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Notes
First, an excellent link covering all genres and aspects of French film -- filmsdefrance.com.
See Premiere for current films. And a blog, L'Oeil sur L'Ecran.
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The
Palme d'or (golden
palm) is the prize for best film at the Cannes Film Festival, one of
the most prestigious
international film festivals in the world. The
2008 winner is "Entre
les Murs" (Class), a film set in a tough Parisian high
school, and based on a best-selling
autobiographical novel by François Bégaudeau, who plays the main
character. See
announcement in International
Herald Tribune (Eng.)
and discussion in Le
Monde
(Fr.)
|
 Cannes
festival palace 2007
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The César awards are for France the cinematic equivalent to the American oscars. The official site is interesting. And take a look at the César award list for best French film from 1976 to the present. Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterly was the 2007 winner.
The winners for 2008 for: (a) best film and best director: La graine et le mulet (Abdellatif Krchiche) (literally, The Grain and the Mule, but with the alternate English title, The Secret of the Grain) (a warm portrait of a French-Tunisian family, and a man, out of a job, who pursues his dream of opening a couscous restauarant, (b) best actress, Marion Cotillard in La môme (Olivier Dahan) (English title, La Vie en Rose) (about the life of the celebrated French chanteuse, Edith Piaf), (c) best actor, Mathew Amalric, in Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterly) (Julian Schnabel) (a film, surprisingly upbeat, that tells the story of a high-living editor of French Elle, who suffered a stroke, went into a coma, and though in waking up, was only able to move his left eyelid, decides to dictate his memoirs), (d) best supporting actress, Julie Depardieu in Un Secret, (A Secret) (Claude Miller) (the adaptation of an award-winning novel by the same name, by Philippe Grimbert, which tells the story of a family secret from the Nazi period, and (e) Best Supporting Actor, Sami Bouajila in Les Temoins (The Witness), about a man, Manu, who arrives in Paris, settles with his sister, meets a young married couple at a boat outing, and causes, without wanting to, everyone to reveal their true desires.
At Allocine.com is a list of all of the nominations including for best director, best actor, actress, etc. At Canal+ is a list of all the winners.
The Louis-Delluc prize also honors, among other things, best french film. See Wikipédia discussion, which lists previous winners going back to 1937. The winner this year was awarded on December 12, 2007, to La graine et le mulet. The director is Abdellatif Kechiche, a previous César winner (best Director and best film) for his L'Esquive (see Wikipédia). A November 15, 2007 posting in the The French Journal has this year's nominees. The 2006 winner was Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterly, which went on to garner the César award for best French film, so the Prix-Louis-Delluc can be a César indicator.
The Lumière prize (essentially, the French Golden Globes) gave best French film of 2007 to the Franco-American drama of Julien Schnabel, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon. That film also, received a best acting prize for Mathieu Amalric. The best director prize went to Abdellatif Kechiche for La Graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain). Marion Cotillard, received a best actress award for La môme (Le vie en rose). See metrofrance.com, as well as a Wikipédia discussion of the prize.
Academy Award for Marion Cotillard for La Vie en Rose (Feb. 24, 2008) (Watch her on You Tube speaking to the press after winning the award).
La nuit Américaine (Day for Night) (1973)
In François Truffaut's La nuit Américaine (Day for Night), winner of the 1974
Academy Award for best foreign film, there's a repeating dream
sequence, in which a boy walks with a cane down a deserted street.
Where's he going in the dark? The third time that we see it, we
learn that he's off
to a theater, to poke and prod the
cane through
a
fence and steal stills
from the movie, Citizen Kane,
playing there. The person having that dream
about his love of film, and what he'd once
done -- or maybe a mere fantasy? -- is the director, Mr. Ferrand, of a
film in
production, Meet Pamela, (the
"inner film") felicitously
played by Truffaut, who also directs Day
for Night, the encompassing outer film, whose title alludes
to a precise
artifice -- filming during the day, but with a lens to make the scene
look as
if it were at night.
Exploring a hazy borderland between life and art, Ferrand judiciously dips into his grab bag of cinematic legerdemain, pulls out his nocturnal lens, fake snow, fake rain, a stuntman who leaps from a crashing car, artificially manufactured views, such as a construction tower made to appear like an apartment balcony, etc. The result is not unlike the way, if you look at the horizon on a certain day, ocean and sky blend. For example, Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Leaud) plays a character in the inner film, jilted by Pamela, his wife (Jacqueline Bisset), for his father, while during the shooting -- as if life were a distorting mirror of that fim -- his girlfriend leaves him for the stuntman. And that's just for starters. Alphonse proceeds to a one night affair with the femme who plays Pamela (entertaining, because film couple have been reunited, but as befits comedy, in the wrong place, the real world -- or at least Truffaut's bittersweet representation of it -- where she's happily married to another). Complexities abound when her husband learns of her sexual indiscretion/peccadillo, and she, horrified at how rotten life is, bemoans to Ferrand that she's resolved to live alone. He adds her words to the script -- life affecting art, affecting life -- for her to say in the role of the adulteress Pamela. It's enough to make one dizzy.
Just a few examples out of many, with results, at times, zany, that bring to mind the comment of Joelle, the Continuity Girl, aka script director (Nathalie Baye): "Everyone is nuts on the set." Then there are the problems of inadequate insurance coverage, the contract deadline, a power failure, that wipes out a climactic, beautifully photographed scene, etc., all of which leaves Ferrand (Truffaut) to philosophize, "Shooting a movie is like a stagecoach trip. At first you hope for a nice ride. Then you just hope to reach your destination." Such a diminished ambition is too modest for Day for Night, which, with a not inconsequential few jolts along the way, is a thorough delight.
French films reviewed:
L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad)
(L'Argent) (Money, or Silver) and Au hasard Balthazar (Balthazar left to chance) in tandem,
La Môme (though it translates as, the kid, or brat, the American title is La Vie en Rose),
L'Armée des ombres, (Army of Shadows)
Le Boucher (The Butcher)
Le Fils (The Son)
Mon oncle d'Amerique (My Uncle from America)
French Films reviewed
he
second world war. Tension is triggered from the first scene as
a
French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) makes love to a Japanese architect
(Eiji Okada), and bodies, naked, glitter with something whitish --
sweat, snow, or is it 14 years after the atomic blast, radioactive
dust? We then hear a brief, painful voice-over narration by the female
co-star, imagining initial horrors from that bomb, to life that emerged
thereafter. One cannot but wonder: why is she
Hiroshima-obsessed? As the affair winds down in the final
hours
before her return to Paris, he probes about her life, gently
persistent, and his initial idealized portrait of her, "(y)ou're like a
thousand women in one," transforms, as the woman relates in stream of
consciousness fashion, time sequences jumbled, memory at times blurred,
surging, painful, what she never has told before, not even to her
husband. In counterpoint, the personal devastation that resulted from the actress' first love, that for a German soldier (she was 18, he 21), during the occupation in her home town, Nevers. The architect queries,"what do you scream?" And she responds, conflating loves, losing herself as in a labyrinth, "Your German name." And, "I think of you, but I no longer say it. Mad with longing for you." That other's aliveness co-exists with the horror she knows to have transpired, just before Nevers' liberation -- a reconstitution of reality out of a kind of splintering, what Erich Rohmer refers to as Resnais' attempt "to do in cinema what cubism did in painting." Later, the Frenchwoman is walking away to go home, back to Paris, and marriage, children, that acting career she's built over the ruins of her own life. She senses the architect trailing after her, murmurs sotto voce, how for fourteen years, since Nevers, she's sought the impossible love, worries, "he'll come by me, take me by the shoulders, and I'll be lost." Like those flowers on radioactive ash.
Called by Leonard Maltin, The Birth of a Nation of the French New Wave, and by Jean-Luc Godard, "Faulkner plus Stravinsky," it is a film that will stay with you for a long time. The screenplay by Marguerite Duras won an Academy Award nomination. See Kent Jones' essay, "Time Indefinite," for the Criterion Collection and Ed Nguyen in DVD Movie Central.
-12/07/07
L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) (1961) (video trailer)
New Wave,
wildly adventurous, this bold film directed by
Alain Resnais, can be seen in film houses this year on a newly
struck 35mm print. One of of the most influent
ial
films of all time, though not without its detractors (Pauline
Kael derided it as "the snow job in the ice palace"),
it
garnered top prize at the Venice film festival and an Academy
Award nomination for the screenplay by the celebrated French novelist,
Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Helping to explore the
interplay of
memory and illusion are the central characters, an aristocratic woman
(Delphine
Seyrig) and a man (Giorgio Albertazzi), who tells her how he'd met and
romanced
her a year before at Marienbad. He's
come
to take her away from her husband and the elegant chateau-hotel --
fantastic, surreal -- where they're now staying. She responds with
genuine disbelief that he should leave her alone, must be dreaming, as
she doesn't
recognize him. And
maybe he is. The
other guests are mostly impassive, lifeless, but with a strangeness,
too,
unfathomable, as the labyrinthine galleries and mostly empty rooms
that, with
their arabesques, outmoded pictures, mirrors, baroque festoons, and
secrets
from another age, go on, it
would seem, forever.
The man persists, day after day pours out his memories, down to the smallest detail of their time together that year before in Marienbad, like her breaking the heel of a fragile shoe on the gravel in a garden, and his offering to carry her. She'd laughed then! The woman, caught up now in his passion, says, half in jest, half yearning, "tell me the rest of our story." An interesting shift there to the our. He describes the night he came to her bedroom: "I loved your fear! . . . [W]atched you . . . let you struggle for a while . . . loved you . . . I loved you! There was something in your eyes . . . You were alive . . ." Did he take there? by force? He toys with such thoughts, recoils, yet is drawn . . . The film has mystery. And for sure, it abounds in the present -- this vast, monstrosity of a hotel. The bizarre, geometrically patterned vistas of its face, and surrounding environs give a sense that if you look hard enough, you'll grow mad. And mystery in the garden statues -- they'd, according to him, disagreed about a year ago -- frozen, as if by a sorcerer, in the very act of motion. To his claim that the male figure had perceived a danger, was warning his companion not to go further, she -- he recalled -- demurred, argued that the woman had noticed something wonderful, was urging them towards it.
Did the affair at the heart of the film ever happen? And does it matter, if the protagonists believe it did?. There's an affinity here to the work of the Dutch artist, M. C. Escher, who focuses on illusion in perception. As with his woodcut, "Day and Night," where a checkerboard pattern of fields, transform to white birds, seeming to go off in one direction, but focus on the shadows behind them, and black birds fly an opposite way. In the end, the spell over -- for some, a dis-enchantment, because the film is more fun to talk about than to watch, though it is a Resnais masterwork -- it's left to viewers to find their own truths about Marienbad.
-4/09/2008It's helpful to discuss "au hasard Balthazar," (Balthazar, left to chance) by way of a detour to a later Bresson movie, L'Argent (which I also saw this year). L'Argent (The Money) has a plot, loosely based on a Tolstoy story ("The Forged Coupon") relating to a forged five hundred dollar bank note, passed from one hand to another, until it destroyed lives. Bresson was in his early 80s when he directed L'Argent, and his style then involved a tremendous economy of film making. He stripped the actors of all excess emotion, had them move and speak almost robotically (which definitely can annoy the viewer), treated sound and images with the greatest of restraint. Thus, as Christopher Long noted in a DVD.com review,
 Donkey as Protagonist |
It struck me, when I watched "au hasard Balthazar" (directed 17 years before L'Argent), that while Bresson's cinematic techniques may have not been dissimilar (the drunkard Arnold, runs after Balthazar to beat him with a chair, but we never see the beating, only hear it, and the braying, crying of the donkey), a number of the characters are warmer here. |
I do want to navigate a bit the spiritual -- call it Christian if you will -- dimension. How can one not, with the name itself, Balthazar (evoking one of the New Testament's three wise men)? And, most importantly, there's that final climactic scene, which contains a truly sublime cinematic image, incomparable, unexpected -- where Balthazar, bleeding (he's been accidentally shot by a customs officer), wanders in the countryside, and is surrounded suddenly by the whiteness of a herd of sheep, their bells tinkling. And it's as if that whiteness, the purity, innocence there of the herd, could redeem -- because he's gone down to his knees, then fully -- the blood sacrifice. Or is Bresson, when he incorporates Balthazar visually into the flock, underscoring what the latter has always been, a lamb of God, suffering, for himself? Others? One reviewer, Vittorio J. Carli for Reel Movie Critic, finds this film more "serious and profoundly religious" than Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ. Many reviewers have commented on the same aspect. And yet, as with great art, there is often no one interpretation. James Quandt has an interesting take on this for the Criterion collection. He discusses the film's purported spiritual dimension, does not dismiss it, but notes countervailing considerations that arguably put it alongside L'Argent:
Alan Pavelin has a quite interesting retrospective look at the career of Robert Bresson, entitled, "senses of cinema," which I pass along for those who want to know what other films to look for from this brilliant film-maker.
-8/07
- La Môme (La Vie en Rose for American title) (Video Trailers, Eng., French)
First, Olivier Dahan's movie about the life of Edith Piaf, (called La Môme" -- the kid -- in French, "La Vie en Rose" in English, after the song that made her famous) is a powerful film adaptation of her troubled, chaotic life, with a tremendous performance by French actress Marion Cotillard. The French no doubt know more of the nuances of Edith's life, but for Americans, her early hardships -- dumped by her street singer mother, and circus acrobat father, into the hands of her father's mother, who ran a brothel in Normandy -- are generally little known. Her rise to fame is electrifying (she is discovered in 1935 in Paris by a night-club owner named Louis Leplee, played by Gerard Depardieu), though she is, later, tormented, by lost love, and an addiction to morphine. For reviews, see Marie-Noëlle's review in Figaro (in French), Roger Ebert at rogerebert.com, and Laura Bushell for BBC. The only aspect ostensibly missing from the film, that would have added a significant dimension, might have been some reference to Edith Piaf's involvement in the French resistance, and her help in the liberation of certain French POWs. Thus, at France.com, the following is noted:
-8/07
* * *
On February 24, 2008, Marion Cotillard won an academy award for best female performance. (Watch her on You Tube speaking to the press after winning the award).
- L'Armée des ombres (Army of Shadows) (Video Trailers, Eng., French)
Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows (Armée Des Ombres), about the French resistance, went unreleased in the United States for 36 years, before its showing in theaters in 2006, demonstrated it to be a film classic. This movie has a film noir feel to it, and an atmospheric moodiness, just right for what's happening -- like the rain and mud in the opening sequence, when the film star, Lino Ventura (playing Philippe Gerbier) is taken in handcuffs to a prison camp. Sometimes, tension (and a feeling of authenticity) comes from when people have to do things new to them, but which need to be done -- like the fright of having to execute a young man (himself terrified) who is a traitor, or to jump from an airplane with a parachute that will hopefully open -- and there's credibility here that Melville's own experience in the resistance, gives to what he directed. Early in the film, Gerbier, a dedicated figure of the underground, escapes prison, slips through the net of the occupying Germans and joins forces with a small band of fellow-resistance cohorts. Anthony Lane in a New Yorker review captures some of the power of Melville's masterful directing, when he writes:
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"you
have to feel the
plucking of
your nerves as Gerbier flees his
captors along empty nighttime streets, slows to a walk, and slips into
the only shop where the lights still burn. It happens to be a barber’s,
so he sits and has a shave, still panting from his exertions, and not
knowing whether the man with the razor will help him out or slit his
throat. There is no backchat, no music: nothing but the
scraping of the
blade. For the first, and maybe the only, time this year, you are in
the hands of a master, and you follow every cut."
|
 Vive
la Résistance
|
As the plot unravels, with all of the treachery, torture, desperate attempts at escape, and killing, to its unanticipated denouement, what a delicious irony to the note that flashed across the screen (when recollected at the end of the film) which was there at the beginning before the first montage of action: "mauvais souvenirs, soyez pourtant les bienvenus . . . vous êtes ma jeunesse lointaine . . . " (Unhappy memories, be however welcome . . . you are my long-lost youth . . . " as if the director were saying, for almost anything that transpires, however bad it may be, even in our own lives (because not much could be worse than the cauchemardesque Nazi period), youth trumps all. Melville was an early father of the New Wave school of directing, before Godard, Truffaut, and Malle.
See Roger Ebert's review of Melville and Army of Shadows, as well as other reviews.
-8/07
- Le Boucher (The Butcher) (1970) (video trailer) (clip 2)
Somewhere
between Popaul's, "If I asked you, if I
kissed you now, what would you say," and Hélène's, "I'd say
nothing,
but please don't," and the movie's end scene when he imp
ortunes, "kiss
me," and she does, a love story unfolds, bittersweet, that leaves a
shiver. Though the director Claude Chabrol, whom some have called the
French Hitchcock, does offer up fright, it's the subtlety and depth of
characterization that
dazzles.
On a day out mushrooming, her heart pours over, and she tells about her erstwhile failed romance and not wanting to take another risk. To Popaul's, "[n]ever making love can make you insane," she responds how doing it can cause the same. She gives him, though, a token of sorts, a briquet (lighter) as a birthday present. Some days later, when she finds it at the crime scene of one of the victims, she's staggered, pockets it instinctively rather than telling the police, becoming, thus, complicitous.
One night our headmistress, with reason to suspect, not just who is the pyschopathic killer on the prowl, but that he knows that she knows, races through the school (upstairs, where her living quarters are), and then down frantically, heart pounding, locks door after door, actions, not dissimilar from what she's done with her life, against love: but wait! She's missed one in the adjourning woodshed. Too late! Hears from the shadows, a quiet, importunate "Mademoiselle Hélène," to make the hair on one's head horripilate. Who? Or rather what has gotten past her defenses --Popaul? Love? Insanity? And if the latter, whose? With a Chabrol movie -- and surely this one as much as any -- it's what lies beneath the surface that's important, like the caves at nearby Lascaux that Hélène took her students to, to see the Cro-Magnon drawings, the same day she was to find the body and lighter. A revelation! You come away and look at sky again, and blue might never seem quite blue, or grass, green, well . . . why it's red too.
-2/17/2008
But if you enjoy through art the experience of life and mood in a film, although it might be austere, dark, even forbidding, and have the requisite patience to sit back and wait to be drawn in (because the action and dialogue here are at times painstakingly slow), this movie may touch you in ways, both powerful and unexpected.
The story evolves around Olivier (played by Olivier Gourmet, winner of best actor at the 2002 CFF for his role here) , a stocky middle-aged carpentry teacher at a rehabilitation center for juvenile delinquents, and a boy, Francis (Morgan Marinne), seventeen years old, recently released from prison. At first, the teacher tries to avoid having him in his class, then ambivalent, becomes obsessed with, and finally agrees to take the youngster on. Fairly soon, we learn what Olivier knows, that this is the boy who, seven years before, had killed his son in a car robbery. Not aware of the relation, Francis seems genuinely attracted to his teacher-- he has no father in his life, is estranged from his mother.
There's a gritty, hardscrabble feel to the movie as hand-held cameras cut across the minutiae of Olivier's life, the always seemingly endless grey corridors and rooms, and the outside, ever-overcast with its working-class streets and homes. When Francis asks Oliver to be his guardian, we cannot but wonder at what the latter must be experiencing, and where, with his own memories in turmoil, we are going with this. Is the film one of vengeance, soon to be exacted? Or about a substitute son for the man whose life has gone downhill since the murder of his own -- that caused his marriage to break up, his life to become a shambles? From earlier in the film, the echo with us still of his ex-wife's anguished question when she learns of his association with their son's killer, "who do you think you are?" In the process of finding that answer, we learn about carpentering -- from a rasp, to mortise gage, miter box, different kinds of wood, the hardwood of beech for making stairs, furniture, tools, to the softer wood of Oregon or Carolina pine. More than we would ever care to know! Will the aspect of building, though, central to carpentry, carry over at film's end to the human soul? Without saying more about the denouement, I'm sympathetic to the French reviewer at Chroniscope puzzling over this film's having attained, notwithstanding its being weighed down by an infinite sum of material detail, a grace, quasi-mystical.
For another take on it, read Elbert Ventura's analysis of Les Fils, and what he calls the Dardenne Brothers' "latest dip into miserabilist waters" in a PopMatters piece, not as unbalanced as the above characterization might suggest, entitled "The Quality of Mercy." See also the Wikipedia discussion of the director-brothers.
-10/28/2007
Alain Resnais' "Mon Oncle D'Amerique" (My Uncle from America, 1980) has a rather rich conceit, with the stories of three characters, quite fascinating, told to underscore certain points for a science lesson on human behavior by biologist Henri Labout. One man (René) (Gerard Depardieu) gives up work on his family farm to become an executive in a French textile firm, and then must later face the travails of corporate downsizing. A woman (Janine) (Nicole Garcia) leaves her husband, and humdrum family life to have an affair with the writer-politician, Jean (Roger Pierre). Initially, one feels a bit lost, because the human drama is split into these thee disparate strands and it is a bit hard to follow this shifting focus of the characters, but eventually it all comes together. Every now and then, the movie cuts to white mice running around in a maze to underscore that we are all part of one evolutionary chain, where free will is constrained by the biochemistry of brain. Although the film uses didacticism to bring ideas to life, it is in my view, at its best, when it simply makes the viewer feel for the characters. Still, this every now and then intrusive biological conceit (suggestive of an academic setting, like a classroom) creates a wonderfully, complex spin to the film, which received six French Cesar awards. Time Magazine has an interesting review of the film. Resnais is best known for Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) (1955), Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), and L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961). The New York Times has a good biography of the director. Wikipedia refers to Resnais as being, in terms of his early works, a New Wave director.
-8/07
Since many of the directors above were influenced by the New Wave school of French film, indeed Robert Bresson has been considered one of the greatest of the "nouvelle vague" or new wave directors, let me mention something about the meaning of that term, "nouvelle vague," or new wave.
The French filmmakers in the new wave school often worked on location, rather than in the studio, took advantage of lightweight hand-held cameras, making it possible for their films to have a casual and natural look, although they could be produced quickly and cheaply There was a great deal of "fluid panning and tracking," conductive to improvisation, and the "mise-en-scène of Parisian streets and coffee bars became a defining feature." See Steve's Cinema page.
The new wave filmmakers became prominent in the late 1950s and 1960s, and were influenced by Italian neo-realism, and consciously rejected classical cinematic forms. Early new wave filmmakers were: François Truffaut, Jean Luc Goddard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. For a more expansive treatment, see the GreenCine primer on French New Wave, filmsdefrance.com, and Wikipedia.
See my discussion of La Marche de l'empereur, Psycho, and Capote in French, with an English translation in section of this website, on Journal Entries, Essays.
The Image of the Cannes film festival is free for use for text-based work under the GNU Free Documentation License,Version 1.2 or any later version. The 1972 movie poster for the movie, Le Boucher, the 1959 movie poster for Hiroshima Mon Amour, and the screenshot from L'année dernière à Marienbad, though likely owned by the publisher or creator of the work, qualifies for reproduction here as "fair use," because they are illustraive of the film, are for educational purposes, are of much lower resolution than the original poster, do not limit the copyright holders right to market or sell the work in any way, and there are no free or public domain images located for it. This fits the general Wikipedia's rationale for its use of film posters, and it's the rationale for being able to make use of screenshots, like the one next to my review of La nuit Américaine. The drama-film-stub icon can be reproduced under the GNU Lesser General Public License, either version 2.1 of the license, or a latter version. Image of the French flag is in the public domain. Consent has been given for use of the image of the donkey on this page. The other image is my photo from the marquee above the Shirlington movie theater, where La Vie en Rose was playing.
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