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Plus ça change on the tour of French films
By HANNAH McGILL
The Herald, UK
March 27 2005
Once upon a time, France was the mecca of movie snobs. From A Bout
De Souffle to Betty Blue, French cinema danced between the cool and
the cerebral, providing intellectual challenge, artistic innovation,
erotic frisson and fashion iconography, all at the same time.
Today, the baton of arthouse hipness has been taken up by Latin
American and Far Eastern film-makers. French cinema has shed the
dominance it had in the 1970s and 1980s. Recent works have met with
lukewarm international responses. Catherine Breillat and Gaspar Noe
command their own particular followings, but the extreme content of
their films renders each very much an acquired taste. Jean-Pierre
Jeunet scored a massive hit with the effortlessly adorable Amelie
four years ago - but his recent follow-up, A Very Long Engagement,
has failed to confer the same glory upon its nation, chiefly because
its level of American funding means that it can't be classified as a
French film. The better-received French films of recent times,
meanwhile - among them Francois Ozon's marital melodrama 5x2, and
Christophe Barratier's sentimental fable Les Choristes - are
small-scale, formally conservative works.
Can the annual Renault French Film Festival tour, which visits
Edinburgh and Glasgow next week, relight the fire? Certainly it's a
mixed bag: one costume piece (Arsene Lupin), one tale of rock'n' roll
debauchery (Clean), one sensitive contemporary drama (Brodeuses), and
one rollicking existential soap (Rois et Reine). Interestingly, where
French stars used to be enlisted to bring exotic glamour to films
from other nations, both Jean-Paul Salome's Arsene Lupin, based on
the 1907 novel by Maurice Leblanc, and Olivier Assayas's Clean draw
part of their appeal from the involvement of international stars.
Kristin Scott Thomas corsets up in the former, while Hong Kong
superstar Maggie Cheung stars in the latter. Arsene Lupin is a
commercial romp, but does boast the presence of the up-and-coming
French matinee idol du jour, Romain Duris, in the lead. Also in
Arsene Lupin is the beautiful Eva Green - one of very few pretenders
to the irresistable starlet slot left vacant by the likes of
Emmanuelle Beart and Beatrice Dalle. (What happened to Virginie
Ledoyen? And Ludivine Sagnier?)
Clean, by contrast, is determinedly contemporary, and strives hard
for pop-culture cool in its account of the efforts of Cheung's
widowed rock wife to regain custody of her child and fulfil her
artistic aspirations. It's an ambitious piece, beautifully shot; but
the performances are poor, and Cheung proves that singing isn't one
of her many talents.
Eleonore Faucher's debut, A Common Thread (Brodeuses), is the story
of a pregnant 17-year-old (Lola Naymark) who finds a new focus when
she's employed as the assistant of an Armenian seamstress. This forms
part of what is fast becoming a genre in itself: films in which a
sullen teen girl drifts about having intense life experiences, losing
her innocence, and gazing limpidly at shiny objects. Lynne Ramsay has
a lot to answer for - delicate, closely-observed films such as this
are slinking forth from countries all over the globe. A Common Thread
is a servicable if not particularly striking example. It doesn't do
anything wrong but nor does it make you desperate to see what Faucher
will come up wth next.
There is one very special film here, however. The highlight of the
programme is Arnaud Desplechin's remarkable, resplendent Kings and
Queen (Rois et Reine) - a relationship drama with the scale and
intensity of an opera.
The charismatic Emmanuelle Devos stars as Nora, a twice-married
mother of a young boy. Upon discovering that her father is dying of
cancer, Nora tries to track down her former lover, Ismael, in the
hope that he'll step in and provide a role model for her son, who
can't stand her current husband. But Ismael, played by Mathieu
Amalric, has worries of his own: he has been committed to a mental
institution, perhaps in error, perhaps not. Outside the hospital,
Ismael's loopy exuberance passes for artistic abandon. Inside,
however, it's an illness to be medicated. It doesn't help that he
keeps sleeping with his fellow inmates, and telling his therapist
that women have no souls. The therapist's bland reactions tend to
back him up). The film is long and stylistically indulgent (please,
someone pass a law against the casual deployment of jump cuts), but
it's a remarkably dynamic, unpredictable and involving study of
various types of commitment.
A varied and interesting set of films, then, albeit one that doesn't
quite counter the sense that French cinema is undergoing something of
a fallow period. Still, the rest of 2005 boasts more titles for
Francophiles to look forward to, among them The Beat That My Heart
Skipped, and Innocence. Or stick with the past masters - Jean-Luc
Godard's latest, Notre Musique, comes out in May.
--Boundary_(ID_yRJ6nXZdU68cSdBMnKQPnA)--
By HANNAH McGILL
The Herald, UK
March 27 2005
Once upon a time, France was the mecca of movie snobs. From A Bout
De Souffle to Betty Blue, French cinema danced between the cool and
the cerebral, providing intellectual challenge, artistic innovation,
erotic frisson and fashion iconography, all at the same time.
Today, the baton of arthouse hipness has been taken up by Latin
American and Far Eastern film-makers. French cinema has shed the
dominance it had in the 1970s and 1980s. Recent works have met with
lukewarm international responses. Catherine Breillat and Gaspar Noe
command their own particular followings, but the extreme content of
their films renders each very much an acquired taste. Jean-Pierre
Jeunet scored a massive hit with the effortlessly adorable Amelie
four years ago - but his recent follow-up, A Very Long Engagement,
has failed to confer the same glory upon its nation, chiefly because
its level of American funding means that it can't be classified as a
French film. The better-received French films of recent times,
meanwhile - among them Francois Ozon's marital melodrama 5x2, and
Christophe Barratier's sentimental fable Les Choristes - are
small-scale, formally conservative works.
Can the annual Renault French Film Festival tour, which visits
Edinburgh and Glasgow next week, relight the fire? Certainly it's a
mixed bag: one costume piece (Arsene Lupin), one tale of rock'n' roll
debauchery (Clean), one sensitive contemporary drama (Brodeuses), and
one rollicking existential soap (Rois et Reine). Interestingly, where
French stars used to be enlisted to bring exotic glamour to films
from other nations, both Jean-Paul Salome's Arsene Lupin, based on
the 1907 novel by Maurice Leblanc, and Olivier Assayas's Clean draw
part of their appeal from the involvement of international stars.
Kristin Scott Thomas corsets up in the former, while Hong Kong
superstar Maggie Cheung stars in the latter. Arsene Lupin is a
commercial romp, but does boast the presence of the up-and-coming
French matinee idol du jour, Romain Duris, in the lead. Also in
Arsene Lupin is the beautiful Eva Green - one of very few pretenders
to the irresistable starlet slot left vacant by the likes of
Emmanuelle Beart and Beatrice Dalle. (What happened to Virginie
Ledoyen? And Ludivine Sagnier?)
Clean, by contrast, is determinedly contemporary, and strives hard
for pop-culture cool in its account of the efforts of Cheung's
widowed rock wife to regain custody of her child and fulfil her
artistic aspirations. It's an ambitious piece, beautifully shot; but
the performances are poor, and Cheung proves that singing isn't one
of her many talents.
Eleonore Faucher's debut, A Common Thread (Brodeuses), is the story
of a pregnant 17-year-old (Lola Naymark) who finds a new focus when
she's employed as the assistant of an Armenian seamstress. This forms
part of what is fast becoming a genre in itself: films in which a
sullen teen girl drifts about having intense life experiences, losing
her innocence, and gazing limpidly at shiny objects. Lynne Ramsay has
a lot to answer for - delicate, closely-observed films such as this
are slinking forth from countries all over the globe. A Common Thread
is a servicable if not particularly striking example. It doesn't do
anything wrong but nor does it make you desperate to see what Faucher
will come up wth next.
There is one very special film here, however. The highlight of the
programme is Arnaud Desplechin's remarkable, resplendent Kings and
Queen (Rois et Reine) - a relationship drama with the scale and
intensity of an opera.
The charismatic Emmanuelle Devos stars as Nora, a twice-married
mother of a young boy. Upon discovering that her father is dying of
cancer, Nora tries to track down her former lover, Ismael, in the
hope that he'll step in and provide a role model for her son, who
can't stand her current husband. But Ismael, played by Mathieu
Amalric, has worries of his own: he has been committed to a mental
institution, perhaps in error, perhaps not. Outside the hospital,
Ismael's loopy exuberance passes for artistic abandon. Inside,
however, it's an illness to be medicated. It doesn't help that he
keeps sleeping with his fellow inmates, and telling his therapist
that women have no souls. The therapist's bland reactions tend to
back him up). The film is long and stylistically indulgent (please,
someone pass a law against the casual deployment of jump cuts), but
it's a remarkably dynamic, unpredictable and involving study of
various types of commitment.
A varied and interesting set of films, then, albeit one that doesn't
quite counter the sense that French cinema is undergoing something of
a fallow period. Still, the rest of 2005 boasts more titles for
Francophiles to look forward to, among them The Beat That My Heart
Skipped, and Innocence. Or stick with the past masters - Jean-Luc
Godard's latest, Notre Musique, comes out in May.
--Boundary_(ID_yRJ6nXZdU68cSdBMnKQPnA)--