Meaning, that audiences are expected to take the clown-prince of French cinema seriously in a role one-degree removed from his OSS 117 hijinks.

DIPLOMACY

Set largely in one room, this starchy, stagey conversation-piece wears its theatrical inception on its sleeve; Volker Schlöndorff (35 years after The Tin Drum) adapting Cyril Gély’s play with little cinematic inspiration. It’s set in 1944, right as the Germans are abandoning occupied Paris; with scowling Niels Arestrup the Nazi stooge charged with detonating Parisian bridges and landmarks in the wake of the Reich’s retreat. André Dussollier is the Swiss Consul-General out to convince him to spare the city —to spare history and culture— and, as these two icons of French cinema deliver puffed-up performances of breathless gravity, the entire drama leans on the historical weight of its factually-based tale, even as its lines read like over-determined fiction.

ELLE L’ADORE

The premise of Jeanne Henry’s thriller sounds like it’s straining before it even gets going: Laurent Laffitte plays a charismatic chanteur who, when he accidentally kills his girlfriend (Lou Lesage), turns to his #1 fan (Sandrine Kiberlain) to help dispose of the body. But, lo, secrets never stay buried in Hitchcockian-thrillers, and Henry leans heavily on the lessons of the master: abruptly handing off the story to the investigating police halfway through, and then having every scene add another layer to the mounting tension. Kiberlain is given a great part to play: getting to be both hopelessly over-her-head and empowered by being in full command of her hero’s fate; the role of star/fan wholly inverted by getting-away-with-murder conspiracy.

GIRLHOOD

Though her name’s barely-known outside of film-nerd circles, Céline Sciamma has, through three films, established herself as contemporary cinema’s pre-eminent chronicler of female adolescence; exploring female identity, gender conditioning, and nascent sexuality across 2007’s Water Lilies, 2011’s great Tomboy, and, now, the audacious Girlhood. She introduces us to Karidja Touré, an otherwise-quiet girl living in the rough-and-tumble council-estate fringes of Paris, who’s drawn away from school and into a girl-gang. Sciamma suspends judgment and moralising, instead looking at how someone at a formative age can readily adopt an identity —here: brash, obnoxious, aggressive, in some ways quintessentially masculine— so as to survive their environment, and the emotional minefield of adolescence.

THE LAST DIAMOND

A run-of-the-mill heist-movie whose ricocheting double-crosses are inured of their suspense and surprise by the fact that it all feels so routine. Yvan Attal is the master grifter recruited for one last big score, and the only thing that can lead best-laid-plans awry is... love! That comes in the form of Bérénice Bejo, who is acting on some plane above-and-beyond the rote genre-movie she’s been roped into; her performance so simultaneously light and pained that it’s almost enough to recommend the movie by.

LOVE AT FIRST FIGHT

The punning translation of Tomas Cailley’s debut feature is quite literal: when stubborn, aggressive, angry Adèle Haenel meets meek, mild-mannered, chilled-bro Kévin Azaïs, it’s at a beach wrestling meet. She swiftly pins him, he bites her in frustration; and, oh, how the seeds of love are sown! Cailley’s odd, quietly-charming pic then sends the pair off to a military training-camp, in which their personal/physical identities are called into question (she’s too headstrong to be quiet and take orders; he’s a quick study who proves unexpectedly suited to military life), and the sexual-tension reaches breaking point. Eventually, they withdraw into the wilderness, fucking finally coming when removed from the roles, rules, and obligations of society.

THE NEW GIRLFRIEND

François Ozon’s latest feature may be inspired by a short story by Ruth Rendell —whom he so ardently aped with 2003’s Swimming Pool— but it’s, really, 100% Ozon. It’s one of the director’s lavishly-appointed, fussily-wardrobed, primary-coloured haute-bourgeois melodramas, and, in keeping with his narrative obsessions of the last two decades, it delights in dallying across lines of gender and sexual orientation. The New Girlfriend opens with a bravura montage that conveys bounteous back-story with dexterity and swiftness, Ozon’s well-honed filmmaking chops slicing years into minutes. When Isild le Besco dies, tragically young, she leaves behind a child and a husband, Romain Duris, whose grieving involves an extended drag-act in which he ‘plays mother’ in lipstick and heels. This turns a previously-mannered friendship with le Besco’s best pal, Anaïs Demoustier, into a conspiratorial obsession ripe with deception and unloosening of sexual repression; Ozon, of course, delighting in depicting sexual congress in all manner of cutely-perverse ways. Duris received a César nomination for his gender-crossing turn, but the real revelation is the leading performance by Demoustier, which is so deftly-layered and perfectly-judged it’s hard to capture its greatness in mere words.

SAINT LAURENT

In 2014’s kinda-weird head-to-head showdown of duelling Yves Saint Laurent biopics, Betrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent (as opposed to Jalil Lespert’s Yves Saint Laurent) was tarnished, in advance, for being the ‘unofficial’ portrait of the iconic fashion-designer; as if that, in turn, made this tantamount to a knockoff handbag. Unbound by corporate brand-managing, the logo-less landscape allows Bonello free-rein to make a film unconcerned with forwarding the official YSL mythos; and, more importantly, unconcerned with hitting all the clichéd beats of the generic biopic (which Yves Saint Laurent most-tiresomely was). Bonello is one of this century’s great French auteurs —see The House Of Tolerance, Tiresia, On War— and, in turn, he works with a complete absence of overdetermined drama and awards-show cliché; his juxtaposition of YSL collections with contemporaneous end-of-the-’60s new-reels an audacious literalisation of the biopic’s history-making. Nimbly pirouetting through the years, Bonello scrawls an impressionist portrait that doesn’t try to explain away its subject (played, here, by Gaspard Ulliel), but leave them vague and opaque; both intensely human and abstract idea.

SEX, LOVE & THERAPY

Sophie Marceau is a sexpot perfumier whose career is scuttled when she fucks all-too-many of her clients. Patrick Bruel is a recovering sex-addict who’s gone cold turkey, turning his attentions, instead, to his new career as marriage counsellor. When —by cutesy screenwritten contrivance— they end up working together, sparks fly, but desires are repressed. Tonie Marshall’s latest cinematic confection hits all the familiar rom-com beats, but at its best it achieves a cheeky comic tone of sustained sexual tension; with Marceau delighting in a turn that, essentially, demands she play ‘irresistible’ for 80 frothy minutes.