35 SHOTS OF RUM: Claire Denis’s film aspires to the grace of a Yasujiro Ozu film. |
Last year's Boston French Film Festival featured Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two, and that, combined with this year's Chris Marker retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive and Agnès Varda's fine new The Beaches of Agnès, made it seem almost plausible that the New Wave might rise again. But to judge from this year's selections, any such resurgence has peaked, and the Gallic film industry has turned to other matters — political issues like immigration and education and economic concerns such as the box office and the allure of Hollywood.
Even so, not all the films are as bad as Rémi Bezançon's THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE (2008; July 9 at 8 pm, July 18 at 4:30 pm), a mawkish, cliché-ridden family melodrama broken into five vignettes dramatizing significant days over two decades. This being a French film, you could hope that the title is ironic, but it doesn't seem so, since similar bromides headline each segment. Cornier than the material is Bezançon's pretentious style, which includes clumsy flashbacks within flashbacks and pretentious imagery. (Youngest sibling Fleur witnesses her own "deflowering" behind a closed door under which pours blood as if from a scene out of Kubrick's The Shining.) One of the boys competes in air-guitar contests, and I would describe this film as the cinematic equivalent of air guitar. It was a huge hit in France. No wonder it's the festival's opening-night entry.
But neither are the films all as good as the closing-night offering, Martin Provost's SÉRAPHINE (2008; July 26 at 8 pm), a wrenching, magnificently crafted bio-pic of artist Séraphine Louis (Yolande Moreau), the "Modern Primitive." (That's the label on which the critic Wilhelm Uhde, who discovered her, insisted.) Forget La Vie en Rose — Séraphine is a true tortured artist, with the shimmering creepiness of Gustav Klimt. She's also a despised housekeeper in the town of Senlis who creates her uncanny paintings in secret — until the vacationing Uhde (Ulrich Tukur) spots one and says he'll make her a star in Paris. World War I intervenes, and it's more than a decade later that Uhde makes good on his promise — but the big time proves too much for the simple, religious visionary. Moreau portrays her saint-like turmoil without sentiment or stereotype.
More on the ironic side is François Dupeyron's WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MYSELF (2008; July 10 at 5:45 pm, July 11 at 1:45 pm). Sonia (Félicité Wouassi), the matriarch of a rowdy African immigrant family, has been having a rough day: her older daughter is getting married, her older son has just been arrested, dad has lost all their money at the races, and in the ensuing ruckus the bride gets a black eye. When the old man kicks the bucket from a heart attack, all seems lost. But guided by Dupeyron's mordant sensibility and the rousing soundtrack, Sonia heeds the title advice.
Claire Denis in 35 SHOTS OF RUM (2009; July 12 at 3:30 pm, July 16 at 5:30 pm) also takes it for granted that her characters are immigrants and doesn't turn her film into a political discussion. Alex Descas is laconic and majestic as a West Indian facing retirement from his long career as a Paris Métro driver. Should his beautiful daughter, Joséphine (Mati Diop), look after him, or is it time for her to start out on her own life, perhaps with the boy across the hall? Understated, beautifully acted, and with an exacting soundtrack, 35 Shots of Rum aspires to the grace of an Ozu film.
SPY(IES) Nicolas Saada, on the other hand, offers bracing Hitchcockian romance and intrigue. |
| The Boston French Film Festival | Museum of Fine Arts: July 9-26 |
Philippe Lioret's WELCOME (2009; July 26 at 3:15 + 5:10 pm) takes a tougher stand on the issues without surrendering dramatic integrity. Bilal (Firat Ayverdi), a 17-year-old Kurdish refugee, has already trekked on foot from Iraq to Calais to be reunited with his true love in London. But to make it to England, he'll have to take swimming lessons from Simon (Vincent Landon), who's getting divorced from his activist wife (Audrey Dana). "He's walked 4000 kilometers and is going to swim the Channel to reach her," laments Simon to his ex, "and I wouldn't even cross the street for you." The performances and Lioret's low-key direction make all this not just plausible but poignant.In Rithy Panh's THE SEA WALL (2008; July 19 at 5 pm, July 24 at 3 pm), an adaptation of a Marguerite Duras novel, the French themselves are the unwanted foreign intruders. We're in 1930s colonial Cambodia, and yet another troubled matriarch (Isabelle Huppert, sullen again) is having a bad day: the sea has flooded her rice field, her teenage son and daughter are getting restive, and the corrupt land office wants to take over her plot and sell it to a Chinese millionaire. So she panders off the daughter to the rich Chinese guy and attempts to build the title barricade. At times this seems a remake of Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1992 adaptation of Duras's The Lover. At others it merely enjoys its own gorgeous cinematography.
