French

Holy Motors: wild and puzzling

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Holy Motors is a wild and puzzling art film by the French director Leos Carax.  A man named Oscar (the pockmarked Denis Lavant) gets into a white stretch limo driven by a reserved elderly blonde and heads to the first of his “appointments” throughout Paris.  He emerges from the limo disguised as a contorted elderly beggar woman and panhandles for a while.  For his next appointment, he puts on a motion capture suit and acts out a sci-fi scene that culminates in reptilian space alien sex.  We see that the inside of the limo is his dressing room, and later learn that he is acting out scenes to hidden cameras for someone’s viewing pleasure.  Each scene is in a different genre – sci-fi, domestic drama, absurdist, crime action and even romantic musical.

It’s up to the audience to connect the dots – and some dots are just not connectable.  As confused as we are, however, we keep paying attention to try to figure it all out.  Carax’s success here is that he keeps surprising us with stuff that no audience could anticipate.  However, if you need a linear and comprehensible story, you will hate this movie.

I don’t think that I would enjoy the film a second time as much without the element of surprise.  And some of the episodes work better than others.  The motion capture and absurdist segments were riveting, and I loved Oscar leading a head-banging accordion orchestra through the nighttime streets.  The deathbed melodrama didn’t work as well for me, and when Kylie Minogue’s character burst into song in the romantic musical, I gagged. I did appreciate the impressive visuals, the loving shots of Paris and the many homages to films of the past.

Spoiler Alert:  To give you an idea of how wacked out Holy Motors is, here’s the synopsis of the absurdist episode.  Oscar leaves the limo dressed as a filthy and demonic troll, uncovers a man-hole and descends to the sewers under the streets.  He pops up in the Pere Lachaise cemetery, where the gravestones are engraved with websites.  He rampages through the cemetery, eating the flowers left on the graves.  He crashes a fashion shoot and bites off the fingers of the photographer’s assistant.  He then licks the armpit of the supermodel (Eva Mendes), smearing it with blood, picks her up and carries her off to his lair in the sewers.  There he rips off some of her gown and refashions it into a burqa.  Then he sits her (burqa-clad) on a bench, takes off his own clothes and lays next to her with an erection.  Wowza.

A World Without Women: an amusingly awkward but vulnerable guy

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A WORLD WITHOUT WOMEN

In the French film A World Without Women (Un monde sans femmes), Vincent Macaigne plays a lovable loser who manages holiday rentals in a northern French beach town.  He is amiable and good-hearted, but lonely and painfully socially inept.  A good timing single mom brings her college age daughter for a week on the beach and teases him out of his protective shell and into a position of maximum vulnerability.

Macaigne’s characterization is outstanding.  We really care for him and don’t want him to get hurt.  But Macaigne brilliantly employs little touches to illustrate his character’s utter lack of savoir-faire.  For example, at one point he and the mom are leaning shoulder to shoulder against a fence.  She has her arms crossed, and she’s leading him on.  He grasps her her nearest hand with his nearest hand.  But since he’s now holding her left hand with his left, he has pinned her left arm awkwardly across her body like a pretzel, which drains all of the sexual spark out of the situation.  And he can’t put his arm around her because he’s already using that arm to hold her hand.  It’s such a simple action, yet so meaningful.

Laure Calamy is also very good as the fortyish gal who dresses too young and flirts with every available man, leaving male carnage in her wake.

Writer-director Guillaume Brac shows a real command of characters and dialogue in this film.  I’m looking forward to his first feature.  A World Without Women is only 56 minutes long, and plays with Brac’s 24 minute Stranded, which also stars Macaigne as essentially the same character  The two films played together in Paris to surprising popularity.  Fortunately, Brac decided not to bloat the two screenplays into two bad 90-minute features.  Good for him.

I saw both Stranded and A World Without Women at the San Francisco Film Society’s French Cinema Now series.  A World Without Women is not available now on any platform (DVD, Stream, VOD) that I can find, but when it is, I’ll make it a Stream of the Week.  This trailer is in French without subtitles.

Mobile Home: another tale of immature slackers

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MOBILE HOME

In the Belgian comedy Mobile Home, two underachievers in their late 20s, decide to move away from their parents.  They move into a Fiat version of a Winnebago so they can tour the world.  But their big move isn’t really that independent because they park the new home on wheels within an easy drive of their parents.  The question in Mobile Home is whether either of them will catch even a whiff of adult responsibility or whether they will continue denying that it is time to get a real job.

This Belgian story is smarter than most Hollywood bromances, but nothing we haven’t seen before.  A nice little festival film.

I saw Mobile Home at the San Francisco Film Society’s French Cinema Now series.  The trailer is in French without subtitles.

All Together: the elderly resisting aging

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ALL TOGETHER

All Together (Et si on vivait tous ensemble?)  is a poignant French comedy about five septuagenarian friends who decide to eschew the nursing home and live communally.  They hire an anthropology grad student as a caregiver, and he changes his thesis topic to study the social and sexual behavior of the European elderly.

The comedy comes as they resist the insults of age.  One elderly activist, bullhorn in hand, is dismissed as an impotent, harmless crank when the cops refuse to arrest him at a demonstration even when he hits a cop in the helmet with a bottle.

The excellent cast includes Jane Fonda (acting for the first time in fluent French in thirty years).  Geraldine Chaplin, who has acted in French, Spanish, Italian and German films over the years, is impressively spry.   The great French comic actor Pierre Richard (The Man with the One Brown Shoe?) is brilliant as a man terrified by his increasing loss of memory.

Although it covers similar territory as this year’s indie hit The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (a slightly better film), they are different movies, with All Together more focused on mortality and the infirmities that come with age.

I saw All Together at the San Francisco Film Society’s French Cinema Now series.  All Together is now available in the US on Video On Demand, including Amazon Instant Video.

DVD of the Week: Monsieur Lazhar

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This week’s pick is on my list of Best Movies of 2012 – So Far.

A fifth grade class in Montreal loses its teacher in just about the worst possible way – she hangs herself in their classroom at recess.  Monsieur Lazhar is about how the kids face this trauma with their replacement teacher, an Algerian immigrant.  The school gets a psychologist to lecture to the kids, but bans them from otherwise mentioning the suicide in class – a rule designed to minimize the discomfort of the administrators and parents.  Meanwhile, the school’s zero tolerance rule against touching children means that the kids can’t get a reassuring hug.

The new teacher, Monsieur Lazhar (well-played by Mohammed Fellag), is a traditionalist who demands respect but with humor and compassion.  He also seems oddly ignorant of modern teaching methods.  Although mild-mannered, he is fiercely devoted to protecting the kids.  That devotion keeps him from sharing his own burden with the children, for we learn that he, too, has reason to grieve.

Monsieur Lazhar was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar and won Canada’s equivalent of the Best Picture Oscar.  The child actors are superb.  It’s an uncommonly sweet and powerful film.

DVD/Stream of the Week: Time Out

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Aurelien Recoing in TIME OUT

In Time Out (L’emploi du Temps)(2001), a middle-aged guy (Aurelien Recoing) loses his job with an international consulting firm in France and can’t bring himself to tell his family.  Instead, he pretends to still have that job, and then invents a new, better job in Switzerland.  He doesn’t spend his days at the local bar – he actually goes on faux business trips from which he calls his family.  He even dresses in a suit and visits the Swiss corporate HQ where he claims to be working, prowling the cubicles and lounging in the lobby while talking on his cell phone like a big shot.  The lengths to which he goes in convincing his family (and embracing denial for himself) are pathetic, then creepy and finally chilling.

Ironically, he has a smart and supportive wife (Karin Viard); we can tell that, had he told her the truth immediately, she would help him out.  He also has very successful father with the bucks to keep the family afloat until he finds something else.  But so much of his self-identity is wrapped up in his career, that he just can’t bear the thought of disappointing them.

Of course, he can’t keep up this charade forever.  There’s the matter of income, for example, which drives him to join a scam.  And then there is the web of lies that must eventually unravel.  His wife intuits that something is amiss and starts sniffing around….

Recoing is outstanding as the man inside a pressure cooker of his own making.  The great French actress Karin Viard (Polisse, Potishe, Paris) is, as always, perfect.

Time Out is a superb film because of the acting and the writing.  Director Laurent Cantet (2008’s popular The Class) co-wrote the screenplay with Robin Campillo.

Time Out is available on DVD and on Netflix streaming.  (I have not embedded the Miramax trailer because it, replete with swelling music from another film, makes the movie look heart-warming and  melodramatic, and it is neither.)

Farewell, My Queen: a palace teeters on the brink

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This lavishly staged  and absorbing costume drama depicts Marie Antoinette’s Versailles at the onset of the French Revolution.  The story is set during the three pivotal days following the storming of the Bastille.  We view the Upstairs Downstairs of the palace through the eyes of the Queen’s personal reader, played compellingly by Lea Seydoux.  Seydoux’s performance is key to the movies’ success.  When Upstairs, we see her flattering the Queen and observing the Queen’s intimate moments – without becoming an intimate. When Downstairs, we see her unfiltered personality and opinions.

The performance by Diane Kruger as the Queen is equally good.   Her days are designed for her entertainment, and a battalion of servants scurry about to gratify every caprice.  In the days before remote controls, the ADD monarch uses her servant to skip from whim to whim.  She is supreme, but also vulnerable because she craves another person and because she comes to realize that the monarchy itself is threatened.

Virginie Ledoyen plays the Queen’s intimate friend the charismatic social climbing Duchess of Polignac.  In a secondary but essential role, Ledoyen exudes the sexual magnetism that has captivated a queen.

The fourth star of the film is Versailles itself – the movie was shot in the actual palace.   Farewell, My Queen is directed by Benoit Jacquot, and he makes Versailles come alive as a palace, not the museum it is today.  An army of servants bustle about to serve the royals and the nobles.  Even the ostentatiously clad resident aristocrats scuttle like cockroaches for a peek at the king or queen.  It’s a real treat – even those of us who have visited the Queen’s bedroom in Versailles haven’t seen it at night, lit only by the fireplace and candles.

Unfortunately, the ending wraps up the stories of the historical figures Marie Antoinette and The Duchess of Polignac but fails to address the fate of the palace servants who we’ve been following and relating to throughout the film.  I understand that Seydoux’s character is fictional, but we want to know what happened to those vivid characters that are themselves worrying about their own lots.

You might also want to read this superb Mick LaSalle review.

The Intouchables: a crowdpleasing odd couple comedy

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The Intouchables is the second most popular movie of all time in France – and it’s easy to see why.  It’s an odd couple comedy that’s a real crowd pleaser.

A very, very rich French aristocrat has become a quadriplegic due to a hang gliding accident and hires a Senegalese good-for-nothing street hood as his caregiver.  The plot, really just a series of set pieces, mines familiar territory as the poor guy learns about living in a mansion (see Down and Out in Beverly Hills) and revitalizes the rich guy’s zest for living.  But it’s really well done and very funny.

The rich guy is played by the great Francois Cluzet (Tell No One), who gives a tremendous performance using only his head and neck.  Omar Sy plays the poor guy and actually edged out The Artist‘s Jean Dujardin for France’s top acting award last year; that’s hard to figure, but Sy is very funny in The Intouchables.  Overall, it’s a very satisfying comedy.

 

Polisse: how protecting children takes a toll

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Polisse is a riveting French police procedural about the child protective services unit in Paris.  Most cop movies are about how the cops solve the crime.  Instead,  Polisse is about the job’s emotional impact on the cops themselves  – when their assignment is rescuing kids from various degrees of abuse.  It’s an uncommonly good film.

Writer-director Maiwenn embedded herself with this police unit for several months.  At the San Francisco International Film Festival screening, she said that, although the film is fictional, everything in the movie happened in real life (except for the love story between Maiwenn’s photographer and Joey Starr’s cop).  Maiwenn also said that, although the real-life cops were rooting for her to do a movie about their most spectacular exploits, she chose to focus on a realistic cross-section of cases to depict the unit’s actual daily experience.

There are about ten cops in the unit, and it’s an excellent ensemble cast.  Joey Starr is the cop who cares too much.  Karin Viard (Paris, Potiche, Time Out) is the seemingly together cop whose family life has been sacrificed.  Marine Fois (seen earlier this year in Four Lovers) is wound way too tight.  Frederic Pierrot (I’ve Loved You So Long, Let It Rain, Sarah’s Key) is the conflict-averse commander trying to keep the lid on his rambunctious unit.

Polisse won the jury prize at Cannes and is on my list of Best Movies of 2012- So Far.