Jours de fête

Taking a summer break at the Nantucket and French Film Festivals

by Peter Keough

While the rest of the film world lines up at multiplexes to see Star Wars, Austin Powers, and South Park, a lucky few like myself get to take in the more rarefied offerings of the season's odd festival. June saw the fourth edition of the Nantucket Film Festival, a bold burst of fresh energy that's getting stronger every year. And this month brings us the Museum of Fine Arts' fourth annual Boston French Film Festival (running July 8 through 25), which has been promising but this year suggests that the Gallic movie industry is suffering from the same malaise as its Hollywood counterpart.

In fact, don't be surprised if some of that festival's 18 new films don't end up in Disneyfied form on some studio's future release schedule. That's business as usual for Francis Veber, whose The Fugitives, The Toy, and La Cage aux Folles have all gotten the Hollywood treatment. DreamWorks has already snapped up the rights to his The Dinner Game (1998; July 15 at 8 p.m.). With its mordant premise and a soft execution, it's a glib farce about rich publisher Thierry Lhermitte, who, with his other privileged pals, amuses himself by picking up "idiots" and inviting them to dinner, where they provide unwitting entertainment. The tables turn, however, when Lhermitte throws out his back, his fed-up wife leaves him, and he's compelled to spend the evening at the mercy of his idiot, who's played by the fuzzy and rotund Jacques Villeret. Conventional, efficient, and brief, The Dinner Game is at 80 minutes a satisfying snack; see it now while it's still funny.

The same can't be said of A Big Scream of Love (1997; July 9 at 8:15 p.m. and July 22 at 6 p.m.); anything a Hollywood studio does to this feeble, blowzy affair could only improve it. Josiane Balasko's disappointing follow-up to her French Twist is a brassy comedy in which she plays a washed up Liz Taylor type seeking her stage comeback with a tepid Burton played by Richard Berry.

As for Roger Planchon's Lautrec (1998; July 16 at 7:50 p.m. and July 17 at 3:30 p.m.), Hollywood already did this story years ago with Vincente Minnelli's Moulin Rouge. Here Régis Royer in the title role evokes more a bearded Michael J. Fox than a dour José Ferrer. And in the Life Is Beautiful (though predating Benigni's Oscar winner) mode of Holocaust as high concept we get Roger Hanin's heartfelt but hoky Soleil (1997; July 11 at 5 p.m. and July 18 at 2 p.m.). Clumsy and mawkish, it's about a teenage Jewish boy in French Morocco during World War II who's spoiled by his mother (a stolid Sophia Loren) but achieves maturity in a dénouement involving stolen carpets.

Not that this festival is without the sort of films usually associated with the country that gave us the New Wave. Nicole Garcia worked as an actress with Jacques Rivette and Alain Resnais, and her third film, Place Vendôme (1998; July 10 at 3:30 p.m. and July 18 at 4:10 p.m.), shows she's learned from the experience. Catherine Deneuve is stunningly beautiful and ageless, perhaps too much so for her role as an alcoholic widow whose husband, a respected jeweler, commits suicide, leaving her with a pair of priceless stones. She's drawn into present-day intrigues and past traumas in a subtle interplay of memory, duplicity, and fate that doesn't quite overcome its melodramatic conventions.

Unlike Only God Sees Me (1998; July 9 at 6 p.m. and July 17 at 1:30 p.m.), Bruno Podalydès's debut feature, a deceptively free-form slice of a formless life, that of Albert (Denis Podalydès), a nerd unable to decide what to do with himself, beginning with who to sleep with. Comparable to the films of Woody Allen but more inventive and less self-conscious, God is an original spin on that Gallic stand-by story of the pasty-loser-who-gets-the-babes-but-still-is-miserable school of filmmaking.

So is Olivier Assayas's Late August, Early September (1998; July 24 at 7:45 p.m.), by far the best film of those I've seen in this festival. The pasty-faced loser in this case is Gabriel (Mathieu Amalric), who's broken up with one beauty (played by the incandescent Jeanne Balibar, one of the women in God) and is on shaky grounds with another as his life and the lives of his acquaintances are indirectly shaped by the slow dying of a mutual friend. Reminiscent of such chatty French filmmakers as Eric Rohmer, Assayas records with trenchant detail and breezy authenticity the rhythms of everyday life, its profundities and its trivia. Nothing is changed but everything is somehow renewed in this superbly acted ensemble piece, a triumph also of seamless screenwriting.

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A producer, a director, and a star gather around a huge pen imbedded in a stone, unable to extract it. A hand reaches into the frame -- it belongs to a rumpled, bespectacled figure who pulls out the pen and raises it to the sky, where the legend appears: "Nantucket -- Where screenwriters inherit the earth."

So claims the 1999 Nantucket Film Festival's opening trailer, made by Lyn Vaus, who was saluted here last year as co-screenwriter with director Brad Anderson of Next Stop Wonderland and his wife, Kim Caviness. If not the earth, then screenwriters at least have inherited the island, especially since fewer "celebrities" (no Winona Ryder, no Ben Stiller) made the trip over than in previous years.

Nonetheless, the festival has continued its tradition not only of skinny-dipping at the big Vanity Fair party but of honoring that least respected but most essential part of the filmmaking process. It gave screenwriters their due in staged readings of unproduced screenplays, in the Tony Cox award for best unproduced screenplay given to Janusz Glowacki for his Hairdo, and in the lifetime-achievement award given this year to Jay Presson Allen, veteran Hollywood scripter of Marnie, Prince of the City, and others.

More important, though, the writer's hand showed in the selection of independent films, many of them still without distributors, which included some of the best and most intriguing -- not to mention most controversial -- movies I've seen this year.

The Nantucket organizers have an uncanny knack for uncovering obscure gems like American Detective, the debut film of Austin native Dan Brown, which screened here in its world premiere. There must be something about that part of Texas that inspires offbeat, note-perfect absurdist filmmaking: Brown's low-budget near-masterpiece evokes the work of fellow Austinians Richard Linklater and Wes Anderson. In the tradition of Buster Keaton's Young Sherlock and François Truffaut's Stolen Kisses, young idler Owen (an endearing Johnny Mars) takes a mail-order private-eye course that becomes an excuse for stalking a beautiful stranger. Ranging in tone from the ruefully comic to the existentially grave, including one scene reminiscent of Francis Coppola's The Conversation, Detective establishes Brown as a talented original.

Another promising newcomer is Tod Williams, whose semi-autobiographical The Adventures of Sebastian Cole is a standard coming-of-age story with a twist. Young Sebastian (Adrien Grenier) is another teenage loner, though with the advantage of the wisdom and support of his canny stepfather, Hank (Clark Gregg). When Hank decides to have a sex change, Sebastian's mother walks out, and Hank becomes both mother and father to the boy. Potentially a scenario for a cloying TV movie, Sebastian Cole takes its cue from Gregg's terrific performance, embracing the outlandish situation with matter-of-fact absurdity and dignity.

Not so lucky is Will Conroy's formulaic Catalina Trust, in which an ambitious young stockbroker is put off his career path when his estranged grandfather dies, leaving him a venerable but economically insolvent Tucson hotel in his will. Should our hero pursue his own selfish, materialist interests or take up the vaguely right-wing ideals of his legacy? The resolution is predictable and dated.

A similar tale of reconciliation with the family past is told in local hero Davidlee Willson's The Autumn Heart, co-winner of the audience award with the Holocaust documentary Children of Chabannes. The estranged paterfamilias in this case is Lee Thomas, who divorced his wife Ann (Tyne Daly) and took his son (played by Willson) with him, leaving her with his three daughters. Sixteen years later dad's made a fortune and is putting on upper-class airs, and mom's still driving a bus and reveling in blue-collar bitterness. Ann has a heart attack, the three daughters track their brother down to a Harvard classroom, and the film never recovers from the bathos of the opening voiceover introduction ("Father Time and Mother Nature had children and they were the four seasons") and Ally Sheedy's strident overacting as one of the daughters.

In striking contrast to the sentimentality of Heart is the lacerating squalor of Sex: The Annabel Chong Story. An erratic but jolting documentary about Malaysian porn actress Grace Quek, a/k/a Annabel Chong, who set a short-lived record by having sex with 251 men in 10 hours, the film is fascinating and frustrating. Although touching on issues of sexuality, power, identity, and family (shots of Quek with her parents in Singapore are among the most devastating), it's nonetheless a mess (the filmmaker, Gough Lewis, was at the time intimately involved with his subject), though Quek herself, to judge from her confidence and insight answering questions following the screening, is not.

In its own way shocking as Sex is Collette Burson's Coming Soon -- not so much the film itself as its fate at the hands of the film industry and the MPAA. Conceived as a distaff version of the standard teen sex comedy, it tells the story of three female high-school friends determined to have an orgasm. Sound familiar? If not, you might want to check out American Pie. Shown in a director's cut, Coming Soon is far tamer and less funny than its R-rated male counterpart, but the film itself is anticlimactic compared to its NC-17 rating (Burson has since trimmed the film for an R). "I was shocked -- I thought it would get a PG-13," Burson said after the screening. "The board said that since American families had a double standard, it was good that they did too." The Nantucket Film Festival trailer notwithstanding, it's clear that the censor is still mightier than the pen.