The Boston Phoenix
Review from issue: July 9 - 16, 1998

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Breaking the wave

The French Film Festival restores faith in film

by Peter Keough

BOSTON FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL, At the Museum of Fine Arts, July 9 through 26.

Seventh Heaven Those fleeing a summer of Hollywood movies whose scenarios concerning the imminent demise of the human race are confirmed by their absence of any trace of human life can take refuge this month at Museum of Fine Arts. The MFA's French Film Festival, with local premieres of 21 features released over the last four years, restores one's faith in the future -- at least of film -- while easing the doubts of those who saw the end of French cinema in such pseudo-blockbusters as 1996's The Fifth Element. They may not represent a renaissance on the order of the New Wave of 40 years ago, but these recent efforts by younger French directors, and some by established veterans, explore the complexities of sex, politics, and artistic creation denied by a season of banality, hype, and special effects.

Neither will those intrigued by celebrity be disappointed, since the museum will be hosting its share of Gallic star power. One of the most talented young actors in France, Sandrine Kiberlain, who made a powerful impression last year in To Have (Or Not) and returns this year in Benoît Jacquot's ravishing and enigmatic Seventh Heaven (1997), will appear at that film's screening as it opens the festival at 8 p.m. tonight (July 9). And at 8 p.m. on July 24, Bigas Luna and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, director and star of the lush and canny The Chambermaid on the Titanic (1997), will appear at that film's champagne reception.

The latter effort must surely defer to Jim Cameron's leviathan in production costs and box office, but its treatment of the same themes of love, disaster, and the redeeming power of the imagination is a lot more subtle and satisfying. Olivier Martinez, the continent's answer to Leonardo DiCaprio, plays Horty, a strapping, melancholy foundry worker who wins his company's annual endurance contest. The prize is a ticket for one to witness the launching of the Titanic on its maiden voyage -- the other ticket has been pocketed by the company's sleazy owner, who has designs on Horty's comely wife, Zoe (Romane Bohringer).

The high point of Horty's journey is not the launching but the unexpected visit of Marie (Sánchez-Gijón), a woman who claims to hold the title position and asks whether she can share his hotel room. It proves a night not remembered, as Horty wakens to find Marie gone and only vestiges of an erotic dream remaining. Neither is it clear what happened back home while he was away; Zoe triumphantly, if a bit guiltily, announces that his boss has given him a promotion.

Horty repairs to a bar, where, using a photo as a prop, he regales his fellow workers with the story of the chambermaid, embellishing it on each retelling. Like Cameron's own version, Horty's performance expands with special effects, outlandish fabrications, and bathos galore; superbly acted, Luna's film (a previous effort was the cruder Jamón Jamón) crackles with shrewd visual poetry and a wry eye for irony, heartbreak, and the salvation of kitsch.

Another theatrical production is at the heart of Nicolas Philibert's Every Little Thing (1994; July 11 at 11:30 a.m. and July 25 at 2 p.m.). A documentary of the preparations for an annual play (Witold Gombrowicz's Operetta, of all things) put on by the inmates at the asylum of La Borde in the resplendent Loire Valley, it's a kind of enlightened Titicut Follies with a nod to Marat/Sade. Philibert presents the painstaking, wayward rehearsals without commentary, in all their poignance and tedium, and all passes in the lyric setting with an air of bittersweet triumph and ephemerality. The rare moments of lucidity from the mostly torpid patients can be striking, as at the end, when an unassuming elderly man unleashes a mild j'accuse at the camera.

Chambermaid on the Titanic The downtrodden unite for a different kind of party in Eric Rochant's Vive la République! (1997; July 12 at 4 p.m. and July 19 at 12:15 p.m.), a sort of Full Monty, French-style. Disenfranchised workers in a depressed town take matters into their own hands not by taking off their clothes but by establishing their own political party. Their early efforts are as risible as those of their Sheffield colleagues in mastering the striptease, and the organization is exploited by some as a way of meeting women. In the case of a rich yuppie entrepreneur who's pretending to be a prole to hit on a nubile Marxist, this strategy reaps progressive results. In general, the film shines as an exceptionally clever and humanistic rendition of a catchy high concept.

On the more serious side of political responsibility are Sébastian Grail's engrossing, inspiring Les Milles (1995; July 26 at 1:45 p.m.) and Eric Heumann's morose, provocative Port Djema (1997; July 23 at 6 p.m.). Based on a fascinating historical footnote from World War II, the former tells the story of the title camp, in which refugees from Germany (including such cultural figures as Max Ernst) were held in the days before the Nazi invasion. In a more rigorous version of Von Ryan's Express, the commandant, an infirm Great War veteran mustered from the reserves, becomes an unlikely hero as he tries to deliver his prisoners to safety. In the latter film, a complacent Parisian doctor journeys to the civil-war-torn fictional African country of the title to learn the fate of his friend, a missionary doctor murdered by one of the warring factions. In a descent into hell related with the deliberation of Theo Angelopoulos's Ulysses's Gaze (which Heumann produced), the doctor confronts atrocities, his nation's guilt, and personal responsibility. It's a non-preachy corrective to John Sayles's by-the-numbers Men with Guns.

The basic political unit, of course, is the family. Based on a play, Cédric Klapisch's Un air de famille (1996; July 24, at 6 p.m.) revolves around a party set in "Sleepy Dad's Cafe," a threadbare small-town bistro run by Henri (Jean-Pierre Bacri), the less favored of two brothers (his careerist sibling Philippe, played by Wladimir Yordanoff, has just appeared on the TV news). A lifetime of dysfunctionality is comedically and stridently relived as his domineering mother and loose-cannon sister and an innocent-bystander employee share in the celebration, and liberation from the past is almost achieved. Less than liberated, though, is Klapisch; though he shows inventiveness in the use of the single set à la Robert Altman's Come Back to the Five & Dime Jimmy Dean, the inevitable staginess makes one long for the brash serendipity of his previous When the Cat's Away.

Liberation is more a problem than a solution in veteran director Maurice Pialat's Le garçu (1995; July 11 at 1:30 p.m. and July 16 at 5:30 p.m.). Gérard Depardieu plays Gérard, a devil-may-care roué whose lost youth has been replaced by a wife, an ex-wife, a son, and about 40 extra pounds. It's a simple tale of the belated acknowledgment of limitations and duties related with stunning, cinéma-vérité ambiguity. Depardieu's best performance in a long time injects the seemingly evanescent episodes with unforgettable pathos and passion.

Another veteran of the French cinema, the eternally insouciant Miou-Miou, stars in Anne Fontaine's directorial debut, the drably titled but sensuous and evocative Dry Cleaning (1997; July 17 at 6 p.m.). She's Nicole Kunstler, dutiful wife of Jean-Marie (Charles Berling), the hard-working owner of a dry-cleaning establishment in an economically straitened provincial town. When Loïc (Stanislas Merhar, a ringer for Terence Stamp in Pasolini's similar Teorema), a drag queen, drops off a dress to be laundered, their regimented existence begins to fray. He's taken on as an employee and housemate, and his androgynous appeal ignites their repressed desires with expected, and unexpected, consequences.

The premise of the stranger disrupting a bland bourgeois household, a classic since Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning, undergoes beguiling variations in other festival films. In Benoît Jacquot's Seventh Heaven (1997), Sandrine Kiberlain is cryptic and seductive as Mathilde, wife of the self-assured, no-nonsense surgeon Nico (Vincent Lindon). Mathilde has taken to fainting spells and kleptomania, and Nico, despite his red-blooded façade, has been less than a tiger in bed. So when a mystery hypnotherapist she meets by chance suggests she try a few sessions, Mathilde complies. The hypnotist's spell nudges the ids of both husband and wife, and Jacquot's film is similarly trance-like, the shadow side of his rigorously naturalistic, real-time tour de force A Single Girl.

The stranger proves more sinister and problematic in François Ozon's 52-minute See the Sea (1997; July 10 at 6:30 p.m. and July 12 at 2:15 p.m. with "A Summer Dress"). Her physician husband away, Sasha (Sasha Hails) and her baby daughter pass the time at their summer home on the Île d'Yeu. Tatiana (Marina de Van), a surly transient, asks to set up camp in their yard. Sasha consents and, her curiosity and loneliness piqued, bonds with the taciturn and vaguely subversive visitor, who inspires her to trysts with strangers in the woods and other lapses in judgment. Employing stark primary colors and daylight for ominous, umbrous effect, Ozon, who has been compared for better and worse to Chabrol, spoils his effort with a recourse to shock effect and sour misogyny.

Sunnier and more accomplished is his short "A Summer Dress" (1997), which indulges in many of the same elements (and a few from Dry Cleaning) in a frivolous, flawless gem about gender roles, holiday romance, and polymorphous perversity. It says more about love, loss, and renewal in its delightful 12 minutes than any studio's summer-release slate. Like the rest of the films in this series, "A Summer Dress" reminds us that it's a lot more difficult and rewarding to re-create life on the screen than to destroy it.

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