Now in its 29th year, the French Film Festival is long-established as one of local cinema’s definitive events. This year it keeps on trucking: delivering 50 new films (well, technically 49 + 1 TV show), and all the French cinematic icons —Huppert, Binoche, Ardant, Depardieu et al— that you can poke a baguette at.
In advance of the FFF’s opening, yr old pal Film Carew has been locked in a basement, watching as many flicks from the fest as possible. So, here we go, with reviews of half the program:
4 DAYS IN FRANCE
“No hanky panky with boys!” barks an elderly publican who’s just begrudgingly rented out an upstairs room to Paul (Arthur Igual). By that point, deep into Jérôme Reybaud's 140-minute picaresque, the audience will duly laugh; there shades of Alain Guiraudie in the film’s v. queer milieu. It’s a wandering travelogue using Grindr as its compass: we open the film with Pierre (Pascal Cervo), climbing out of Paul's bed, and wandering off, onto the wide-open-road, heading to parts, and sexual partners, unknown. The drama, in turn, is wholly happenstantial, there a randomness to the way the narrative bounces from hook-up to hitchhiker to random passersby, stretching out to no known destination, no third-act resolution.
AVA
The first half of Ava is some of the most sterling filmmaking you'll see this year, debutante director Léa Mysius depicting her 13-year-old heroine with a formalist assurance. In a sweaty summer spent by a beach, Ava (Noée Abita) is coming to grips with her budding sexuality, Mysius making a film about the adolescent body from a female gaze.
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The easy sensuality of her mother (Laure Calamy) makes our titular character uneasy, if not repulsed; “I can't stand you anymore; your voice, your smell, the lot,” Ava spits, later inviting neighbourhood kids to watch her mum fuck the latest guy she's met down the beach. When Ava then turns full teenage rebel, and starts stealing from people, her victims are all nudists; symbolising her revulsion at the physical form, her own changing body.
But, well, about that theft: once a fucking gun —the cheapest dramatic device in the book— enters the picture, Ava goes downhill, and fast. Instead of being a striking portrait of a prickly, pissy, moralising teen —an antidote to those coming-of-age movies whose adolescent leads are whimsical and delightful— it just becomes some cut-rate Bonnie & Clyde fable.
back to burgundy
Sadly, Back To Burgundy isn’t a sequel to Peter Strickland’s domestic-doms neo-classic The Duke Of Burgundy. Instead, it peddles a far more familiar-feeling set-up that could’ve come from some Sundance crowdpleaser. A black-sheep son heads back to the family vineyard, reuniting with his estranged siblings, taking over the season's wine production after the demise of their father. Along the way, old family skeletons will come tumbling out, wounds will heal, siblings will bond anew, and a Home will be found.
Cédric Klapisch is no stranger to feelgood dramas, and here he matches all these familiar family-drama beats to the seasons, and to many montages depicting the winemaking process. Therefore, if you’re an oenophile —or just a souse— there’s an extra layer of interest/warmth/crowdpleasery laid on.
BLOODY MILK
Bloody Milk is, essentially, a noir movie set in a rural dairy farm. Swann Arlaud plays a devoted, workaholic farmer who makes one ill-considered decision, then finds his life spiraling slowly downwards, sinking into moral quicksand. When one of his cows comes down with a virus, Arlaud kills it and burns the body, rather than reporting it to the authorities and facing the possible loss of his entire herd. This is illegal, and, from one small act, so many others must come; the cover-up, as always, worse that the crime.
Debut director Hubert Charuel grew up on a dairy farm, and returned to his parents’ property to shoot the film. This gives the film is sense of place, and a strong social-realist quality; which, in concert with its narrative descent, makes the film feel like a more of a human tragedy than a preachy morality play.
BPM
Robin Campillo’s AIDS-activism drama is set in Paris in the early-'90s, but there’s real universality and topicality to its story. Bunkering down amidst weekly meetings —based on Campillo's own experiences in ACT UP a quarter-century ago— BPM is a picture not just of a cast of people out to survive a plague, but a study in group dynamics.
The drama comes in the tension between that unity and the plurality of the characters. These activists with broadly-shared goals but radically-different approaches, are forced to work together, and work through their personal issues, in order to achieve greater ends. It’s a film about allowing for political debate, discussion, disagreement, even dissent; one that shows a group of people unafraid of uncomfortable truths, never silenced or sidelined by the contemporary minefield of identity politics. In such, it feels like a valentine to a rougher, more productive time of far-left activism; a model of banding together to achieve social change.
THE BRIGADE
It’s men-at-work in this portrait of the daily business of a company of firefighters in the South of France. There’s workplace politics, regulations, codes-of-honour, tragedy, the thin line between life and death, lessons to be learned; the film about doing a job, and attempting to do it well. It’s middlebrow stuff, but, in some ways, pleasingly so: never straining for the inspirational.
CATCH THE WIND
Gael Mörel's aggressively-queer filmography takes an unexpected turn with this restrained character-study, in which the notion of the middle-aged ‘seachange’ is subverted. Sandrine Bonnaire —in her most interesting role in aeons— plays a factory seamstress whose workplace closes down, operations outsourced to cheaper producers in Tangier. Refusing a ‘generous’ settlement, she chooses to relocate to Morocco; moving across a cultural divide for less money and worse working conditions.
Catch The Wind is, obviously, a reversal of the typical migrant tale; here a white Frenchwoman forced to adapt to a new country, a new language, a milieu that oft seems hostile to her presence. In turn, there's a commentary on internationalism, with Bonnaire swimming against the current, heading down the food chain of globalised production; this a film about downward, not upward, mobility. Instead of serving up a crowdpleasing portrait of self-discovery, Mörel hitches his narrative to a lead character who’s not just forever-frowning, but aloof and unknowable; a heroine stubbornly refusing to bow down in the face of any suffering, driven, always, to continue working, even when it’s a bad idea.
COBY
A prime exemplar of a film blessed by archival footage, Coby is a documentary chronicling the gender transition of its titular male, made all the more profound by the fact that we meet him as a teenage girl, pre-transition, talking to-camera in video diaries, in daily chronicles of change. Director Christian Sonderegger balances this in-the-moment footage with newly-shot documentation, speaking to subject and family about what it was like to live through, witness, deal with; the milieu forever domestic, mundane, intimate. There’s a simplicity to the film that’s striking, Coby a work of humanity, not hysteria.
DIANE HAS THE RIGHT SHAPE
In Fabien Gorgeart’s debut film, we meet the titular character (Clotilde Heseme) at a bar, where she’s offending an Irish tourist, then making out with him anyway. From there, we smash-cut to her at an obstetric appointment, surprised to learn that Diane is pregnant.
She’s carrying the child, however, for a pair of gay friends; and, whilst the film is largely played for comedy, the drama that unfolds is about being a womb for rent, providing bodily space whilst remaining largely detached, about notions of the individual and the collective. The result is a flick that sallies forth with humour and charm, but habours emotional currents that run deep.
DOUBLE LOVER
François Ozon is in fine form in this wild, wicked, ridiculous romp, a psycho-sexual paranoia-thriller that feels like what might’ve happened were Hitchcock free to explore his predilections and perversions without restraint. Here, Ozon’s old Young & Beautiful starlet Marine Vacth plays an ex-model who ends up in an obsessive relationship with both her psychologist (Jérémie Renier, rumpled and cardigan’d) and the twin brother (Jérémie Renier, manscaped and tight-trouser’d), also, a psychologist, who may or may not actually exist.
Ozon’s 18th film —all made before he turned 50— is filled with doubles, twins, and mirrors; the fine line between reality, fantasy, dream, nightmare, and delusion all but obliterated as he follows Vacth down into the depths of her suspicious mind. It’s pulpy, creepy, pleasingly perverse, and dabbles in some straight up pussy symbolism with a cast of unnerving cats. It’s a riot, Ozon at his most provocative and playful; Double Lover is the FFF’s sure standout.
GOLDEN YEARS
‘Queer wartime saga’ is André Téchiné’s corner, and, here, the director delivers some period-piece based-on-a-true-story Césarbait. Pierre Deladonchamps plays a WW1 deserter who, escaping conflict and court-martial, disguises himself as a woman. This gender-dabbling leads to a sexual awakening, and getting fresh with all comers. What results is a wild melodrama, with Téchiné getting meta-theatrical by telling the tale, within, as a lurid cabaret; Deladonchamps starring in the story of his/her own life.
THE GUARDIANS
The Guardians is a long, slow, 135-minute trudge set in a rural dustbowl during World War I. Here, Nathalie Baye wears a sober grey wig, her sensible centre-part standing in for a time of scarcity and self-sufficiency. Director Xavier Beauvois is out to build a noble shrine to women remaining defiant and driven, keeping things running during wartime. But the resulting film feels a lot like their agrarian toil: a thankless slog.
IF YOU SAW HIS HEART
Oh, God. One of those unremittingly-grim art-movies that forsakes socio-realism for strident feelbadism, If You Saw His Heart serves up a witless host of violent, overbearing, grotesque men, who get drunk, beat each other up, and commit varying crimes. Our hero, however, is a noble thief; operating via moral codes, and grieving over the death of his best friend. When a lost wastrel crosses his path, he becomes your standard male rescuer, out to save a woman from this ultra-macho cine-world. By casting the ridiculously-good-looking Gael García Bernal and Marine Vacth in the leading roles, director Joan Chemla uses beauty as a kind of narrative cudgel, unsubtly hammering home whom audiences are supposed to ‘cheer’ for.
ISMAËL’S GHOSTS
It’s hard to work out what’s more unlikely in Ismaël’s Ghosts: that Marion Cotillard plays a woman returned from the dead, or that Charlotte Gainsbourg plays an astrophysicist. Arnaud Desplechin has long been one of cinema’s most overrated auteurs, and here his shaggy-dog shtick makes for a rambling, sprawling, borderline-awful mess.
Mathieu Almaric, as always, plays the filmmaker’s on-screen stand-in: a director who, at work on his latest movie, is one of many, herein, to have a hysterical meltdown, to spend most of his screen-time yelling at people. With the main character being a director (Dear filmmakers writing films about filmmakers: try harder), there’s also a film-within-a-film, a period political-thriller starring Louis Garrel and Alba Rohrwacher; though there’s little resonance between the two narrative worlds. The incoherent whole teems with ideas, melodrama, and mugging, almost all the starry cast seemingly instructed to horribly overact.
JEALOUS
“I’m not at all unpleasant,” says Karin Viard, mid-way into the Foenkinos bros’ film, showing the delusion that defines her character, and colours its drama. At first, Viard seems like a quirky rom-com everywoman: prone to disastrous failures of manners and tact, dealing with a return to dating in her middle age. But this is no mild mid-life-crisis comedy: it turns out the titular jealousies Viard feels towards any woman younger than her —her ex-husband’s new partner, the new teacher on staff at her university, the friendly new neighbour, even her own 18-year-old daughter— aren’t comic, but tragic; driving her to increasingly hostile, horrifying, sociopathic behaviours.
Ultimately, of course, the screenplay can’t help but rehabilitate its monster: anti-heroine forced to confront her destructive behaviours, and make elaborate amends; finding salvation in a Good Man and a Kindly Old Lady who’s sure to die from the moment we meet her.
LADIES
Rote crowdpleasery in which 40-something Florence Foresti, a breast-cancer survivor who’s been told her whole life she’s ugly, seeks to find love, liberation, and a positive body image. This involves making out with Mathieu Kassovitz, telling her cantankerous mother to shove it, teaching her surly teenage daughter to be who she wants to be, and dancing in a community-theatre-esque burlesque show presided over by Nicole Garcia and openly compared, within, to The Full Monty.
LET THE SUNSHINE IN
‘A Claire Denis rom-com’ sounds like a strange concept, and, indeed, it’s peculiar to witness one of the titanic auteurs of French cinema making a funny little film about Juliette Binoche's misadventures with various middle-aged male suitors. But Lesser Denis is still Greater than so much contemporary cinema: the director using her command of camera to turn awkward situations and minor social slights into lacerating assaults and wry sufferings. The random late-film appearance of Gérard Depardieu only adds to the growing feeling of absurdity.
M
A nearly-mute teenager and a 30-something illegal-street-drag driver meet-cute at a bus-stop, and form an instant bond; two lonely, marginalised, put-upon people finding each other, and solace from the hostile outside world. She never speaks, and he can barely read. They’re the original odd couple! Sara Forestier, both serving as debutante director and playing a character half her age, pulls impressive double-duty, and attempts to given an air of gravity to a tale of the innocent meeting the corrupt in mutually-beneficial love. But, it’s couple feels too cute by half, M’s fable always playing as cinematic premise incarnate.
MONTPARNASSE BIENVENÜE
Those who like films about ‘difficult’ female protagonists will delight in Léonor Serraille’s debut, in which its leading lady (Lætitia Dosch) blows through every scene like a whirlwind. She’s impulsive, angry, combative, hilarious, frustrating, prone to bad choices; spinning in endless circles, directionless, life going down the drain. She’s 29 (but actually 31), with no career or house to her name; so, like some Parisienne Llewyn Davis, she bounces from couch to couch with a cat under her arm, rarely grateful to those who help her. Watching the film is an experience equal parts maddening and charming, making it play as pure character study.
NUMBER ONE
Tonie Marshall’s latest stages a battle-of-the-sexes in the guise of political/corporate drama; the B-roll crammed with endless shots of sunlight glinting off glass skyscrapers. In this world, Emmanuelle Devos plays the high-powered careerwoman who, for all her success, still finds herself banging against the glass ceiling. The highest reaches of power are still the province of silver-haired men in navy suits, and they’ll protect this final frontier with dirty tricks, double-crosses, and their dicks. “One guy wants to put his dick in my mouth, to shut me up no doubt,” Devos laments; Number One, inevitably, finding her refusing to be silenced, kicking against the pricks, and rising to you-go-girl heights.
REDOUBTABLE
After the all-too-earnest misfire of his The Search remake, Redoubtable finds Michel Hazanavicius returning to more Artist-esque territory: a valentine to the cinema of the past, dressed up in cutesy, era-aping, ultra-stylised threads. Here, he’s authoring a portrait of, evidently, one of his cinematic heroes: Jean-Luc Godard. The film chronicles Godard’s life during the making of 1967’s La Chinoise, and the year of social tumult that came thereafter.
Upon its premiere at Cannes last year, the film was criticised for aping the stylistic quirks of Godard whilst glossing over his political, experimental bent; this game of nouvelle vague dress-ups swapping out radicalism for nostalgia. Yet, Redoubtable surely ruffles the feathers of Godard devotees in another fashion: depicting him as a total dick; a petty, possessive, self-obsessed narcissist who’s swallowed the myth of the Great Male Artist whole.
ROCK’N ROLL
A meta-movie featuring countless French celebrities playing comic versions of themselves sounds noxious. But Guillaume Canet’s Rock’n Roll isn’t some mere in-joke amongst famous friends, or a lazy work of navel-gazing. Instead, it’s a satirical portrait of middle-aged-male insecurity blown out to absurdist ends: Canet playing a version of himself so riddled by fears he’s past it that he leaps headlong into a downward spiral of pure narcissism, ending up a gym-junkie whose unsmiling visage is a work of Meg Ryan-esque plastic surgery. Canet’s real-life wife, Marion Cotillard, plays herself as Awards-chasing method actor, sagely offering that only roles with handicaps or accents are worth taking.
SEE YOU UP THERE
“It’s a long story, complicated,” says Albert Dupontel, in the framing-narrative opening to See You Up There. You know what’s happening next: “we’ve got time,” says the interviewing army officer he sits across from, to which we dissolve, back to the front at WW1, thrown into the fray of no man’s land, shells going off around us. What unfolds is a rollicking tale that rolls through the roaring ’20s, with Charleston-ing flappers and the neon lights of the Moulin Rouge soon appearing.
Dupontel —who serves as director of this lavish, crane-shot-filled spectacle— plays opposite Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (also seen in BPM and If You Saw His Heart this FFF), a gifted, Egon Schiele-esque artist whose face is blown off in the war, and who spends the rest of the film hidden beneath an ever-changing array of masks. Stylised and a little ridiculous, See You Up There is prime period-piece tragicomedy, a wild romp that plays as a fable.
THE WORKSHOP
Laurent Cantet has made a career of sterling socio-realist pictures, and here’s another. The Workshop, co-scripted by long-time collaborateur Robin Campillo (also director of BPM at the FFF), brings back memories of Cantet’s masterful The Class. Here, a novelist (Marina Foïs) takes a teaching gig at a rundown port city in the South of France, getting a group of lower-class kids together, in a summer-class, to write a collaborative novel. The debate about the story, however, soon turns into a powderkeg: the kids dividing themselves along racial, political, ideological lines. Both Cantet’s camera and his lead character are drawn towards Matthieu Lucci, a hyper-serious young man obsessed with video-games, militarism, far-right wing cant; his muscled form embodying the potential that this writing workshop will erupt in violence.
