February/March 1999
The Best of French Cinema
by Lisa Nesselson
When the Y2K bug hits and renders filmgoing and video viewing a thing of the past, I plan to earn my keep by reciting the plots and choice passages of dialogue from the good films we will no longer be able to see. My repertoire will feature precious little from France, circa 1998. One of the most pathetic calendar years in terms of creativity and entertainment in Gaul also turned out to be a rotten 12 months for ticket sales to domestic productions. Although 116 French films were released in 1998, a mere 30% of tickets sold in French movie theaters were to patrons opting for French fare. And that figure would have been far, far lower had it not been for three high-performing French comedies: Le Diner de Cons (The Dinner Game), Corridors of Time: The Visitors 2 and Taxi. A short and sweet boulevard play by Francis Veber, who also wrote and directed the movie, The Dinner Game is the nasty but hilarious tale of a businessman whose circle of friends compete among themselves to unearth the most insipid individual and invite the unwitting victim to dinner. He who produces the biggest dope, wins. Although the cast's comic timing is excellent, the picture was shot with all the cinematic flair of a surveillance camera tape. The American remake rights have been sold.
With far and away the snappiest production values of the trio, Corridors is the sequel to the local smash about a time-traveling knight and his serf as they encounter the difficulties to be expected when one abruptly skips ahead ten centuries or so only to find one's look-alike descendants in contemporary France. The original installment was seen by every man, woman and child in Gaul. The sequel resulted in the biggest opening day in French box office history.
A runaway hit with adolescents, Taxi, directed by Gerard Pires and written and co-produced by Luc Besson, is one of the lamest so-called comedies in recent memory. A young cop who's failed his driving test for the umpteenth time enlists a gung-ho cabbie to be his wheels as the semi-dynamic duo track down a ring of German bank robbers who say witty things like "Sheiße!" Although the filmmakers had Formula 1 race car drivers at their disposal to drive dozens of souped-up cars through the actual streets of Marseille for three full weeks, they failed to come up with a single stunt more daring or impressive than the collision of two shopping carts in a grocery aisle would be. Carefully nurtured by youth-oriented radio stations, the completely unremarkable soundtrack by local rap heroes IAM flew off the shelves. Not only did Taxi do solid repeat business, it was the French film most sold beyond French borders. Which to my mind is an accomplishment on the order of announcing that Flat Coke ("No fizz, less flavor") was the soft drink most successfully purveyed to other countries.
Film pioneer Charles Pathe, declared in 1918 that the cinema was no longer a profitable business. He may have been ahead of his time, but history is catching up. The aforementioned hits aside, French film after French film flopped at the box office. In assessing the speed with which domestic productions were rejected by the general public, the local edition of Premiere magazine concluded, "If this decline continues, it will be suicidal for any distributor to endeavor to release a French film in French theaters."
1998 wasn't a banner year for personal hygiene, either, according to a national survey. In late November, Le Figaro made public the fact that "only 47% of us bathe daily, 67% brush their teeth twice a day and only 40% wash their hands after using the toilet." However, a survey-taker warns, "When you ask people questions on such a sensitive subject, they have a tendency to reply with what they've read or heard to be the norm rather than reporting what they actually do. The figure of 47% is almost certainly higher than the real figure." An instructive sidebar titled "Briefs and Panties" gets down to the gritty knitty, er, nitty-gritty: "Overall hygiene includes clean underwear. The French have proven to be seriously lacking in this department. Men in particular. If 75% of women report that they change their underpants every day, only 60% of men can say the same for their briefs or Jockey shorts. It should be noted that 9% of women and 15% of men admit to wearing the same pair of undies for three days or more. And yet nowadays 95% of French households are equipped with washing machines."
As the French are inveterate hand shakers I'm a little perturbed by the statistic that "6% never wash their hands." Never?? ("I tried washing 'em once back in 1966. Didn't agree with me.") An interview with social historian Edouard Zarifian puts the "shmutz" in context. "I'm not surprised by the figures," says Zarifian. "Keep in mind that a campaign is underway right now in French hospitals to remind doctors and nurses that it's important for them to wash their hands before and after attending a patient. Hand-washing is a reflex that's been lost by most of the staff, even in the most germ-sensitive sections of our health care facilities. The vast majority of medical professionals no longer wash their hands between patients, and if physicians, who should be in the front lines of good hygiene, have forgotten the most elementary principles of cleanliness, why would the rest of the population be any better?"
When asked "Do the French have a special problem with the idea of cleanliness?" Professor Zarifian had this to say: "Eating and drinking are natural acts. Washing isn't. The proof is that when you tell a child he must wash himself he says 'Why?' Animals don't wash either; they're perfectly content to coat their hairs or feathers with secretions from their sebaceous glands. The problem is that one needs to think of washing as a worthwhile act in itself. In the United States and Northern Europe the population has long made an association between cleanliness and health, between cleanliness and a loathing for germs, whereas in France and Latin countries in general, that's not the case. The population doesn't view bathing as a measure that contributes toward cleanliness in any special way. The proof is that one can find filthy people across the full spectrum of French society, well-to-do or not."
Meanwhile, come November 2000 in the nation where cleanliness is next to Godliness, germ-eradicating Americans can vote Mister Clean himself into the oval office if they want to. But no amount of detergent will rinse away the permanent blot on American prestige ground in by partisan politicos trying to get Bill Clinton to come clean. From now on, whenever an immigration officer at Orly, Charles de Gaulle or Calais looks at an American passport he or she will no longer think "Wow. a citizen of a superpower that bailed us out of two world wars" but rather "Man oh man. another juvenile and puritanical nincompoop." It doesn't matter if your bumper sticker back home says "Honk if you want to disassociate yourself from the nation's elected representatives." The damage is done. Congratulations, Starr & Co.: We are a laughingstock abroad; a virtual "Hee-Haw" among nations.
Please note: William Jefferson Clinton is in no way taken to be the problem or source of embarrassment. If that was the Republicans' goal, they have failed about as thoroughly as the space shuttle Challenger failed to safely transport the seven astronauts aboard on January 28, 1986. The rest of the world understands the underlying details of the current fuss in D.C about as well as you and your neighbors probably understand the ethnic conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia or Rwanda. As far as 6 billion non-Americans can tell, the President of the United States of America may lose his job because he fibbed about a few trysts with a consenting adult, and this is apparently a worse offense than O.J. Simpson mistaking two people for a whetting stone. So, if you hail from the land where Starr and his deplorably petty minions have worked so diligently to convey this impression to the outside world, get used to it. From now on you are a nincompoop with an eagle on your passport.
As the U.S. Senate laid the ground rules for impeachment hearings in early January, radio and television news hosts asked their correspondents in the land of the free and the home of the brave, "So, is every eye and ear glued to the proceedings in Washington?" only to hear their reporters in the field reply, "Hell, no. The only topic of concern to the nation right now is the NBA strike, which appears to be on the brink of resolution, and the companion question, 'Will Michael Jordan return to play for the Chicago Bulls?'"
Some questions have answers and others remain rhetorical. For example, last March, the French Independent Producers Association newsletter printed a photo of crowds at a multiplex waiting to see Titanic, Starship Troopers, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Anastasia, Mortal Kombat 2, The Jackal, Mad City, The End of Violence, Deconstructing Harry, Tomorrow Never Dies and The Devil's Advocate, with the caption "In which American city was this photo taken: NY? LA? Boston? Miami?" The accompanying article, addressed to the President, Prime Minister, Minister of Culture and director of the National Cinema Center, asked, "Are you going to let this go on much longer?" The photo was taken in Paris at the Path, multiplex at Place Clichy. The Association was reminding readers that on May 28, 1948, US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and Leon Blum, a minister in Felix Gouin's government, signed the trade agreement "which contributed to the development of American movies in French theaters." It would appear that they "developed" with the same restraint as bunny rabbits or the teen Mae West.
In the summer of 1949, novelist and screenwriter Niven Busch contributed an essay to The Writer's Book called "Writing for the Screen." Mr. Busch had this to say about geography as it relates to filmic storytelling: "All audiences, to be sure, are not the same in their conditioning; they differ in different states and countries; the audiences in Europe, for instance, still being in a retarded or lethargic era of development, permit a more leisured story technique. Alfred Hitchcock illustrates this difference with a story about clouds. In Europe, he says, a director using clouds to establish a mood has a good deal of license. He can dissolve from one cloud formation to another and even a third without resistance from the spectators. In the United States, the audience will hold still for one shot. If a second is used, it is no good unless a plane appears. For Shot Number Three the plane has to burst into flames."
Fifty years on, Hitch, he of the fabulously British "retarded or lethargic" elocution, adorns a classy U.S. postage stamp, his Psycho was remade frame-for-frame by Gus Van Sant and an awful lot of European filmmakers still don't have a clue when it comes to blowing up that third cumulus or nimbus. While many a European filmmaker clings to his "retarded or lethargic" heritage, European filmgoers have simply decided to go to American movies instead. In France, of late, I don't blame them.
A French colleague, who did his doctoral dissertation on gladiator movies, marvels, "People keep trying to come up with profound sociological explanations for the drop in attendance. But the explanation for why French people aren't going to French movies is very simple: Most of the movies are awful and only an idiot or a masochist would waste time and money on them." I repeated this to a group of twentysomethings at a dinner party. "You mustn't say they're bad movies," my young host urged. "Say they're worthless."
There may have been some movies even worse than the ones I'll mention a little further down. After all, I didn't see all 116 releases. But first, it's worth noting that in a climate of disappointing, pretentious, ill-conceived and/or merely adequate movies, several films were praised to the skies. In mid-January Erick Zonca's The Dreamlife of Angels won the Lumière as best French film of the year. The Lumières, intended to be a Gallic replica of the Golden Globes, are voted on by foreign correspondents based in Paris.
The story of two appealing young women who form an impromptu alliance, share house-sitting duties in an apartment whose righful tenant is in a coma and take life as it comes, is a solid debut for its 41-year-old writer-director. The Dreamlife of Angels landed a double Best Actress prize at Cannes for its young stars Elodie Bouchez and Natacha Regnier. Although it's impossible to know as of this writing, Dreamlife, the official French nominee for the foreign language Oscar, will probably figure prominently at this year's Cesars. By the way, Cesar, the ornery sculptor who designed the eponymous brick-shaped trophies, died in December. The Cesars are meant to be the Academy Awards of France but a Cesar will confer the same clout as an Oscar at about the same time Monica Lewinsky accepts the Nobel Prize in probability studies. Zonca's film is not pretentious but neither is it transcendent. We are given reason to care about the characters and, to its credit, the film, set in Lille rather than Paris, rings true for the bulk of its running time. This is no small accomplishment nowadays in the land of Moliere.
One of my favorite Woody Allen scenes goes something like this. An emotionally fragile woman, gorgeous and patrician, is describing how various members of her family gave serious thought to committing suicide. Woody's pragmatic Jew avers (I paraphrase), "We didn't have time to contemplate suicide in my family. My mother was too busy putting the chicken through the de-flavorizing machine." The artier the French movie, the more likely it is to have been put through the "de-credibilitizing machine." As best I can tell, this is the device that deludes French filmmakers into thinking you can never make too many movies about:
- Unusually attractive prostitutes forming touching bonds with troubled young boys
- Taciturn serial killers who leave flagrant clues wherever they strike but needn't worry about eluding the police
- French stars posing as troubled Nordic sisters locked into an unhealthy symbiotic existence in a windswept enclave dripping with pretentious symbolism
In its many gratuitous, out-of-focus passages, the repellent and almost completely inexcusable Sombre, by Philippe Grandrieux, lets viewers with 20-20 vision know what it's like to lose a contact lens. Unfortunately, it's supposed to be about a taciturn serial killer who picks up a succession of women and strangles them while having murky, out-of-focus sex. When he and the still-virginal mope played by Elina Lowensohn cross paths, his antisocial behavior triggers in her a deeper understanding of her place in the world. The film triggered in me a headache. And I was only slightly less floored to read in the press notes that what I'd just suffered through was, in fact, "a love story" than I would be if some earnest essayist tried to convince me that South Park is actually a well-argued plea for nuclear disarmament, or the dialogue in Mister Ed was used to convey Balkan intelligence during the Cold War. ("Wilbur, I'm hungry" = "The Latvians are restless.")
The de-credibilitizing machine could, in fact, die happy in the wake of the year's slickest and least convincing effort, Yves Angelo's Voleur de Vie (Thief of Life), which appeared in competition at the Venice Film Festival before landing with a thud in French cinemas. Ponderous stillborn piffle masquerading as meaningful human drama, Voleur de Vie is a hollow exercise gussied up with striking imagery and two of France's most bankable thirtysomething thespians. The story of the symbiotic relationship between two sisters who live together in a former rectory overlooking a graveyard, Voleur relies far too much on pregnant silences and hackneyed symbolism. DP-turned-helmer Yves Angelo's third directing stint after Colonel Chabert and Un Air si pur may travel the fest route on the strength of its cast, but viewers would be far more rewarded by going back to the Scandi classics than by giving this Bergman-wannabe a spin. After an aerial view of a craggy island, the film opens with Alda (Emmanuelle Beart), the lit teacher at the local high school, explaining in voice-over that today, Sept. 3, is her birthday, but she's always been ambivalent about celebrating it since that's also the date on which a sister died the year after Alda was born. Alda's older sister, Olga (Sandrine Bonnaire), and Olga's 17-year-old daughter, Sigga, live with Alda in a presbytery with paintings and photos of stern, deceased relatives on the walls. The house, which is way bigger on the outside than the inside we're shown, has a graveyard for a front yard and is nearly on top of the unwelcoming shore. When they're not stoically coping with their presumed inner turmoil, the sisters take turns staring out the windows at the harsh, slightly morbid landscape. Life. Death. Etc. Upstairs, after school, Alda exercises her prodigious libido with a succession of married men while downstairs Olga incubates a dark secret and weaves straw chotchkees as Sigga does her homework. Olga does all the household chores and also likes to listen at Alda's door as sounds of pleasure waft through. Outside, a bedraggled woman (Bulle Ogier) mumbles to herself in the cemetery.
The screenplay is based on a novel by Steinunn Sigurdardottir. What may very well have worked in novel form is almost completely uninteresting as adapted here to the screen. Proceedings often feel like chic but troubled Parisians have been grafted onto a rugged windswept isle by way of Dreyer and Bergman. A few indelible images from Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, shown to the school's film club, only accentuate the wretched gap between luminous grab-`em-by-the-guts filmmaking and this tepid, rehashed facsimile.
As an ice maiden who racks up hollow sexual experiences and leaves all the emoting to her sister and niece, Alda, who defiantly treats men like paper plates, remains an enigma whose assumed emotional growth moves at a glacier's pace. Olga suffers in silence. Sigga seems vivacious and normal despite her creepy, co-dependent role models. In scenes that feel like the movie has morphed into a play, well-mannered shopkeeper Jakob (Andre Dussollier) comes to the house to collect Olga's straw cradles and animals. He hates to see her all cooped up but that's the way she wants it, since she's harboring a dark secret and all.
Although lensing is attractive, the setting is oddly compartmentalized and never rings true. There are two burial scenes in the first reel alone, yet the little graveyard is sparsely populated with headstones. The island looks and feels small, yet the school's corridors are as crowded as Beverly Hills High. And who could possibly be buying all those straw chotchkees? With little to distinguish it but one excellent sex scene, one good confessional speech and a worthy fantasy sequence, Thief of Life is stuck with an awful lot of screen time to fill-over half of which is dialogue-free. Thief of Life is D.O.A.
The phenomenal revival and repertory network in Paris means that not only wonderful films but truly bad ones may be shown again and again.
As 1999 gets underway, the Emperor has so many new clothes he'll be needing a new invisible walk-in closet to hold them all. The January program guide for the Cinémathèque Française highlights a retrospective of the films of Maurice Pialat. Pialat's approach tends to be a love-it-or-hate-it affair on a film-to-film basis. When Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan won the Golden Palm at Cannes in 1987, the director answered booing detractors in the auditorium with "Hey, I can't stand you either."
Pialat's Van Gogh (1991), starring a dessicated Jacques Dutronc, was quite good. His 1995 travesty, Le Garçu, stars Gerard Depardieu as an odious force-of-nature type who can't maintain an authentic relationship with the women in his life or his three-year-old son because being a brash force-of-nature type takes up so much of his time. It was no doubt vital for the production that the main character be shown not only in Paris but in an idyllic setting, so Pialat took cast and crew to an idyllic island setting beyond France so he could film the force-of-nature type being ornery in a natural paradise, too. The shoot cost a fortune. The film is episodic and annoying in the extreme. It also stars Pialat's own late-in-life son, Antoine. Not to put too fine a point on it, it would be more interesting to spend 95 minutes comparing snowflakes than it would to spend those same 95 minutes observing Antoine's "Look, I'm a three-year-old set loose on a movie set!" activities. The film's reception at its release was a crystalline example of the knee-jerk aspects of the auteur theory gone haywire. The film was about nothing but Pialat's self-indulgence, yet critics fell all over themselves saying it was "meaningful to anyone who ever had a father." Yeah-the same way aspirin is meaningful to anyone who ever had a headache. Le Garçu felt best when it was finally over.
But the companion piece to persistence of vision is persistence of idiocy. The program notes by Marc-Edouard Nabe tell us: "Is this the cinema of video-taping? The family sequences in Le Garçu are in fact an indictment of the constant video-taping by scared parents who can't manage to completely steal their children's souls by diligently making amateur tapes. Failing to capture precious moments is the shameful lot of mothers and fathers. Pialat, on the other hand, deliberately sets out to miss as many precious moments as possible. He films in-between these moments, in the gaps where time builds its nests."
If Pialat had made There's Something About Mary, we'd have seen shots of Ben Stiller stoically reading Le Monde before his big date, and Cameron Diaz, rather than enthusiastically reaching for a dollop of organic hair gel, would have rummaged around in her purse for a few minutes before a fade out left us to fill in the blanks about their night on the town. I don't know about you, but few things crack me up faster than leisurely depictions of time building its nests. They get at certain deep truths, such as "Some French directors get to film whatever the hell they want and make a nice living doing it while other people have to scrounge for carfare."
Sombre, for example, benefitted from sufficient production funds from "proper" channels, while Gaspar Noé was turned down flat by traditional funding entities. Whereas the director of Sombre and his social outcasts have absolutely nothing to say, the disenfranchised horse butcher in Noé's I Stand Alone shares with us an internal monologue so insidiously well-reasoned that the viewer ends up identifying with a narrow-minded, potentially violent and justifiably pessimistic racist as he pursues a fruitless and humiliating job search. Noé's film, which won the International Critics Prize at Cannes and is slated for a March release in New York, is both queasy-making and laugh-out-loud funny. At one point a working countdown gives squeamish viewers "30 seconds" to leave the theater. A true independent who favors an ultra-widescreen image, Noé's style is so distinct that Crick and Watson could probably extract a double helix from every frame.
In early December, Cedric Kahn's third film, L'Ennui, won the Prix Louis-Delluc, opening prize-giving season. Of course, in a world where Godzilla's Roland Emmerich got a European Film Award as Best Director, in the wacky category of "Best Contribution to an American Film by a European," prizes may now be considered completely irrelevant. L'Ennui, literally, "Boredom," adapted from the 1960 novel by Alberto Moravia, is a hoot, in the best sense of the word. Charles Berling (the well-meaning interloper in Ridicule) plays Martin, a philosophy professor who couldn't relax if his life depended on it, so obsessed is he with getting at the deeper meaning of, well, everything. He's insufferable, the kind of character that most viewers would have no qualms about throwing to the lions if each theater seat came with a Coliseum-style "thumbs down" button on the armrest. Precisely because he's such an irritating, navel-gazing, intellectual twerp, it's extremely entertaining for us when he meets his match in an exceedingly unlikely form: Cecilia (Sophie Guillemin), a Rubenesque teenager with a taste for sex and nary a shred of inner life. The more Martin bombards her with questions, the more he hits a brick wall of mono-syllabic, but not unreasonable, replies. No matter what he asks her, she's never really thought about it and isn't about to start now. She's sensual and compliant in every way and multi-orgasmic at the drop of a chapeau, but he'd probably have a more rewarding conversational exchange with a fedora than with her. Martin needs someone to talk to, so he burdens his ex-wife, the statuesque Arielle Dombasle, who has her own pointless fish to fry. Martin and Cecilia are coupling three, four times a day, day in and day out, as it were, but she remains as opaque as a granite curtain in a coal mine during a total eclipse. The visit to Cecilia's parents alone is worth the price of admission. Twenty-year-old newcomer Guillemin is absolutely extraordinary. Everyone who sees her romp around in the altogether while suppressing any external evidence of intelligence says the same thing: "Either she's really like that or she's the most amazing actress I've ever seen."
While you're waiting for L'Ennui to make it to your local Bijou, how's this for laughs? On Dec 16th in the southwest part of Paris, Gaumont opened a brand new, 14-screen multiplex where all 14 shows start at exactly the same time. So, if you arrive a little late or the movie you had in mind is sold out, you're screwed for the next two and a half hours. In short, the Gaumont Aquaboulevard has deliberately shunted aside two of the major advantages a multiplex theoretically has to offer: choice and flexibility.
Then again, maybe Gaumont is really embarking on a conceptual adventure in which the logic of their operating policies perfectly matches that of the latest films. For example: Lost in Space, which opened in France on December 9th.
When it comes to praise for movies, I worry about the meaningless, hyperbolic phrases that clutter American newspaper ads, such as "Unquestionably certain to be a big winner at Oscar time!" or "The very best feel-good movie of the year!" or "A movie so moving you'll never ever forget it as long as you live!". But what is one to do when the simple declarative expression "It makes no sense" has been devalued? Must one qualify: "Well, if you thought that movie made no sense, just wait until you see this movie! Never have you seen a movie that makes so little sense! At last, along comes a movie you won't be able to recall just moments after you leave your seat, let alone as long as you live!"
The people who made Lost in Space actually think it's somehow okay to mix and match ideas without having any of them connect in plausible or meaningful ways, as long as characters spout a lot of gobbledygook about the importance of "family" before the insanely abrupt closing credits roll. You see, it's 2058 and the whole reason the Robinson family is being sent into space is to pave the way for an evacuation of earth's population to the planet Alpha Prime, since polluted earth will be unable to sustain life in just 20 years. The mission goes astray because evil Dr. Smith (Gary Oldman, who keeps announcing that he's "evil") does heinous stuff that makes their spacecraft crash in an uncharted corner of the cosmos. They need to get some "radioactive matter" in order to power up the ship enough to take off and get back into space. Conveniently, Mrs. Robinson (Mimi Rogers) locates a bunch of radioactive matter a few miles away. But it's in some sort of transparent bubble that cuts off radio communications. In a parallel time travel universe, 20 years go by, which means Earth is toast, but that's okay because young Will Robinson (10 at the outset, now 30) and his distracted dad (William Hurt) get to bond after all before they take off in the stranded ship, even without actually having retrieved any of the radioactive matter they absolutely need in order to get off the planet. Like the middle Robinson child says at the outset: "This mission sucks!"
Multiplex scheduling aside, never let it be said that France doesn't loom large in the international arena. On November 20th, former sex-kitten Brigitte Bardot journeyed to Edinburgh to rescue a dog named Woofie who had been sentenced to death for barking at a postal worker. Woofie didn't bite anyone, mind you. Dogs who bite are forced to watch Lost in Space until they clamor for cyanide-laced doggie biscuits. Bardot's plea was successful and Woofie was reprieved from Scotland's canine Death Row.
Just as Bardot's actions give us hope for a kinder, gentler universe in which man and animal can peaceably co-exist until, per the January issue of Wired magazine, the Y2K-prompted failure of 1.7 million computer applications reduces us all to our basest instincts, there there were indeed a number of French films eminently worth seeing in 1998. Last summer and without fanfare, Que la lumière soit! (Let There Be Light!), by Arthur Joffé, was unceremoniously dumped in theaters, where it lasted but three weeks. In retrospect, it was one of the more entertaining French outings of the year. The premise: God, out in the heavens, decides to write a screenplay, then comes to earth in search of a producer and director. Even God gets the bum's rush in Hollywood, so the Supreme Being trades the City of Angels for the City of Light, where Satan himself sends God to development hell. With its irreverent premise, star-spangled cast and spiffy special effects, it was probably too inventive for French movie goers, who preferred Taxi.
A Vendre (For Sale), by Laetitia Masson, premiered at Cannes and attracted audiences with its arresting poster, which, although one wouldn't know this without having seen the movie, was a photo of the lead actress, the quite remarkable Sandrine Kiberlain, being mounted from behind on the polished living room floor of her employer's apartment, by said employer. When impossibly lanky Kiberlain leaves her husband-to-be standing at the altar, the jilted groom sends a gumshoe, played by Sergio Castellitto, to track her down. His search for the elusive young woman, whose apparent emotional self-sufficiency is truly startling, gradually takes us into her psyche as well as that of the detective on her trail.
Catherine Deneuve won a much-deserved Best Actress trophy at Venice for her marvelous turn in actress-turned-director Nicole Garcia's Place Vendôme, a lavish and suspenseful tale set in the ritzy realm of international gem dealing. As a well-to-do alcoholic who sobers up at her husband's sudden death, Deneuve chews the scenery, but since it's high-priced French and Belgian scenery, the results are very tasty. Of the actress's most interesting and least aloof performance in years, the daily Liberation was moved to say: "Deneuve has reached a point of regal maturity where she could make a pair of support hose seem sexy."
Le gone du chaâba (The Kid from Chaâba), by Christophe Ruggia, worked wonders in recounting life as lived by Algerian immigrants in a shanty town outside Lyons in the mid 1960s, seen through the eyes of a smarter-than-average youngster torn between his love of learning and his desire to be one of the gang. Kirikou et la sorcière, by Michel Ocelot, an animated feature four years in the making, uses imagery reminiscent of the lush paintings of the Douanier Rousseau to tell the charming and exciting tale of Kirikou, a preternaturally swift baby who emerges from his mother's womb, cuts his own umbilical cord and starts talking. Although he's only a few inches high, Kirikou packs a wallop when he confronts the evil sorceress who has eaten all the men from his village in the African brush. Despite competition from Mulan and The Prince of Egypt, the number of screens showing Kirikou has actually increased each week since its release.
Serial Lover, by James Huth, is a deliciously over-the-top comedy about one eventful evening in the trendy apartment of a publisher of pulp novels. The lady of the house, (Michele Laroque, also the mom in Ma Vie en rose) has been dating three different guys. For her 35th birthday, she's invited them all to dinner at the same time so as to select the best one to marry. But poise and gravity are not on her side and she accidentally kills one of her suitors. As the frenetic soirée wears on, she continues to, in showbiz parlance, "knock 'em dead."
A sexy, intellectually engaging confection with a literary bent, Petits désordres amoureux (Love Tangles), by Olivier Peray, is pleasing, teasing and pays off with a cerebral twist. The mechanisms of seduction and desire are explored with a tasteful approach that still leaves plenty of leeway for fetching young damsels in scanty attire, or even none at all. Having both spotted an intriguing woman during intermission at a stage performance of Don Juan, one man bets another that he can't pick up the mystery woman and refrain from making love to her throughout an entirely chaste night in the same bed. The Casanova in question has ten days to prove his colleague wrong. A slinky looker with a ready smile a mile wide, newcomer Smadi Wolfman effortlessly makes the woman seem every bit a catch worth pursuing.
Written and directed by Ziad Doueiri, West Beyrouth, Lebanon's official nominee for the foreign language Oscar, is a funny and poignant Arabic-language film that follows a trio of adolescents free to roam at the start of the war in Lebanon. It's flat-out terrific. As apolitical and secular Muslims who haven't read a word of the Koran, class clown Tarek, played by the director's brother, and his pal Omar,who was cast from an orphanage, can't quite fathom Omar's dad's newfound belief that movies and rock music are the devil's work. "You mean Paul Anka is in service to Satan?" asks Tarek. From the protagonists' apartment block to encounters in the street, most verbal exchanges take the form of "Why converse calmly if you can hurl inventive curses?" Stewart Copeland's score is delightful. As a side note, the composer and former drummer for The Police lived in Lebanon for ten years after his dad opened the CIA's bureau in Beirut.
The contemporary answer to June Cleaver must cope with a nuclear family that's a blast once a pet rat triggers a catch-all catalogue of perversions, in Sitcom. The first feature-length film by François Ozon, whose truly creepy short See the Sea and off-kilter comic short A Summer Dress perfectly showcased his considerable talent, doesn't quite last the distance, but his second feature, due out in Spring, sounds extremely promising.
In December, the folks at Cahiers du Cinema put together an excellent special issue called "Nouvelle Vague-une legende en question" ("Questioning the legend of the New Wave"), with New Wave poster girl Jean Seberg on the cover. The recent Paris re-release of Robert Rossen's Lilith, the unsettling 1964 drama in which Seberg played the title role, proved yet again that movies used to be edgy and "difficult" in a manner that sticks with you instead of a matter that makes one exclaim, "What the hell was that all about?" In Lilith, Seberg is gorgeous and disturbing as a manipulative and cannily sexual creature locked up at a luxury funny farm where new staff member Warren Beatty gives her specialized attention. Seberg's fellow inmates include a young, affecting Peter Fonda, and the townsfolk include Gene Hackman as the businessman who married Beatty's high school sweetheart while Beatty was off in Korea.
Although the entire issue of Cahiers is instructive, some of the best comments are to be found in the section where different personalities answer a questionnaire. Samples:
- Q) What place does the New Wave phenomenon hold in your life?
José Bénazéraf: "The New Wave phenomenon was an explosion of childish and poorly made films as immature as their creators. Truffaut and Chabrol would remain that way their whole lives. Jules and Jim, Breathless and Hiroshima mon amour will endure. They're the inexplicable masterpieces."
Abbas Kiarostami: "You may not believe me if I tell you that the movement in French filmmaking set off by the New Wave was followed in Iran on a daily basis. Iranian filmmakers and film buffs who had studied in France, with Farrokh Gaffary in the lead, showed New Wave films at the Iranian Cinémathèque, where we'd go to see the movies and hear analysis and commentary. You could also pick up translations of certain articles from Cahiers du cinema right after they were published in France. I remember it as a new movement that started in Paris but- no joke- reached us in Iran with just two and a half hours delay due to the lag between time zones. Absolutely everything seemed possible and accessible."
Q) "What would you say was the major contribution of the New Wave? Was its influence positive or negative?">
Tonie Marshall: "The end of beauty, as in the beauty 'establishment,' because physical attractiveness no longer seemed like the central concern. Whereas before (my mother* may have played a part in this) it seemed to me that sheer aesthetic beauty was a prerequsite for any filmmaking endeavor."
*Marshall is the daughter of French actress Micheline Presle, who starred opposite Gerard Philipe in 1947's Devil in the Flesh.
Gerard Blain: "Very positive. It enabled me to buy a Ferrari when I was 28 years old and to drive at 220 kilometers an hour in 1959. That was a fabulous sensation!"
Thanks to Mr. Millennium Bug, the sensation of driving headlong into the unknown at a jaunty clip is now available to us all, sports car or not. The French seem to be bringing the same rigor to the problem as children who believe that they become invisible to onlookers when they cover their eyes with their hands. Silicon Valley is full of French computer whizzes who took their pricey state-sponsored educations and fled to America, where their talents were more likely to be both appreciated and rewarded. As recently as four years ago, French media personalities were calling for a moratorium on "the information superhighway" and declaring that "We must take measures to keep the internet out of France," not realizing this sounded about as bright as declaring "We must keep milk from forming in cows" or "Mushrooms must not be permitted to sprout in shady, moss-blanketed forests." In late December and January the "Front National" or National Front party splintered when leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and his younger protegé, Bruno Megret took to each other's throats with all the delicacy of Ken Starr investigating Monica and Bill. The squabbling within the National Front feels like nothing so much as the scene in Bananas where two groups of would-be bank robbers try to assert their priority over the loot at the same bank. ("We were here first. We're robbing this bank." "No, we are.") "WE represent the true interests of racist and xenophobic pea-brained citizens." "No! WE represent the homophobic and anti-Semitic faction of this once great nation now riddled with racial impurity!" While Le Pen and Megret bickered and grabbed headlines, the satirical weekly Charlie-Hebdo grabbed their party's handle: The paper legally registered the name "Front National." A little bit like The National Lampoon or Saturday Night Live securing the trademark "Ku Klux Klan" while the Grand Wizardship argued over how big the eye holes in a pointy white hood should be.
On to the topic of road safety in France. There is none. Over 50 motorists were killed on January 1st alone. If traffic lights cease to function at midnight next December 31st it will in no way perturb the vast majority of French drivers, who seem to think those red and green bulbs strategically placed at intersections were installed as diagnostic tools for color blindness in large mammals. If Godzilla has monochromatic rods and cones, Parisians will be the first to know. And, thanks to Le Figaro, we now know that if a pedestrian is mowed down by a thoughtless motorist, it's statistically unlikely that the victim will be wearing clean underwear.