France

BESTIES: confidence rocked

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Photo caption: Lina Al Arabi and Esther Esther Bernet-Rollande in BESTIES. Courtesy of Frameline.

The absorbing coming of age drama Besties is set among Algerian teen girls in a hardscrabble immigrant urban French neighborhood. They’re growing up on the streets with minimal supervision by their hard-working single moms, and even their modest aspiration of a day trip to the beach seems beyond their grasp.

Yet, despite her downtrodden circumstances, the spirited Nedjima (Lina Al Arabi) is especially comfortable in her own skin. Supremely confident, she leads her girl squad, athletically matches up with the boys, and can talk trash like an NBA player.

Lina Al Arabi in BESTIES. Courtesy of Frameline.

Nedjima is fascinated by Zina (Esther Bernet-Rollande), a new girl in the hood, with relatives in a rival crew. Although Nedjima and Zina are on different sides (as in Sharks/Jets, Montagues/Capulets), there are attracted to each other and begin a secret romance.

Suddenly, Nedjima’s own identity is rocked – she never imagined that she could be a lesbian. This may be France, but even the kids in this insular immigrant community are homophobic. Suddenly she’s lost her community status and her support group. She reveals to Zina what teens often feel and never say, “I’m afraid of everything.” How is Nedjima going to recover her own agency and navigate being lesbian in her family and neighborhood?

Esther Bernet-Rollande (center) in BESTIES. Courtesy of Frameline.

Besties’ two leads, Al Arabi and Bernet-Rollande are very charismatic. Al Arabi’s performance could be star-making. Her Nedjima registers strength and vulnerability, wilfulness and confusion, and the audience is on her side all the way.

Besties is the first feature for writer-director Marion Desseigne-Ravel, and it’s an impressive debut. The milieu seems absolutely authentic. Besties is briskly paced, and Desseigne-Ravel tells her story economically and powerfully, without a single false moment. The final shot captures the briefest of glances, the perfect culmination of Nedjima’s story.

Besties is a showcase for Al Arabi’s magnetism and Desseigne-Ravel’s storytelling. Besties screens at Frameline on June 19.

JANE BY CHARLOTTE: as mildly interesting as the subject

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Photo caption: Charlotte Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin in JANE BY CHARLOTTE. Courtesy of Utopia.

In Jane by Charlotte, the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg examines the life of her mother Jane Birkin in a series of cinéma vérité candid moments and on-camera interviews. The English-born Birkin was a beauty in Swinging London known for her 1968-1980 Paris-based relationship with singer-songwriter lover Serge Gainsbourg, who is is a cult figure in France. Birkin and Gainsbourg collaborated in music and film, and were a celebrity couple.

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Birkin are an amiable mom-daughter, very comfortable with each other. Because of that, and perhaps because Birkin is so used to being in front of cameras (acting in movies, modeling and being hounded by paparazzi), Birkin opens up about her relationships, her parenting and what it’s like to physically age.

The thing is, I’m not really that interested in Jane Birkin (or Serge Gainsbourg, for that matter) – and I’m a Baby Boomer, formed in the era when Birkin was a minor pop icon. (Can someone be a minor icon?) Jane and Charlotte are two nice people, pleasant enough to spend 88 minutes with, but it’s not a compelling, unforgettable experience.

The one captivating segment of Jane by Charlotte is when Charlotte brings back Jane back to Serge Gainsbourg’s apartment, which Jane had not visited in four decades. Jane and Serge’s love nest for 12 years and Charlotte’s childhood home, it is fraught with memories and loaded with emotion. The museum-like apartment itself, reflecting Serge Gainsbourg’s singular taste and eclectic interests, is pretty cool.

BTW I’m a big fan of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s. She’s an often fearless and always interesting actor (including in Sundown earlier this year). (Just wish she hadn’t appeared in so many movies by that cynical provocateur Lars Von Trier; I originally posted that Von Trier was a dickwad, but The Wife made me change it.) This is Charlotte’s directing debut.

Jane by Charlotte is streaming on AppleTV.

MY BEST PART: growing up, with a boost from mom

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Photo caption: Nicolas Maury in MY BEST PART. Courtesy of Altered Innocence.

In the French coming of age dramedy My Best Part, the young actor Jérémie (Nicolas Maury) is teetering on the verge of a breakdown. Not that Jérémie is generally a stable person – he is so needy and dramatic that he attends Jealous Anonymous.  But he loses a gig that he was counting on, his credit card is declined, and worst of all, Jérémie’s smothering jealousy sabotages his relationship with his veterinarian boyfriend (Arnaud Valois), Jérémie’s neurotic fit having disrupted ferret surgery.

With his tail between his legs, Jérémie Paris retreats to hos boyhood home in rural Limousin (the area around Limoges) and the arms of his mother (Nathalie Baye). Jérémie is open to infantilization, but the matter-of-fact Mom is anything but neurotic. With prodding from his mom, will he start behaving like a sane, stable grownup and get his life back on the rails?

Nathalie Baye and Nicolas Maury in MY BEST PART. Courtesy of Altered Innocence.

I’ll watch ten-time César Award nominee Nathalie Baye in anything. Here, in an unchallenging role, she brightens every scene with the sniveling son.

One of the world’s funniest actors, Laure Calamy gets to play a hilarious meltdown in a brief turn as a narcissistic film director.

My Best Part is the feature directing debut for Maury, who also co-wrote the screenplay. My Best Part was nominated for the César for Best First Film.

Parts of My Best Part drag, especially a slooooooow nighttime poolside scene. The final scene, in which Jérémie sings lyrics that explicitly detail his character’s growth, is off-putting and self-indulgent.

My Best Part opens Feb 25 on VOD and at the Glendale Laemmle.

ONLY THE ANIMALS: surprise after surprise

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Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Nadia Tereszkiewicz in ONLY THE ANIMALS. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

The ever-surprising Only the Animals is no ordinary mystery. After an opening sequence with a most unusual piggy-back ride, a wealthy woman (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) disappears among the wintry cattle farms in France’s mountainous and sparsely inhabited Lozere highlands. We meet a series of local characters, each of whom may hold the key to the puzzle, as may the young hustler Armand (Guy Roger ‘Bibisse’ N’Drin), a world away in Côte d’Ivoire.

The intricately constructed story reveals elements of the mystery, from each character’s perspective in sequence. The first French character we meet is Alice (Laure Calamy) – cheery, good-hearted and goofy, with atrocious taste in men; Alice’s neediness leads her to make a poor decision. Then the others, whose behavior is motivated variously by obsessive infatuation, misdirected passion and psychotic delusion, plunge completely off the rails. Their individually random acts collect into a pool of perversion.

By the time we reach the satisfying conclusion, the audience has learned the what and the why (which the investigating police will never uncover), and the most seemingly disparate story lines have intersected.

The story comes from a novel by Colin Niel, adapted by Only the Animals’ director Dominik Moll, with Gilles Marchand. Moll and Marchand were nominated for the César (France’s Oscar equivalent) for adapted screenplay. (Niel himself has a cameo at the agricultural coop’s store counter.)

Laure Calamy and Denis Ménochet in ONLY THE ANIMALS. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

The story is the real star of Only the Animals, but the cast is superb. Tedeschi is marvelous as the worldly woman with a private reason to get away to her husband’s rural getaway, especially when she flashes the briefest instant of anger. Calamy, recently in Sibyl and My Donkey My Lover and I, is one of my favorite international comic actresses. Denis Ménochet, César-nominated for Custody, perhaps the best ever domestic violence drama, plays Alice’s boorish and secretive husband Michel. Damien Bonnard plays Joseph, a damaged loner with an underestimated psychosis.

Nadia Tereszkiewicz plays the young waitress Marion, who turns a one night stand into a disturbing infatuation. This is only the fifth feature and third significant movie role for 25-year-old Tereszkiewicz. She now has four films in production or pre-production, including one directed by Tedeschi.

Guy Roger ‘Bibisse’N’Drin (left) in ONLY THE ANIMALS. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

N’Drin and the other key Ivorian players – Perline Eyombwan, and Christian Ezan – are also excellent.

The surprises keep popping up until the final shot. Only the Animals opens this weekend in a limited theatrical release, which will soon include the Bay Area’s Landmark Shattuck.

SIBYL: masking its trashiness with expert filmmaking

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Virginie Efira and Laure Calamy in SIBYL

In director Justine Triet’s sex-filled (and sometimes darkly funny) melodrama Sibyl, the psychotherapist Sibyl (Virginie Efira) decides to phase out her practice and return to her primary obsession – novel writing. Sibyl is changing the trajectory of her own life, and she reflects on the one true love in her past (Niels Schneider), her sobriety, her parenting and the family of her sister (Laure Calamy).

While off-loading most of her patients, Sibyl picks up a new one – a needy young actress (Adèle Exarchopoulos from Blue Is the Warmest Color). The actress is about to jump start her movie career, but she’s having an affair with the other lead actor (Gaspar Ulliel), who is inconveniently married to the director Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann).

Each of these threads is its own melodrama, and Triet braids them together into an always entertaining story. We are our choices – and we can be our impulses.

Sibyl may be a psychotherapist, but she hasn’t mastered the concept of boundaries. Most egregiously, she doesn’t hesitate to use the personal secrets of her patients as fodder for her novels. Yikes! And she doesn’t resist rampant boundary-crossing by the actress, the actor and the director, either, and she’s used by all of them.

The characters, especially Sibyl, fill the camera lens with passionate sex – on the floor, up against a door, on the beach, on an apartment bathroom’s sink, on the deck of a boat, but not, to the best of my recollection, on a bed.

Niels Schneider and Virginie Efira in SIBYL

There’s lots of sly, dark humor, beginning with the over-intellectualized mansplaining in the very first scene. The sister is hilarious, especially when she coaches her niece on how to manipulate her mother. At one point, the director of the film-within-the-film responds to a lover’s meltdown on the set: “Guys, let’s keep the drama fictional if you don’t mind.“

The scene where the director first meets the actress who has just been impregnated by the director’s husband is another comic masterpiece from Hüller.

Many of us so revere French cinema that we forget that one of the things French filmmakers do well is trashy. And Sibyl is every bit as trashy as Fifty Shades of Grey. However, the editing (Laurent Sénéchal) and the acting are so exquisite that it masks the trashiness of the story.

I originally streamed Sibyl on Virtual Cinema at Laemmle. It’s now available on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and DVD.

TITANE: demented, excessive and icky

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Photo caption: Agathe Rousselle and Caddy in TITANE. Courtesy of NEON.

I don’t think I’ve ever before described a movie-going experience as “punishing”, but here goes.  After being assaulted by the French sci fi horror film Titane, which purports to be two portraits of abnormal psychology, I felt beaten, even tortured.

The headstrong child Alexia causes an auto accident and gets a platinum plate in her skull.  She grows into a stripper at car shows (Agathe Rousselle), and has a serious automobile fetish.  In Titane’s most notorious scene, Alexia gives a new meaning to auto-eroticism by having sex with, and becoming impregnated by, a Cadillac.  

Alexia is also a serial killer, and her second signature fetish is impaling her victims.  She keeps a spike in her hair for this purpose, but a bar stool will suffice, too. One victim gets away and indemnified her, so Alexia changed her appearance and goes underground as a young man. Here, she happens on a beefy fire captain (Vincent Lindon), who is grieving for a son who disappeared ten years ago, and adopts Alexia as his long lost, now recovered, son.

Through much of Titane, we are asking WTF is going on? Writer-diretor Julia Ducournau keeps surprising us by piling on segments that are SO twisted and bizarre, that most of us could not imagine them.

Most of Titane is intentionally unpleasant to watch.  Characters bleed blood, unless they bleed motor oil.  Bones crunch, mouths froth and bellies are picked open. The murders are gory, and Alexia self mutilates as her pregnancy progresses, right up to an excruciating birth scene.

Oh, and let me be very clear about this, Titane is NOT a date movie.

The character of Alexia is just a bad seed, a feral maniac. The character of the troubled fire captain is also bizarre, but he’s more psychologically interesting.  He insists that everyone else accept what is clearly a delusion.  Does he understand that this is not his son?

Vincent Lindon in TITANE. Courtesy of NEON.

Lindon (who muscled up for the role) is superb in this crazy role, which requires him to exude command authority and also the deepest vulnerability. It’s a very brave performance, and it works, for example, in his solo dance to She’s Not There. 

Myriem Akheddiou is also excellent in a brief scene as the mother of the fire captain’s missing child.

I know my share of American firefighters.  They would be surprised by Titane’s French firefighters, who let off steam by getting high and holding raves in the firehouse, all hypnotically dancing to electronica.

Notably, Titane won the Palme d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. While one of the two most prestigious prizes in cinema (along with the Best Picture Oscar), the Palme d’Or is no guarantee that a movie is great – or even watchable. On the positive side, recent winners have included the superb Parasite, Shoplifters, Amour, Blue Is the Warmest Color and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. On the unfathomably bad side, cinematic excrement like The White Ribbon, The Tree of Life, Dancer in the Dark, and now Titane – has also won.

The critical consensus is far too kind to Titane.  Many critics correctly label what had come out of  Julia Ducournau’s mind as “demented” and then credit her for the visual excess in telling an unbearably icky story.  It’s just demented, excessive and icky.

MA BELLE, MY BEAUTY: a simmering romantic reunion

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Idella Johnson, Sivan Noam Shimon and Hannah Pepper in Marion Hill’s film MA BELLE, MY BEAUTY. Courtesy of SFILM.

In the beginning of the simmering romantic drama Ma Belle, My Beauty, the New Orleans musicians Bertie (Idella Johnson) and Fred (Lucien Guignard) receive a surprise visitor. Fred, the band leader and Bertie, the vocalist, have married and relocated their jazz band to a rambling French farmhouse owned by Fred’s parents. Both the marriage and the move were Bertie’s idea, but now she’s depressed and no longer working with the band.

We learn that Bertie, while involved with Fred, had a simultaneous relationship with Lane (Hannah Pepper), until Lane starting dating another woman. Now Lane is single again, and Fred, hoping to shake Bertie out of her depression, has invited Lane to visit and surprise Bertie.

A surprise it is, and not altogether welcome. Bertie tells Hannah that Bertie’s happiness does not depend on either Fred or Lane – but is that true? And is Lane really willing to accept a non-exclusive relationship? And who is whose creative muse?

Bertie and Hannah spar, Hannah has a noisy fling with another guest, sexual tensions simmer, and before you know it, somebody is harnessing on the strap-on.

Almost all the action takes place at the farmhouse and the setting is sumptuous – Grade A Travel Porn. The farm is located in Anduze, France, at the very edge of the Rhone Valley, nestled in the foothills of the Cévennes.

Ma Belle, My Beauty is the first feature by writer-director Marion Hill, and it won an audience award at Sundance. I screened Ma Belle, My Beauty at SFFILM, and, in the Q&A, Marion Hill said that she was seeking to shoot a film in this idyllic French location, along with aspiring to explore the post-breakup dynamics of polyamorous women.

There’s a touch of jazz in Ma Belle, My Beauty, and Idella Johnson’s vocal performance shine.

The setting may be languid, but we know that Hill’s characters may erupt in passion at any moment. Ma Belle, My Beauty is a gorgeous, sexy, character-driven film. I screened Ma Belle, My Beauty at the 2021 SFFILM.

CURIOSA: erotic, but do we care?

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Noémie Merlant and Niels Schneider in CURIOSA. Photo courtesy of Memento Films.

The French romantic drama Curiosa is set in the Belle Epoque, when the Eiffel Tower was new and sexual liberation was burgeoning among literati.

The saucy Marie (Noémie Merlant) is in love with Pierre (Niels Schneider), but marries the more financially established Henri (Benjamin Lavernhe). Pierre is a libertine (and, if British, would have been called a “rake”). Pierre returns to Paris from Algeria with a girlfriend unencumbered with inhibitions and an obsession with erotic photography. Marie instantly begins an affair with Pierre, and, boy, does she start losing her inhibitions, too.

Merlant and others spend much of Curiosa in various states of undress, so much so that teenage boys will have difficulty fast forwarding between them. Impressively, the distributor was able to find and cobble together 1 minute and 38 seconds worth of mostly clothed action. for the trailer below. It bears mention that Curiosa was co-written and directed by a female filmmaker, Lou Jeunet.

The characters are “based loosely” on the writings and photographs of real literary figures. We do know that Marie de Heredia married Henri de Régnier, had an affair with Pierre Louÿs and posed for his erotic photographs.

The cinematography by Simon Roca is beautiful, and this movie filled with attractive, naked people should be more engaging. The problem is that it is difficult to relate to or care about any of the characters.

I streamed Curiosa from Laemmle.

CASANOVA, LAST LOVE: the seducer seduced

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Photo caption: Vincent Lindon and Stacy Martin in CASANOVA, LAST LOVE.

In Casanova, Last Love, a middle-aged Casanova (Vincent Lindon) visits London and meets an entrepreneurial sexpot (Stacy Martin). It’s an age-old story – playing hard to get, a young woman captures the heart and soul of an older man – but we REALLY don’t expect this from Casanova himself. The seducer is seduced and it’s well, pathetic.

“Casanova” is a synonym for “womanizer”.  Indeed, sex sells and the historical Casanova’s remarkable fuck-and-tell memoir does detail a record of sexual encounters perhaps unmatched until Wilt Chamberlain.

This was an era where, even more than today, men of privilege could get away with any exploitation of women. Casanova reflected and projected the power of his powerful patrons – and took full advantage.

The historical Casanova was also a hustler, who sponged off a series of aristocratic patrons and pitched lottery schemes to crowned heads of Europe (France was a Yes, England and Russia were Nos).  In Casanova, Last Love, he easily rebuffs the opportunity to invest into a magic elixir scheme.

In his four decades cavorting across Europe, spinning schemes and seducing? women, Casanova saw himself as a professional gambler. He suffered the expected cyclical busts of a gambler, a harsh circumstance in the era of debtors prisons. That roller coaster life would have taken a toll on anyone of Casanova’s age at this point.  Indeed, Casanova, Last Love’s Casanova is starting to lose something off his fastball.

Vincent Lindon is an actor well-equipped to play conflicted characters (Mademoiselle Chambon, Augustine), and he’s played defeated characters before. Here, as Casanova’s confidence unravels, Lindon’s performance becomes ever more poignant.

Stacy Martin, very good as Jean-Luc Godard’s girlfriend Anne Wiazemsky in Godard, Mon Amour, is a capable web-spinner, but doesn’t project the nuclear-level sexual allure that I imagined necessary to ensnare Casanova.

Director Benoît Jacquot (Diary of a Chambermaid, Farewell, My Queen) specializes in sumptuous period tales.  If you want powdered wigs, candlelight and harpsichord music, then Jacquot is your guy.  Jacquot and cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne have made a visual delight. Many frames is this film could have been paintings from the period.

Jacquot has some sport with us when he shows Casanova taking friends on a 20th Century-style castle tour of Hever Castle complete with English speaking docent (He treated his servants very well). And the great yew maze in Castle Hever’s garden wasn’t constructed until 100 years later.

Note: Early in his London visit, Casanova is taken aback by a well-dressed Brit in Hyde Park who defecates in public. Does movie shitting constitute acting or a stunt? In Casanova, Last Love, there are actors credited for performances as Man in Hyde Park ,and there are stunt performers credited as well. But there are no additional crew listed as shit wranglers. Who is the shitter here? Just wondering.

Casanova, Last Love posits that everyone can act like a romantic fool, even a cynic like Casanova. There is palace porn here, like a 17th Century HGTV would offer, plus a little sex. And a wretched womanizer teased into despair.

MAMA WEED: it’s always fun when Huppert gets outrageous

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Photo caption: Isabelle Huppert in MAMA WEED. Photo courtesy of Music Box Films, ©Photo Credit Guy Ferrandis

In the French comic thriller Mama Weed, Isabelle Huppert plays Patience, a woman beset by money troubles stemming from the care of her aged mother.  She embraces an increasingly bizarre and risky solution.  Mama Weed starts out droll and blossoms into madcap.

Patience, having been born in colonial Algeria, is fluent in Arabic.  Her day job is as the translator for a French police unit that wiretaps Arabic-speaking drug dealers.  She learns that the cop are about to take down the son of her mom’s beloved caregiver, and she tips the kid off. That results in her gaining the possession of a ton and a half of somebody else’s hashish.  Patience disguises herself, enlists some dimwitted street dealers and seeks to monetize her haul.   Did I mention that she is dating her boss on the Narc Squad?

Her own employers are now throwing all their resources toward catching this mysterious new dealer, whom they don’t know is sitting in their midst.  The original owners of the hash, a murderous lot, are also hunting her down.

She’s more and more at risk, but the story gets commensurately funnier.  She adopts a retired drug-detecting police dog.  One of her client drug dealers is ravaged by the Munchies in a kabob shop.   Much of the humor is centered on the experience of Arabs and Chinese in contemporary France.  One central theme is the cynical principle that money makes world go round.

Mama Weed also recognizes how we value the caregivers who take loving care of our elderly parents; those folks can become more dear than family.

I’ll watch anything with Huppert in it, although it’s hard to top her electrifying performance in Elle. Of course she’s a great actress, having been nominated 16 times for an acting César (France’s Oscar).  But here’s her sweet spot – no other actor can portray such outrageous behavior with such implacability as Huppert.  She is probably the least hysterical actor in cinema. 

Mama Weed opens in theaters in July 16 and on digital on July 23.