Un Secret, 2007
In an early episode in the film, a bookish, teenaged François Grimbert (Quentin Dubuis) sits in a classroom intently watching the archival footage of the mass collection and burial of concentration camp victims during the Holocaust, before flying into an inconsolable rage over a student's racially insensitive comments. For François, the sobering images of emaciated, broken bodies not only raises the specter of his suppressed identity after his parents Anglicized their surname and had him baptized as a Catholic in the aftermath of their untold experience during the war, but also reminds him of his own physical frailty. The son of athletic parents, a ruggedly handsome gymnast and haberdasher named Maxime (Patrick Bruel) and his beautiful, fashion model wife, Tania (Cécile De France), François's self-consciousness over his own physicality has plagued him since childhood, even imagining that he had an athletic, alter-ego brother who could climb the ropes and execute perfectly controlled turns on the high bar that he could not perform for his demanding father. Even the idea of his parents humoring his fanciful whims for an imaginary brother would prove to be elusive, answered instead with almost desperate re-assertion of their singular existence. It is a gnawing sense of insecurity over his parents' evasive silence that would continue to consume him until one day when the family's longtime friend and neighbor, Louise (Julie Depardieu) decides to tell François the story of his parents' entangled destiny of unreconciled ghosts and memories in the shadows of occupied France. Adapted from the novel Memory (Secret) by Philippe Grimbert, Claude Miller's Un Secret is an articulate and well-rendered, if occasionally belabored portrait of guilt, transference, and survival. Framed within the context of the now grown François's (Mathieu Amalric) attempts to find his missing elderly father following the accidental death of the family dog, his search also becomes a metaphoric quest for identity and connection within the silence of a traumatic and dislocated history (a haunted persistence that also evokes integral, recurring themes in Chantal Akerman's cinema).
Posted by on Mar 04, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Rendez-vous with French Cinema
During the Q&A for Ain't Scared (Regarde-moi), Audrey Estrougo remarked that one of her motivations for making the film was to create a more authentic portrait of les cités - the low income housing neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city - that had become an all too convenient political target for all the social ills of France by then right wing candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy during the presidential election, especially in the aftermath of the 2005 civil unrest. Within this context, it should come as no surprise that Estrougo finds certain kinship with the films of Spike Lee in capturing the sense of entrapment, poverty, despair, and frustration that lead to these eruptions of violence. Composed as a two-part chronicle (with epilogue) of a day in the life of residents at a housing project - initially, from the perspective of the young men, then subsequently, from the young women in the neighborhood - Estrougo proposes that violence and social inequality are not overtly issues of racism, but rather, a broader symptom of underprivilege and disenfranchisement. Indeed, Estrougo subverts this convenient generalization in the early establishing shot of Yannick (Paco Boublard) receiving money inside a parked car before trying to catch a glimpse of his ex-girlfriend, Melissa (Djena Tsimba), his friend Jo (Terry Nimajimbe), who has been training for his debut with a professional soccer league, and even in the image of a bare-chested Mouss (Oumar Diaw) practicing an assortment of romantic overtures in front of a mirror that would later prove to actually succeed in seducing his girlfriend, Daphné (Salomé Stévenin). In contrast, the plight of the women is harsher and more restrictive: a reality that is foreshadowed in the film's black screen opening sequence as two women scandalously argue over the stealing of a lover (later identified as Melissa's mother and her neighbor) that ends with the slamming of a door, that is subsequently mirrored in the escalating rivalry between Jo's girlfriend, Julie (Emilie de Preissac) and Mouss's younger sister, Fatima (Eye Haidara) that dominates the second half of the film. Paradoxically, it is through this sobering glimpse of petty territoriality and jealousy that Estrougo not only reinforces the idea of violence as an integral reflection of poverty, dispossession, and exclusion, but also offers a semblance of hope and solidarity.
Christophe Honoré's idiosyncratic concoction of irreverent humor, subverted expectation, romanticism, and affectionate homage falls elegantly and poignantly into place in Love Songs (Les Chansons d'amour): a lyrical, immediately engaging, yet substantive thirteen song musical presented in three chapters, each bearing a title from the three parts of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Departure, Absence, and Return). The unexpected presentation of the film's opening credit sequence - citing only the surnames of the actors and production crew - sets the tone for Honoré's whimsical exploration of loss, incompleteness, and emotional fracture. Ostensibly a film on the amorous (mis)adventures of indecisive, twenty-something Parisian copy writer, Ismaël (Louis Garrel) who, as the film begins, has embarked on a ménage à trois with the reluctant consent of his devoted girlfriend, Julie (Ludivine Sangnier) and his co-worker Alice (Clotilde Hesme), the film similarly sweeps through the variegated arcs of Demy's quintessential film as it traces the complex emotional trajectory of loss, grief, survival, and healing following an unexpected tragedy. However, Honoré's rumination on lost love is far from a derivative reconstitution, but rather, a contemporary examination of the malleability - and interchangeability - of modern identity. Featuring original songs by collaborator and friend Alex Beaupain (whose experienced loss of a mutual friend served as the inspiration for the film's narrative) and a strong ensemble cast who perform the musical numbers in their own unadulterated voices - including Brigitte Roüan in the role of Julie's mother, Chiara Mastroianni as Julie's sister Jeanne, and Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet as the idealistic Breton student, Erwann - Love Songs delightfully (and unabashedly) expresses the poetry in the quotidian in all its intoxicating, dislocated presence and bittersweet, lingering memory.
In an interstitial episode the occurs halfway through Nicolas Klotz's La Question humaine (Heartbeat Detector), a group of diners at a low rent café are racially profiled and rounded up by the police for a random check of identification papers, the first among them, Papi (Adama Doumbia), the African immigrant whose wife, Blandine (Noëlla Mossaba) was injured during deportation in Klotz's previous film, 
Noémie Lvovsky returns to the idiosyncratic, subtly modulated multigenerational human comedy of 
Originally produced by Humbert Balsan before his death in 2005, Mia Hansen-Løve's All Is Forgiven (Tout est pardonné) recalls the muted, slow brewing, slice of life implosions of Stefan Krohmer's 
For successful, attractive, career-minded, thirty-something real estate attorney, Éloïse (Elsa Zylberstein), there is a certain efficiency and reassuring sense of retained control in the dynamics of speed dating that proves particularly appealing: seven pre-selected men, seven minute face-to-face meetings to form - and leave - an impression and exchange information that, at the end of each allotted time, allows each participant to start anew no matter how promising or disastrous the previous encounter proved to be, and, at the end of the evening, the flexibility to pursue or reject a subsequent relationship with any or all of the eligible bachelors or simply walk away. At first, the rapid fire pace of the encounters proves awkward, reducing the conversations to polite small talk, uncomfortable silences, reflexive regurgitations of one's curriculum vitae, or impromptu interrogations that attempt to dissect the failures of past relationships as a means of evaluating future compatibility. Nevertheless, Éloïse remains unfazed, sensing a potentially suitable complement in the handsome, self-assured trial lawyer, Jean-Luc (Bruno Putzulu), even as she finds a momentary, if reluctant connection with the insecure, neurotic André (Jacques Bonnaffé) amidst the din and haze of the evening's self-induced emotional rollercoaster. But the cracks in Éloïse's carefully controlled existence have already begun to surface, metastasizing in bouts fainting spells, unexplained physiological changes, and panic attacks that would soon send her to a series of medical specialists in search of proper diagnosis and treatment. Struggling with the physical and emotional toll of her increasingly complicated professional and personal life, Éloïse is forced to set aside her romantic ideals of finding perfect love in order to confront the mundane reality of her debilitating (and life-altering) illness. Expounding on his earlier film, Work Hard, Play Hard, Jean-Marc Moutout's The Feelings Factory (La Fabrique des sentiments) similarly captures the anxieties of urban existence, industrialization, modern identity, and disposability. At the core of Moutout's articulate and lucid contemporary portrait of love in an age of technological convenience (and anonymity) is Zylberstein's remarkable, subtly modulated performance - alternately struggling between pragmatism and quixotic romanticism - where the human heart, too, is a compromised, tradable commodity of instant gratification, weighed options, and accepted risk.
The possible implications of an innocent kiss hover like a dark cloud over the almost perfect evening out between an attractive, out-of-town textile designer, Émilie (Julie Gayet) and good Samaritan Gabriel (Michaël Cohen) in Emmanuel Mouret's refined and effervescent comedy of manners, Shall We Kiss? (Un baiser s'il vous plaît). Unfolding as a story within a story as Émilie attempts to explain her insistence against capping off their casual dinner date with an almost obligatory goodbye kiss that, with both parties involved in committed relationships and Émilie on the last day of her business trip before heading home the next morning, would seem an innocuous enough request, she recounts the emotionally prickly tale of another pair of erstwhile innocent kissers, Judith (Virginie Ledoyen) and Nicolas (Emmanuel Mouret) whose polite gestures and good intentions lead to unexpected catastrophe. At the heart of the story is the ever-analytical and pragmatic Judith, a laboratory researcher who has been happily married to pharmacist Claudio (Stefano Accorsi) for several years. Always eager to lend a sympathetic ear to her best friend Nicolas who has fallen into an inextricable romantic slump after having ended a long-term relationship with a mutual friend, Judith has become a close confidante to Nicolas's neurotic tales of self-defeating, frustrated intimacy - fearful of returning to the dating scene without appearing too desperate after having been celibate for so long, yet unable to summarily consummate the physical act and snap his dry spell by hiring a prostitute when she prevents him from kissing her as a prelude to their mechanical coupling. As a remedy to the impasse, Judith suggests that she serve as Nicolas's surrogate, rationalizing that their friendship would fill the semblance of emotional connection that he seeks to be able to consummate an act of intimacy. However, when Judith's selfless act of intervention proves to be less than resolved despite Nicolas's newfound relationship with a sexy fight attendant, Câline (Fréderique Bel), the two are forced to confront the Pandora's box of confused emotions and irrationality that their meaningless encounter has caused. Favorably evoking Woody Allen's witty, self-deprecating humor combined coupled with the clinical observations of human interaction (and dysfunction) inherent in Eric Rohmer's cinema, Shall We Kiss, nevertheless, bears the imprint of Mouret's characteristic, tightly woven construction - a subtle choreography of words, scenarios, elisions, and ambience that, in turn, reflect the ephemeral alchemy of human connection and desire.
Forty-something perfume developer, confirmed bachelor, and henpecked (and only male) sibling in a decidedly female-centric household of six children, Luis Costa (Alain Chabat) - still nursing a wounded heart from his only serious relationship during his twenties (a personal milestone that he nostalgically, but nebulously remembers as his "The Cure phase", indelibly marked by his gothic, Robert Smith-styled, oversized fashion sense, his lover's decision to leave him following an introductory meeting with his disapproving family, and his accidental discovery of his life-long passion when he attempts to recapture her essence by chemically synthesizing her complex scent into a fragrance) - has been officially classified as long overdue for marriage by his well intentioned, but intrusive family (in a motion overwhelmingly passed by the women under the collective resolution brought to the family's "G7" domestic committee). In an attempt to stave off his sisters' aggressive attempts at matchmaking - and who, in turn, have taken the cause of finding a suitable wife for their visibly disinclined brother by flooding the internet - Luis enlists the aid of his best friend and business partner, Pierre-Yves' (Grégoire Oestermann) bohemian sister, Emma (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who, having recently ended a long-term relationship and moved back to France, is eager to prove her financial stability as she settles into a new phase in her life and prepares to petition a Chilean orphan for adoption. Hatching an elaborate scheme to rid the family once and for all of their chronic interference into his romantic life by transforming Emma into the ideal fiancée in order to win the hearts and minds of his sisters and, above all, the family matriarch, Geneviève (Bernadette Lafont), before staging a sudden break-up where he would assume (and eagerly exploit) the role of jilted lover humiliatingly left at the altar, Luis' bright future of meddle-free bachelorhood seems tantalizingly within reach, until he finds himself on the defensive in the chaotic aftermath (and familial wrath) of the aborted wedding against amorphous accusations of unspecified transgressions that undoubtedly caused such a perfect woman to escape his grasp. Evoking the slapstick comedies of Francis Veber in its tortuous, absurd, over-the-top, rapid fire scenarios, Eric Lartigau creates a whimsical, charming, and infectious, if perhaps, characteristically outré romantic farce in I Do: How to Get Married and Stay Single. Supported by equally solid performances from veteran actors Chabat (who also conceived the idea for the script) as cosseted man-child and hopeless romantic, Gainsbourg as the world-wise, but vulnerable object of affection, and Lafont as the indomitable, yet overindulging mother prone to histrionics, the film is an enjoyable, well crafted, and irresistible tale on the inexorable - and enviable - travails of love, commitment, and family.
Favorably evoking Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie in its taut, slow brewing, and unnerving portrait of dysfunctional class relations, Denis Dercourt's The Page Turner is a distilled, understated, and elegantly realized psychological tale of fragility, revenge, and manipulation. At the heart of Dercourt's dark allegory is a polite, attractive, and meticulous young woman named Mélanie Prouvost (in the astute casting of Déborah François, who played the role of Sonya in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's 
In an early episode in Catherine Corsini's dark romantic comedy, Ambitious, a timid, aspiring writer book shop owner named Julien (Eric Caravaca) discreetly, but deliberately, foists his recently finished autofiction manuscript on unsuspecting friend and perennial store patron, Mathieu Séchard (Renan Carteaux), the son of a renowned literary publishing house director in Paris, and immediately becomes wracked with anxiety and insecurity over Mathieu's seeming evasion and prolonged silence regarding his initial impressions of Julien's work, mollified only by his friend's impulsive offer, in passing, to send the manuscript to his father's office. Julien's seemingly amicable, yet intrinsically calculated encounter with Mathieu provides an incisive prelude to the film's overarching themes of exploitation, vanity, and self-absorption, as his reprehensive opportunism is equally matched by the introduction of a mercurial publishing agent named Judith Zahn (Karen Viard) into his life. Delegated with the task of providing feedback on the manuscript's potential for representation, Judith shirks her obligation to review the personal favor submission and, instead, sends an assistant to meet with Julien to tactfully, but decisively reject his work. But Julien soon proves to be a formidable non-client, ingratiating himself into a frazzled and distraught Judith's reluctant company. Newly entrusted into her intimacy, Julien discovers the remarkable contents an entrusted box of souvenirs and personal effects that Judith has inherited from her estranged, late father - a 70s revolutionary who had lived a life of intrigue replete with covert acts of political espionage and assassinations - and decides to surreptitiously embark on a more marketable premise for his next novel, a story based on the mined contents of her father's buried, secret history. Assembling an eccentric cast of morally reprehensible, yet endearing characters - a motley crew that also includes failed thespian, consummate freeloader, and part-time stalker, Julien's former classmate, Simon (Gilles Cohen) - Corsini strikes a delicate balance between humor and pathos, revulsion and affection to create a slight, yet acerbic dysfunctional fairytale of the idiosyncratic intersections of deception, manipulation, betrayal, and desire that define the inscrutable course of neurotic true love.
Each day, a divorced, middle-aged dance hall chanteur, Alain Moreau (in an elegant performance by Gérard Depardieu), attired in his white satin suit and sporting a provincial, stylishly overgrown haircut with a touch of highlights, sings from his stout repertoire of familiar - yet not too iconic - love songs before an appreciative audience in assorted dance halls, upscale restaurants, and nursing homes throughout Clermont-Ferrand: special places where people with palpable life experiences - too old for the frenetic beat of clubs and discotheques - can come together and, for a brief moment, find connection with each other, their formative histories, their personal memories. It is a humble vocation that suits the endearing and charismatic Alain well with his easygoing, confident manner and refreshingly pragmatic outlook over his role - not as an artist seeking to elevate his performance in search of legacy and stardom - but as an entertainer for hire who must consciously remain attuned to the wishes of his audience to sing competently, yet unobtrusively, the sentimental melodies that will entice them to dance, to linger in the moment, to forget their pain, abandon their inhibitions and take a chance. It is perhaps Alain's remarkable ability to put the audience at ease and break down resistances that propels real estate businessman, Bruno (Mathieu Amalric) to bring his newly hired real estate agent, an attractive, recently separated woman named Marion (Cécile de France) to the dance hall one evening, a manipulative ploy with seeming unintentional consequences when she catches the attention of the charming crooner. Instinctually drawn to each other by a sense of displaced longing and mutual woundedness, Alain enlists Marion's aid in finding a new residence under the pretext of finally moving out of the home that he had shared with his manager and former wife Michèle (Christine Citti). But as Michèle strives to reinvent Alain's flagging career in the face of dwindling bookings, declining health, and the increasing popularity of karaoke, his reinvigorated desire to start his life anew is tempered by the ambivalence of leaving behind the intimacy of his beloved dance halls. Channeling the spirit of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Red in its suffusive evocation of longing and synchronicity, Xavier Giannoli's The Singer is an intelligently rendered, understatedly resonant, and refined portrait of the often bifurcating trajectories of existential and emotional intersections. Concluding with the extended long shot of Alain and Marion in desperate and reluctant embrace from the windows of a café, the silent choreography of souls in restless motion becomes a sublime metaphor for their transformative, star-crossed encounter - fragrant in its fleeting intoxication, heartbreaking in its inevitable conclusion, and indelible in its haunting irresolution.
Bruno Dumont returns to the desolate pastoral and emotional landscapes of his earlier features L'Humanité and Life of Jesus in Flanders, an austere, tonal, and visceral exposition into the integral nature of violence, sexuality, desire, and instinctual survival. A rugged young farmer, Demester (Samuel Boidin) impassively harvests his dessicated, autumnal fields before finding his neighbor - and unrequited object of affection - Barbe (Adélaïde Leroux) waiting for him in the clearing to take a casual walk in the woods and a diversionary afternoon rendezvous. In a subsequent encounter with mutual acquaintances at a local bar, Barbe seemingly trivializes her relationship with the introverted Demester by casually referring to him as a close, childhood friend before impulsively (and all too easily) submitting to the advances of a bar patron, another conscript named Blondel (Henri Cretel). The stark juxtaposition of Barbe's fickle dismissiveness of her familiar intimacy with her obliging neighbor, and her brief, but intense affair with Blondel exposes the profound gulf that continues to separate Demeter from his beloved who, in his opaque gaze and uncomfortable silence, cannot articulate the depth of his despair over her cavalier treatment of their relationship - supplanting the greyness of their cold, unemotive, and mechanical post-coital embrace with the (alluded) image of unbridled carnality intrinsic in Barbe and Blondel's desperate, needy, and frenzied coupling. Sent far away from their bucolic hometown to wage war in the trenches of a distant land with his unwitting romantic rival, Demester sublimates his wounded heart and sense of betrayal in their mutual struggle for survival against a brutal and faceless enemy. But as the inhumanity and carnage of a seemingly senseless and interminable military campaign continues to take its toll on the psyches of the young soldiers, Demester finds himself struggling to maintain his sanity by holding on to the fragile memories of his distant, unreciprocated, and increasingly impossible love. In distilling the film to a series of formal, representational episodes, Dumont condenses the essential images of quotidian documentation into an abstract, yet instinctual composition - transforming the literality of the often blunt, crude, and awkward encounters into a potent and indelible crystallization of human cruelty, desire, and longing. Inevitably, it is perhaps within this interpenetrating cycle of war and growth, violence and intimacy, death and renewal that Dumont also invokes the impassioned, elegiac sentiment of John McCrae's famous Great War poem, In Flanders Fields in its contours of memory and eternally transforming landscape that define the inalterable shape of the human heart.
It perhaps comes as no surprise that the astute social observation and political acuity so integral to the wry, infectious, and irresistible whimsical humor of Blame it on Fidel comes from first (non documentary) feature filmmaker Julie Gavras, whose father, Costa Gavras, continues to redefine the bounds of political filmmaking with his distinctive blueprint for crafting articulate and thought-provoking historical docu-fiction. Set in 1970 France, the film opens to the insightful close-up image of cherubic, Catholic school girl, Anna (Nina Kervel) commanding (or rather, demanding) the attention of her dining companions by demonstrating the proper way to peel an orange using only silverware, much to the assorted bemusement - and indifference - of the children in the designated kids' table of a wedding banquet. But beyond Anna's projected confidence in demonstrating her impeccable table manners, the auspicious occasion has already begun to sow the seeds of confusion for the young heroine, as her father, a Spanish expatriate and successful trial attorney named Fernando (Stefano Accorsi) covertly scuttles his sister and niece from Spain following the arrest of Anna's left-leaning uncle for political agitation, moves them in with the family, and invariably becomes galvanized into his own acts social action by his sister's impassioned stories of struggle and resistance. Their unexpected arrival also causes consternation for the family housekeeper, Filomena (Marie-Noëlle Bordeaux), a Cuban exile whose family was brought to ruin and forced to flee the country after Fidel Castro's rise to power, and who now sees the introduction of communists into the de la Mesa household as a harbinger for an inevitably great calamity. Meanwhile, Anna's mother, Marie (Julie Depardieu), increasingly dissatisfied with her career as a journalist relegated to writing women's issue fluff pieces for Marie Claire, decides to embark on her own independent research for an exposé on the (then) taboo subject of reproductive rights with unexpected - and life-altering - consequences. In her remarkable perceptivity and even-handed approach towards depicting the repercussions of transformative change and ideological awakening from all facets of social life, Gavras emerges from her father's formidable shadows and into her own luminous spotlight as a conscientious and assured filmmaker, creating a charming and deceptively lighthearted, yet incisive survey of the cultural climate in the immediate aftermath of May 68, when the disappointment of the failed national revolution was seen, not as a death knell signal to the left movement, but as a momentary stumbling towards a still vital - and seemingly within reach - global wave of social revolution, a continued idealistic euphoria that was crystallized by the ground-breaking popular candidacy of socialist Salvador Allende in Chile. Capturing the profound trajectory of young Anna's own domestic struggle to make sense of her parents' newly (re-)awakened militancy through the subtle, yet poetic closing image of Anna, no longer in the center of her own dainty, cultivated - if insular - universe, but rather, among the diverse milieu and controlled chaos of multicultural children playing in the schoolyard, the film is a potent, uncompromisingly intelligent, and refreshing portrait of the enervating confusion and sublime exhilaration of social awakening.
Crafted as a cine-reportage restaging of the circumstances surrounding the 1965 abduction - and presumed assassination - of mathematics professor and exiled Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka (Simon Abkarian) on a Paris street, I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed is told from the point-of-view of petty criminal turned informant Georges Figon (Charles Berling) who, as the film begins, lies dead on the floor of a hotel room with a gun shot wound in the back in what the investigator would expediently classify as a suicide. But the reality of Figon's involvement with the still-unsolved disappearance would undoubtedly prove to be more complicated. Recruited by a nebulous band of politically connected thugs, Figon poses as an intermediary and aspiring producer bearing guaranteed financial backers for a proposed film on decolonization, a project that attracts the attention of the usually-cautious Barka who views renowned filmmaker Georges Franju's (Jean-Pierre Léaud) involvement in the project as a sign of its legitimacy, and envisions his own participation as an opportunity to rally the Third World movement during his planned appearance for the upcoming Tricontinental Conference in Cuba. Meanwhile, Figon has been burning both sides of the candle as the charismatic con-artist insinuates himself into the company of author and scenarist Marguerite Duras (Josiane Balasko) by appealing to her first-hand childhood experiences with the inequity of colonialism in French Indochina (as well as touting Barka's participation), and who, in turn, has expressed interest in bringing her good friend Franju into the project in an attempt to reinvigorate his career (and psyche) after suffering a nervous breakdown following the financial failure of his latest film. Filmmaker Serge Le Péron employs a clinical and objective tripartite structure of the film that, like the real-life incident, reflects the messy and tangled web of crossed alliances, double-dealing, deception, and betrayal that interweaves the scandal - a journalistic approach that ultimately suffers in its broadstroke rendering of underlying human stories (Franju's breakdown, Duras' anticolonial activism, or even Figon's chameleon-like social networking) in favor of a more comprehensive, if less insightful cultural snapshot of the volatile zeitgeist that ignited the political powder keg of the Ben Barka affair.
Divorced single parent, successful attorney, sans-papiers advocate, and not-so-obscure object of desire Chantal Letellier (Carole Bouquet) has led a fairly manageable life of controlled chaos in her comfortable, if occasionally unhinged flat until one day when she seizes the opportunity of a vacated sublet upstairs maid's room to open up their living space and convert the second floor into an office area. Hiring the services of a Colombian architect (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo) brimming with lofty design ideas and ambitious concepts but with little preoccupation towards more pragmatic issues of logistics and schedule, Chantal's life is soon turned into upheaval when her apartment is thrown into a state of perpetual construction, demolition, and rework, and the apartment becomes a haven for a stream of immigrant workers with varying degrees of questionable job skills and even more dubious immigration work permits. Recalling the idiosyncratic humor of recent "fish out of water" comedies such as 
During the introductory remarks for Grey Souls, Yves Angelo commented that perhaps the most enduring lesson that had remained with author Philippe Claudel during his years spent working as a prison guard while writing his acclaimed novel was the idea that in such an environment, no one can be completely trusted. This sense of pervasive uncertainty also infuses the atmosphere in the filmmaker's realization of the dour, haunting and interminably bleak tale, as villagers struggle to carry on some semblance of a normal life in the austere winter of 1917 at a provincial border town, even as the Great War tragically unfolds within earshot of the town and all enlistment-aged men - except for factory workers and local authorities deemed essential services to the civilian population - are being sent off to the battlefield to reinforce the protracted war campaign: an idealistic schoolteacher, Lysia (Marina Hands) who has been recruited by the elementary school to replace a teacher who suffers a nervous breakdown during gas attack drills; a widower prosecutor, Destinat (Jean-Pierre Marielle) who finds a semblance of his late wife in Lysia and begins to pry into her affairs in an attempt to draw himself closer to her; a bombastic mayor (Michel Vuillermoz) who seems more eager in maintaining class order than social order; a frazzled police inspector Mierck (Denis Podalydès) trying to juggle the responsibilities of law enforcement and impending fatherhood. Structured through a series of elliptical flashbacks that obliquely trace the progress of an overarching murder investigation of the innkeeper's lovely young daughter, Belle (Joséphine Japy) found strangled near the riverbank that overlooks the reclusive prosecutor's estate, the film is also an acutely grim and unflinching view on the baseness of human behavior that is nurtured by the folly and madness of war. Shooting in somber hues that mirror the interiority of the characters, Angelo indelibly captures the ambiguity and desolation that inevitably surface within the periphery of the dispirited rituals and moral vacuum of human crisis.
Part police procedural and part character study of the camaraderie of detective work, Xavier Beauvois evokes the unsentimentality and objective, cinéma vérité-styled painstaking observation of Maurice Pialat - with similar conflicted results - in his latest film Le Petit Lieutenant. The titular rookie investigator is Antoine (Jalil Lespert), a prototypical provincial cop from Normandy eager to experience the adrenaline rush of metropolitan crime busting. Assigned under the tutelage of the well-respected, second-generation "supercop" Caroline Vaudieu (Nathalie Baye), Antoine becomes closely involved with the seemingly routine investigation into the death of a vagrant - later identified as a Polish migrant worker - found floating in the river after he recognizes the victim from an earlier encounter at the police station for public intoxication. As in Pialat's oeuvre, the success of the film ultimately resides in the strength of the performance of the actors, and Baye's role as Vaudieu is complexly rendered (she received Best Actress at the 2006 Césars) as a recovering alcoholic who has declined promotion into the higher ranks of law enforcement to instead return to the "real world" of field work after two years of sobriety - a nuanced performance that seems particularly in sharp contrast to the almost superficial characterization of Antoine as an immature, impetuous thrill seeker. Perhaps driven to drink by the unexpected death of her only child - who would have been Antoine's age had he survived - Vaudieu's relationship with the idealistic young detective is protective and intimate, yet necessarily distanced (a subtly evident demarcation between personal and professional life that is illustrated in her physical separation from her colleagues' after hour drinking parties, invariably leaving early after finishing a glass of soda water). Beauvois' approach is systematic, organic, episodic, and precise in execution, which lends itself to a certain degree of aesthetic clinicality and emotional disconnection, to create a competent, if coolly detached policier.
Set in 1970s Haiti under the post-colonial repressive regimes of François and Jean-Claude Duvalier, Vers le sud provides an incisive and provocative recontextualization of cultural imperialism as neocolonialism - specifically, in its economic manifestation - as Westerners, particularly middle-aged women, converge in an idyllic seaside resort where handsome, native young men from the slums of nearby Port-au-Prince vie for the favored company of the women in exchange for money and access to social privilege. From the opening sequence of a curious encounter between a polite and mannered man, Albert (Lys Ambroise) and an imploring, desperate woman, Cantet reflects the contextual ambiguity (and complexity) of social interrelationships within this seemingly hermetic paradise, as he awaits the arrival of the latest hotel guest, an attractive American divorcée named Brenda (Karen Young), and the native woman attempts to give Albert her attractive, young daughter to him to serve in some nebulous, unspecified capacity in an attempt to save her from the fate of many impoverished, pretty girls within the fear-riddled social climate of government-sanctioned, tonton macoutes thugs who operate with impunity throughout the city. This prefiguring dynamic of servility, myopic self-interest, ignorance, entitlement, and rejection provides the framework to the unraveling of Brenda's long-awaited idealized fantasy of returning to the resort as she attempts to recapture the euphoria of her sexual awakening with an undernourished and obliging then-15 year-old boy named Legba (Ménothy Cesar) who had once insinuated himself into her company for meals, and who she would, in turn, violate under the romantic delusion of reciprocated attraction. Now the constant companion of a handsome and imposing, if aloof and forbidding Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), the headmistress of an all-girl boarding school who spends her vacation trying to slough off the discontentment of her repressed and unfulfilling life, Legba soon becomes the unwitting pawn in a desperate, calculated tug-of-war between the two equally possessive, determined, and vulnerable women. Continuing in the sociological vein of his recent film Time Out, Vers le sud expounds on Cantet's recurring expositions on the masked - and masqueraded - unarticulated psychology of quotidian and social ritual. During the Q&A for the film, Cantet recounted his inability to shoot most of the scenes on location in Port-au-Prince due to the rampant lawlessness and random violence pervasive in the area (the resort sequences were filmed in the Dominican Republic). In a way, this pervasive anarchy can be seen as an evolution of the dysfunctional relationship between post-colonial African nations and western society, as commodification, territoriality, and favorable compensation reflect the everyday social dynamics of an implicit cultural and economic imperialism, where humanity and sense of community have been replaced by instinctual self-preservation and the volatile cocktail of impoverishment, privilege, and desire.
During an oral dissertation that occurs near the denouement of L'Enfer, the youngest sister Anne (Marie Gillain) is randomly assigned the topic of Euripedes' Greek tragedy Medea, a mythological character who, betrayed by her husband Jason, exacted revenge by killing their children. The allegory of Medea would prove to be an insightful framework into the fractured, disparate lives of Anne's estranged family as well. Her volatile, married sister Sophie (Emmanuelle Béart) has become increasingly consumed with a crippling obsession over her husband's infidelity. Her introverted sister Céline (Karin Viard) continues to lead an emotionally closed life of self-devotion and predictable ritual by dutifully attending to their invalid, embittered mother (Carole Bouquet) in a secluded nursing home, even as she wrestles with her surfacing feelings for an enigmatic, handsome stranger named Sébastien (Guillaume Canet) who begins to court her undivided attention. Even Anne's seeming youthful idealism cannot mask a life-altering personal crisis as she struggles to make sense of her married lover (and professor) Frédéric's (Jacques Perrin) unexpected rejection after informing him of her pregnancy. Segueing into her literary exposition with the remark, "Today, tragedy is no longer possible," Anne's evocation of modern-day tragedy as the walking wounded tersely encapsulates the invisible, yet immediately palpable repercussions of the sisters' own deep rooted childhood trauma surrounding their father's (Miki Manojlovic) imprisonment (and subsequent death) and their mother's cold, retreated silence, as the siblings embody a figurative, sacrificial death at the hands of parents' tumultuous marriage, yet survive to bear the collective scars of their broken childhood into their unreconciled, adult lives. Invoking the spirit of Krzysztof Kieslowski through similar aesthetics of thematic color palettes (in the compositional representation of the sisters) and imagery (most notably, a drowning insect struggling to make its way out of a glass from Decalogue, and a shot of an elderly lady recycling bottles that recurs through all the films of the Three Colors trilogy) and realizing a scenario by Kieslowski and long-time collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Danis Tanovic further creates a Bergmanesque atmosphere of claustrophobia and Antonioni-inspired interior landscapes of profound desolation. Unfolding as fragments of an elliptical puzzle that, when reconstructed, precisely interconnect to reveal a portrait of revenge, self-absorption, and despair, L'Enfer is a thoughtful and articulate examination of the myopia and untold legacy of human cruelty and emotional warfare: a metaphoric representation of hell as a godless - and graceless - existential plane of inured suffering, silence, longing, and disconnection.
Popular novelist and first-time filmmaker Emmanuel Carrère takes a decidedly more affirming and compassionate adaptation of his twenty-year old dark, psychological novel on obsession, identity, and alienation for his debut feature, La Moustache. While getting ready for a dinner party with mutual friends, a comfortably settled, middle-aged married man and successful architect named Marc (Vincent Lindon) impulsively decides to surprise his wife Agnès (Emmanuelle Devos) by shaving off his well-worn moustache - a facial feature that he has sported through much of his adult life - for the occasion. However, when Marc subsequently realizes that neither Agnès nor their dinner hosts Serge (Mathieu Amalric) and Nadia (Macha Polikarpova) seem to notice the change in appearance, he begins to suspect that his wife has somehow involved his friends in the ruse, a wounded perception that Agnès tries to quell by insisting that he had never had a moustache. Frustrated by her intransigence to admit an apparent conspiracy in their seeming oblivion over such an obvious physical transformation, Marc attempts to catch Agnès in a lie by finding some trace of proof of his moustache's former existence - a family photograph, a double take reaction from his colleagues, or even the retrieval of errant hair trimmings from garbage cans set out on the curbside for pickup - to no avail. Soon, Marc's obsession to prove elaborate deception begins to place a strain on their relationship, as he begins to question the continuation of their life together after such a casual betrayal, even as he harbors increasing doubts over his own sanity and sense of identity. At the core of Carrère's surreal and nightmarish descent into madness, disconnection, and fugue is a thoughtful, lucid, and penetrating exposition into the inevitable transformation of all human relationships from visceral passion to emotional partnerships, when a relationship inevitably begins to evolve - and sometimes, drift apart - through the passage of time (and comfortable familiarity), and lovers no longer see things through the same blissful prism of lovestruck intoxication. It is this inevitable transformation that is metaphorically represented by Marc's existential crisis over his unnoticed, missing moustache - an illuminating personal and mutual journey beyond the superficial novelty of romantic love towards a deeper realization of true, shared intimacy.
The whimsical and offbeat opening sequence of subverted expectation and role reversal provides a tongue-in-cheek glimpse into the eccentric humor and understatedly irony of screenwriter turned filmmaker Sophie Fillières latest film, Gentille, as an anxious Fontaine Leglou (Emmanuelle Devos), an anesthesiologist working the evening shift at a private psychiatric hospital, accosts an unwitting man on the street with a vehement rejection of any potential attempt at romantic pursuit in the mistaken belief that he had deliberately followed her from the train in order to chat her up. Chagrined by her impulsive act of presumptive aggression, Fontaine then invites the stranger for a drink to atone for her unprovoked brusqueness. Fontaine's reaction to the awkward, if amusingly disarming, encounter provides an insightful glimpse into her character that will inevitably set the tone for a delightful comedy of manners when her behavioral pattern of exceeding politeness, discretion, and opacity collides with her emotional ambivalence over a patient and fellow colleague, Philippe's (Lambert Wilson) not-too-subtle romantic overtures and a marriage proposal from her long-time, live-in lover Michel (Bruno Todeschini) towards an attenuated (and occasionally surreal) self-induced crisis of evasive indecision. Inviting favorable comparison to Noémie Lvovsky's deceptively lyrical, breezy, and idiosyncratic, yet sophisticated, incisive, and poignant comedies on the travails of romantic relationships (in films such as 
When the attractive widow Christine (Aurore Clément) asks her children for permission to offer a statue in their garden - a gift from their late father - as a housewarming present to her new beau Gérard Courtois (Bernard Le Coq), the eldest child, Philippe (Benoît Magimel) appears visibly disconcerted by the proposal, but nevertheless acquiesces for the sake of unanimity and subsequently insists on personally hand carrying the object to Gérard's home. However, it seems that the nature of his apprehension does not stem from a suppressed Oedipal rage or the traumatic idea of Gérard taking the place of his late father, but rather, from a curious attachment to the statue itself: an idealized image of classical beauty that would seem to have come to life in the soulful and enigmatic gaze of his sister's beautiful and alluring bridesmaid, Senta (Laura Smet). Living alone in the basement of a large, dilapidated country estate (and apart from her estranged stepmother and her lover who live two floors above) that she had inherited from her father, Senta's obscure personal history would seem to be as near-mythic as the Hellenic statue that she resembles: an Icelandic mother who died in childbirth, a reckless, disreputable past as an exotic dancer in New York City, an evil stepmother who has emotionally abandoned her to pursue a career as a tango dancer. Aroused by Senta's uninhibited desire and touched by her fragile vulnerability, Philippe is all too willing to embark on Senta's seemingly operatic (and fated) course of romantic destiny, and in the process, becomes increasingly entangled in her myopic - and delusive - quest for love and loyalty. Adapted from the novel by Ruth Rendell (whose novel La Ceremonie also provided the basis for the earlier Claude Chabrol film), The Bridesmaid exhibits a similarly deceptive and slow-building narrative crescendo as 
Each day, a struggling touring comic named Irène (Yolande Moreau) checks out of a modest hotel, packs a large, aluminum gear case and a wooden chair into the trunk of her Peugeot, drives through long stretches of empty, rural roads along the northern towns straddling the Franco-Belgian border, sets up her minimal equipment on the stage of a small theatrical venue (often, local clubs, town auditoriums, nursing homes, and converted classrooms), selects a volunteer "chicken" from the audience who will act as her partner in crime for the comedy skit, performs her comedy routine before an animated crowd, checks into a convenient hotel in town, and calls her supportive husband and daughter to dispense and receive equal measures of advice, encouragement, and affection before turning in for the evening. It is a lonely and uneventful, but personally fulfilling routine that Irène knows all too well, buoyed by her brief, yet affectionate connection with her appreciative audience, the adrenaline rush of the performance, and the warmth and generosity of the townspeople she meets along the way, until one fateful day when Irène becomes stranded on a empty stretch of road and is assisted by a flighty, but genial parade float conductor named Dries (Wim Willaert). Marking the debut feature film of actress turned filmmaker Yolande Moreau, When the Sea Rises... is an irrepressibly eccentric, thoughtful, and infectiously whimsical comedy on loneliness and emotional synchronicity. Inspired by Moreau's own experiences as a traveling comic during the 1980s, the film affectionately captures the laid back, free-spirited, and interpersonal indigenous character of the northern border towns that, as the filmmaker comments, "do not take themselves too seriously". Following in the similar vein of idiosyncratic, bittersweet, muted kitsch comedies often associated with Swiss and Belgian cinema, and infused with the intimate insight of Moreau's first-hand experience and clear passion for the region and her craft, the film is a quietly observed portrait of the disconnected lives of traveling performers, and a humble and tender love letter to a surrogate community that had nurtured and supported her career before achieving fame and success.
In an early episode of Me and My Sister, the younger sister Louise (Catherine Frot), having been picked up from the train station and driven home by her older sister, Martine (Isabelle Huppert), discovers her manuscript haphazardly tossed in the trunk of her sister's car as she retrieves her luggage, yet says nothing about the apparent slight to the culmination of her dedicated hard work. It is an episode that speaks volumes on the nature of the relationship of the siblings. Rejected by their alcoholic mother and forced to lead independent lives at an early age, the pragmatic and sensible Martine has consciously worked to shed her provinciality and cultivate an air of sophistication and bourgeois respectability in Paris while the fanciful and quirky Louise remained in Le Mans to lead a humble life as a beautician and aspiring writer. However, Martine's seemingly comfortable, lush life is also far from ideal. Trapped in a passionless marriage yet bound to the social comfortability afforded by her husband's success, Martine has become increasingly exacting and hardened to the people around her, and invariably, Louise's unpolished manners, idiosyncrasies, and interminably bubbly personality quickly begin to fray her carefully cultivated social decorum. Alexandra Leclère's film is a slight, yet charming, admirable, and effervescent comedy on manners, sibling rivalry, and the unbreakable bonds of family. By examining Louise and Martine's lives through the reflective prism of their interactions with each other, Leclère also creates an insightful social allegory for elitism, classism, denial of roots, and cosmopolitan arrogance.
L'Intrus opens to a shot of the Franco-Swiss border as a border guard performs a customs check and inspection of a random vehicle with the aid of a contraband-sniffing dog. The seemingly mundane image of frontier, wilderness, and deception provides a curiously appropriate introduction into the Claire Denis' impenetrably fractured, enigmatically allusive, otherworldy, and indelible metaphysical exposition into the mind of an emotionally severe, morally bankrupt, and profoundly isolated heart transplant patient named Louis (Michel Subor). Idiosyncratically unfolding in elliptical, often reverse chronology (with respect to the heart surgery) through the lugubriously fluid intertwining of Louis' alienated existence and deeply tormented subconscious, the film is a fragmented and maddeningly opaque daydream (or perhaps more appropriately, a haunted nightmare) of the price exacted by his disreputable past, estranged relationships, hedonism, and instinctual quest for survival: his inability to reconcile with his only son and his family; his sexually motivated, yet emotionally distant relationship with a materialistic pharmacist; his dubious, transcontinental past (a suppressed history that may have included murder). Perpetually followed by a beautiful, enigmatic sentinel (Katia Golubeva) - or conscience - who seems to have been instrumental in obtaining his new heart, what emerges is an indelible, elegiac, and poetically abstract dreamscape through the wondrous, alien terrain of unreconciled (and irreconcilable) personal history, unrequited longing, and haunted memory.
Olivier Assayas' latest film, Clean, is a sincere, well-intentioned, and technically proficient, but uncharacteristically trite and formulaic portrait of a drug-addicted, washed up celebrity and recent widow named Emily Wang (Maggie Cheung) who, having lost custody of her son Jay (James Dennis) to her Canadian in-laws, Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and Rosemary Hauser (Martha Henry) while serving a prison term in North America for drug possession, decides to return to France in order to forget her personal tragedy, embarking on a long, emotionally draining, uncertain, and lonely journey to rebuild her life in an attempt to earn the Hausers' respect and repair her estranged relationship with her abandoned son. It should be noted, however, that as in his earlier 
During the Q&A for Local Call, filmmaker Arthur Joffé expressed his great fondness and respect for the works of Nobel laureate author and playwright, Isaac Bashevis Singer, whom he credits as his primary screenwriting influence, and from the complex tragicomic, impassioned, affecting, and deeply humanist tone of the film, the affinity is easy to see. As the film begins, the neurotic, well-to-do, and (perhaps all-too) comfortably settled astrophysicist Félix Mandel (Sergio Castellitto), arranges to meet with his first love Wendy (Emily Morgan) during a working trip to London and returns home with her gift for his son, an overfamiliar gesture for which his wife Lucie (Isabelle Gélinas) responds with an order to clean out his wretchedly overfilled, disorganized home office. Leaving only a box filled with his late father's belongings for storage, including a cashmere overcoat that Félix had retrieved unaltered from the tailor for him on the day of his death, Félix decides to offer the overcoat to a homeless man who then promptly sells the article to a near-mythical, joy-riding, motorcycle daredevil known in the streets as Le Prince Noir for spare change. However, Félix soon discovers that dispossessing himself of his father's effects will not allow his father, Lucien (Michel Serrault) to rest in peace, as he begins to receive mysterious - and exorbitantly expensive - collect calls from Heaven reproaching him for dispensing of his overcoat so readily. Driven into near bankruptcy (and brink of insanity) by his father's rationally unsettling, yet intrinsically emotionally reassuring conversations, Félix resolves to recover his father's overcoat and complete the alteration that the tailor (László Szabó) had earlier refused to perform. It is important to note that the French title, Ne quittez pas! ("Don't hang up") is more thematically in keeping with spirit of the film. During the Q&A, Joffé also offers two additional anecdotes that greatly contribute to the appreciation of the film: the first is that the alteration that was asked to be performed - and adamantly rejected - by his personal tailor is based on a true incident in Joffé's father's life (both his father and the tailor were children of the Holocaust); the second is that Joffé had intended for a French actor to play the part of Félix, but soon found that cultural and spiritual issues - and social implications in French society - that underpin the story made the role uncomfortable, and none of the French actors whom Joffé had approached with the script accepted the part. Unable to cast locally, Joffé then turned to Sergio Castellitto, with whom he had previously collaborated on Alberto Express, in what turned out to be a stroke of pitch-perfect casting that delicately balances fragility, affection, humor, charm, sophistication, intelligence, turmoil, and spirituality into an intelligent and affirming, yet whimsical examination of cultural rootlessness, despiritualization, filial devotion, and the legacy of the diasporic experience.
From the opening sequence of 36 Quai des Orfèvres that shows intercutting parallel sequences between a band of thugs who break into a bar and physically abuse the proprietress and a pair of vandals who pry off a street placard and subsequently emerge in the private room of a bar with other drunken, trigger-happy carousers, Olivier Marchal establishes the film's overarching moral ambiguity and blurred delineation between criminals and undercover police. Ostensibly a professional (and inferentially personal) competition between two seasoned law enforcement agency lead investigators Denis Klein (Gérard Depardieu) and Léo Vrinks (Daniel Auteuil) as they try to apprehend the perpetrators responsible for a string of boldly executed, daytime armored car robberies by any means possible in order to secure a promotion to commissioner, the rivalry soon escalates into a protracted, acrimonious, and increasingly reckless and unethical power struggle for professional validation, glory, and revenge. Drawing inspiration from the filmmaker's former career in law enforcement as well as a beloved national cinema legacy of atmospheric and highly stylized crime thrillers (that include such eminent filmmakers such as Louis Feuillade, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Henri-Georges Clouzot), 36 Quai des Orfèvres is an accomplished and entertaining film that is bolstered by the impeccable performances of a strong lead and supporting cast that, nevertheless, ultimately suffers from an overly contrived, conveniently structured, and tidy resolution (in particular, an extraneous, tangential subplot that could only have served to set up a set of conditions in place for the inevitable outcome).
An apprehensive Olivier (Mathieu Demy) inscrutably stands watch at an outpost on the side of a mountain, cursorily surveying the desolate topography with a pair of binoculars, waving to armed comrades situated on an adjacent clearing, checking the sight on his rifle...waiting for something to happen. The seemingly idyllic opening sequence of natural communion provides an insightful glimpse into the heart of the conflict as the chaos of shots fired and a faint rustling in the brush momentarily betrays his insecurity and allows a wild boar to escape into the wilderness. On holiday in his native village in Corsica, Olivier has returned with his fiancée (Natacha Régnier) to reconnect with his ancestral identity (perhaps resulting from an existential crisis brought on by his impending fatherhood), returning to the simpler life and camaraderie of the hunters who have continued to carry on the centuries-old tradition of his cultural heritage against the tide of inevitable depopulation (and vanishing way of life) in the dying village. Bound by the cultural code of self-reliance, rugged individualism, and independence, Olivier's moral allegiance is tested when he becomes an inadvertent witness to an act of cold-blooded murder. Orso Miret's sophomore feature is an elegantly shot and sincere, but thematically slight and ultimately superficial psychological portrait of guilt, conformity, and personal responsibility. Juxtaposing stylized, oneiric images that reveal Olivier's crisis of conscience against the naturalism of the region's harsh and unforgiving terrain (and further correlating the boar hunt as a social metaphor for natural law), Le Silence serves as a thoughtful exposition on instinctuality, character, and human resolve.