E-Mail This Article to a Friend Waiting for Godard New Wavering at the Boston French Film Festival BY PETER KEOUGH
	The 9th Annual Boston French Film Festival At the Museum of Fine Arts July 8 through 25.

Since the New Wave, French cinema has led the way in synthesizing the sublime and the vulgar — i.e., Gallic sensibilities and everyone else’s. But not so, lately. The disparity between technological sophistication and cultural decline has never been greater, and globalization threatens to churn all distinctive national cultures into one global pudding.

Where is the new Godard to make sense, or nonsense, of it all? Even the old Godard would do. The 9th Annual Boston French Film Festival at the Museum of Fine Arts offers neither, but most of its 21 features should reassure those who fear that present-day film artistry begins and ends with Spider-Man 2. At the very least, this series should reawaken one’s love of film, since most of the films are about love.

In lieu of Godard, how about Jacques Rivette? In the midst of a world full of doom and crises, his L’histoire de Marie et Julien/The Story of Marie and Julie (2003; in French with English subtitles; 150 minutes; July 10 at 2 p.m. and July 15 at 7:15 p.m.) is reassuringly solipsistic and irrelevant. Emmanuelle Beárt, who so indefatigably played the nude artist’s model in Rivette’s voyeuristic 1991 epic La belle noiseuse, returns here as a muse of another kind, the mysterious Marie, whom lumpish Julien (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) fell in love with one night a year ago. Since then, Julien has been supplementing his clock-repair business (metaphor alert!) by blackmailing a certain Madame X, whom he suspects of murder. But then, the borders between life and death are rather blurry in this meticulously constructed artifice that concludes with perhaps the most audacious scene of romantic optimism since Eric Rohmer’s 1986 Le rayon vert.

More in touch with the issues of the day is nonagenarian Portuguese (the definition of French film also includes Belgian, Canadian, Moroccan, and other nationalities) director Manoel de Oliveira’s Un film parlé/A Talking Picture (2003; in Portuguese, French, Greek, and English with English subtitles; 96 minutes; July 11 at 12:30 p.m. and July 15 at 1:30 p.m.). A Portuguese history professor (Leonor Silveira) decides to take the sea route with her young daughter to visit her husband in Bombay. Thus, as the film’s opening title points out, they can also travel back several millennia in history, dropping in on such key outposts of civilization as Naples, Athens, and Istanbul, where they have fascinating, instructive chats (a talking picture, indeed) with strangers before setting sail again.

This somewhat repetitive pattern changes toward the end of the film when mother and daughter join the flirtatious captain (John Malkovich, who else?) and a trio of internationally famous beauties (Catherine Deneuve, Irene Pappas, Stefania Sandrelli) in the ship’s dining room for a multi-lingual conversation about how multi-lingual conversations can save the world. Those seeing an eerie resemblance to The Poseidon Adventure might not be disappointed.

Sometimes, though, the parts lost in translation are best left unsaid, which is partly the case in Jacques Doillon’s melancholy and seductive Raja (2003; in French, Arabic and English with English subtitles; 105 minutes; July 17 at 6 p.m.). Hoydenish and chimerical, 19-year-old Marrakesh street walker Raja (Najat Benssallem) finds work in the household of the rich, older European Frédéric (Pascal Greggory), and the two engage in a torturous, exquisite mating dance that need not be interpreted only as an allegory of colonialism. Subtle and heartbreaking, Raja merges the harsh exoticism of Paul Bowles with the excruciating nuance and romantic tragedy of Proust.

Speaking of Proust: Jean Paul Civeyrac’s Toutes ces belles promesses/All Those Fine Promise (2003; in French with English subtitles; 85 minutes; July 22 at 6 p.m. and July 24 at 2:30 p.m.) demonstrates how clumsy film can be when trying to re-create the interplay of memory, loss, love, and the passage of time. Cellist Marianne (Jeanne Balibar) can’t get over the sense of abandonment instilled in her by her late, high-living, maritally casual parents. After another painful break-up, she discovers that one of her father’s mistresses had been mentioned in his will and sets off to find her, a search complicated by the flashbacks, and literal ghosts, that lurk behind every creaky plot twist.

Another detective story piecing together the meaning of a dead man’s will, and almost as awkward, is Antoine de Caunes’s period drama Monsieur N. (2003; in French and English with English subtitles; 120 minutes; July 18 at 7:15 p.m. and July 23 at 8 p.m.). The "N" of the title, is, of course, Napoléon (Philippe Torreton, more toad like than imperial), fighting his "last battle" in exile on St. Helena against his British overseer Sir Hudson Lowe (Richard E. Grant, going nuts with his lemon-sucking sneer). Will Napoléon escape? Does he really die on the island? Has Elvis left the building? The overacting and the purple subplots don’t clarify the film’s tangled and tedious web of conspiracies.

Handled far more deftly and delightfully are the intrigues and the immoralities of actor/director Michel Blanc’s Embrassez qui vous voudrez/See How They Run (2002; 103 minutes; in French with English subtitles; July 10 at 7 p.m., July 15 at 3:30 p.m., and July 18 at 3 p.m.). Charlotte Rampling plays the spoiled British wife of a jaded businessman (Jacques Dutronc) whose choice of vacation sites initiates a daisy chain of erotic misadventures. At first the film seems misogynistic (despite Blanc’s own painful performance as a macho shithead). But then it grows serenely misanthropic, arguing that human beings are flawed, repulsive, tragic, treacherous, and depraved — but ultimately redeemable, if only through laughter.

Or through further depravity, tragedy, and repulsiveness. No French film festival would be complete without a ponderously enacted ménage à trois with elements of sado-masochism. Xavier Giannoli’s joyless Les corps impatients/Eager Bodies (2003; in French with English subtitles; 94 minutes; July 17 at 8:15 p.m. and July 24 at 5:15 p.m.) serves here as a lightweight substitute for a controversial film by Catherine Breillat or Gaspar Noé. A young couple’s love hits a snag when the woman is diagnosed with cancer. Her best friend drops by to help out, and they all act perversely, succumbing to their basest impulses and least attractive desires. Then they talk about it.

Of course, as Godard would tell you, the true ménage à trois involves a man, a woman, and cinema. That’s how matters stand at the beginning of Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu’s Un homme, un vrai/A Real Man (2003; in French and English with English subtitles; 115 minutes; July 9 at 5:30 p.m. and July 11 at 4:45 p.m.). Boris (Mathieu Amalric) is an aspiring auteur whose attempt to turn a promotional video for a telemarketing firm into an autobiographical musical comedy loses him a client. It wins him, however, the attention of Marilyne (Hélène Fillières, a willowy beauty who moves among the tiny French men like a gazelle among warthogs), an up-and-comer with the company who believes in the beauty of film.

Five years later, when Boris, still working on his first screenplay, is tending the kids while mom has lesbian affairs with co-workers, the glow of art and romance has dimmed a bit. Maybe it’s the music: inspired by Jacques Demy or by Boris’s own pretensions, the Larrieux every now and then try to crank Un homme, un vrai itself into a musical with a feeble number. Leave that kind of thing to Michel Legrand; the film works well enough as a bittersweet, whimsical romantic comedy about passion and transience.

The artistic ambitions of Claude Miller’s La petite Lili (2003; in French with English subtitles; 104 minutes; July 10 at 5 p.m.), on the other, are well rewarded. The ubiquitous nymphet Ludivine Sagnier climbs out of her duds early in the film; she’s a seemingly naive beauty who serves as a muse for the insufferably pretentious Julien (Robinson Stévenin). Her face is the only merit in Julien’s earnest and horrible debut short, and the film’s premiere at Julien’s family estate does not go well. His aging actress mom (Nicole Garcia) bluntly dismisses it, and her latest boyfriend, Brice (Bernard Giraudeau), a successful hack director, shows more interest in Lili than in the film.

If this is starting to sound a bit like a certain Chekhov play, be patient. It actually comes to resemble more a story by Jorge Luis Borges (say, "Pierre Menand, Author of the Quixote") as the "real-life" events get converted by the "artist’s" sensibility into the familiar patterns of a classic drama. It might not be a New Wave, but with its insistence that art prevails over experience, that film prevails over all, it’s not old hat, either.