Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2025

[Chris Knipp]

Unifrance and Film at Lincoln Center present
30TH RENDEZ-VOUS WITH FRENCH CINEMA

FILMLEAF GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD

LINKS TO REVIEWS
AND THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM/LEURS ENFANTS APRÈS EUX (Ludovic Boukherma, Zoran Boukherma 2024)
BEING MARIA/MARIA (Jessica Palud 2024)
DJ MEHDI: MADE IN FRANCE (Thibaud de Longueville 2024)
GHOST TRAIL/LES FANTÔMES (Jonathan Millet 2024)
HOLY COW/VINGT DIEUX (Louise Courvoisier 2024)
THE SECOND ACT/LE DEUXIÈME ACTE (Quentin Dupieux 2024)
MEETING WITH POL POT/RENDEZ-VOUS AVEC POL POT (Rithy Pann 2024}
THE QUIET SON/JOUER AVEC LE FEUX (Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin 2024)
SOULEYMANE'S STORY/L'HISTOIRE DE SOULEYMANE (Boris Lojkine 2024)
SUSPENDED TIME/HORS DU TEMPS (Olivier Assayas 2014)
THIS LIFE OF MINE/MA VIE MA GUEULE (Sophie Fillières 2024)
THREE FRIENDS/TROIS AMIES (Emmanuel Mouret 2024) Opening NIght Film
VISITING HOURS/LA PRISONNIÈRE DE BORDEAUX (Patricia Mazuy, 2024)
WHEN FALL IS COMING/QUAND VIENT L'AUTONNE (François OZON 2024)
WILD DIAMOND/DIAMANT BRUT (Agathe Riedinger 2024)
WINTER IN SOKCHO/HIVER À SOKCHO (Koya Kamura 2024)

[Chris Knipp]

MALOU KHEBIZI, IDIR AZOUGLI

AGATHE RIEDINGER: WILD DIAMOND/DIAMANT BRUT (2024)

Reality dreams

Some thought Wild Diamond/Diamant Brut, Agathe Riedinger's first feature, was getting ahead of itself in being included as a Cannes Competition film. Its thinness feels more so because its subject, the nineteen-year-old Liane (Malou Khebizi) is a blatantly superficial girl, a live Barbie doll who thinks of little or nothing that's more than skin deep. A lot of her time is spent on how she looks, her enlarged breasts, her buttucks, her skin, her lips, her hair.

But the film demands our attention by the way it captures a phenommenon of these days: the self-made online personality who exploits social media, what Owen Gleiberman calls in his Variety review "the up-from-nowhere apparatus of fame." There are other things Gleiberman says that I like, such as his calling Liane a "glam trainwreck" and his comment that the various devices she uses, the tarty-sexy clothes, the hydraulic acid lip injections to create a pouty mouth, make her "heartbreaking." He grasps Liane's world wonderfully. Even as he pities her he's into her. But I can't agree with him that all this announces Riedinger as "a major filmmaker." Riedinger has found an excellent subject, perhaps a career-best one. But if this is all she can do with her, if these, even with the final time of Christian penance, are Liane's limits and Riedinger's best effort, this feels like a flash in the pan.

Liane has 40,000 Tik Tok followers. She aspires to being an "influencer," and she has applied to be included in a popular reality show called "Miracle Island" - and been granted a momentous interview. Though she has to wait over a month afterwards to find out if she's been officially chosen by the judges to be part of the show, somehow it's a bit of a disappointment for us when she is in fact chosen. Is that what we've waited an hour and 43 minutes for? And is the tragic low point merely the moment when Liane gives herself a disastrous tattoo?

Wild Diamond does have special redeeming features. For me the greatest one is visual. I was surprised what a beautiful film this was. The cinematography of dp Noé Bach makes the Côte d'Azur glow permeate everything, Liane, the light, and the world around her, all the time. The use of the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, confining us to Liane's intense world, is like an imprisoning jewel box. It's one of those films that glows with the sunny warmth of the Mediterranean: it's full of the atmosphere of Fréjus and the summery South of Franc. Here where Liane lives with her mother and little sister, there are other girls like her. These are her best mates who are hard to distinguish from her when they're together. With them this world of the French Riviera, familiar to us already from decades ago, is updated. Liane is responsible for the care of her younger sister, and and surges with resentment and a dangerous temper from the indignity and abuse she suffered when young by being put into a "foyer," a home, by her neglectful mother.

This experience handily provides Liane with a boyfriend, Dino (Idir Azougli), who appears from her past: he too was in that "foyer." And he like many others has found her and been attracted by her online "glamor." Malou Khebizi as Liane indeed has a seedy glamor - one feels that she would be more attractive if she toned down and washed off all the glitz - as she does to prepare for the interview. Dino shows her a vacant building he says he is saving up to buy. Later, he declares his love for Liane and says she will always be his "queen." Because she has just been humiliated and insulted by her mother, she lashes out in anger and repels him at a club where her girlfriends already suspect he is her "mec," her guy. And part of the feel-good finale of this film is that this comes true. Alone together later, she apologizes for her rudeness, they embrace, and there's almost a fairytale romance feel.

This finale is cheap, it's superficial, and yet it's somehow touching. But it fades compared to a Mediterranean doomed romance classic like Manuel Pradal's 1997 Marie baie des anges/Marie from the Bay of Angels, whose romance, also sunstruck, is simple and timeless. Riedinger depicts character, trends, and atmosphere well, but she is not a storyteller like Pradal. What makes this movie memorable is how freshly and vividly it depicts the wretched underside and dubious mystique of social media. And for that trendiness it gained entry into Cannes Competition.

Wild Diamond/Diamond brut, 103 mins., debuted at Cannes in Competition May 15, 2024, showing also at Munich, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Cairo, and other international festivals including Mumbai and Two Riversides Film and Art Festival, Poland. It opened theatrically in France Nov. 20, 2024, resulting in AlloCiné ratings of 3.3 press (66%) and 3.5 (70%) spectators. Strand Releasing in the US. Showing:
Monday, March 10 at 3:30pm
Saturday, March 15 at 12:30pm – Q&A with Agathe Riedinger

[Chris Knipp]

IRÈNE JACOB

RITHY PANH: MEETING WITH POL POT/RENDEZ-VOUS AVEC POL POT (2024)

A surreal jumble of fact and invention portrays the world of a genocidal dictator

Not having learned any more about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge since seeing Rithy Panh's The Missing Pictdure in 2013 (NYFF), I was just as puzzled after watching his recent Meeting with Pol Pot, and found less explanation in reviews. This is more complicated, because it refers not to Panh's personal family history but three journalists' joint 1978 visit to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, based "partiallly" (the blurb says) on actual events, but again with Rithy Panh's use of hand-crafted clay figurines - a device that causes an already very weird moment to seem even more surreal.

On the one hand Panh stages this event with enough realism that it makes you wonder how he did it, where this was shot, who the Cambodian actors are. We know very well who Irène Jacob is, who plays a challenging French journalist called Lise Delbo, and who Grégoire Colin is, that Claire Denis regular who here plays a Pol Pot loyalist and "friend" who knew him in Paris and still correspnds with him, called Alain Cariou. We don't know who Cyril Gueï is who plays a fictitous photojournalist called Paul thomas; he seems mostly to have worked in French TV.

The question of why these three unrelated journalists, all with a marketdly different bent, would be risking their lives together may be answered simply by saying an opportunity for in-person coverage of Pol Pot was too good to pass up. The question arises though of why anybody in their right mind would enter into the world of a brutal dictator in the role such people hate most, someone aiming to report the truth about them. The answer is that war correspondents are risk-takers. In particular the friendly Cariou turns out to be just as much in danger of being offed as the other two, even though it's Thomas who's most outwardly provoctive, and he's the first to "disappear." It's hard to access the factual basis of this film, and other reviews in Screen Daily and Variety don't seem to try to.

Panh creates a convincing sense of place with long shots including what seems to have a plentiful number (for a low budget fllm) of uniformed Cambodians. He also uses black and white archival footage to suggest the presence a world that is being hidden from the journalists, or occasionally found by the photographer. At one point he's by himself in a storage space with large sacks of rice. He pulls out a pen knife and stabs the sack (but how would be be alone, and how would he have a knife? Panh doesn't handle Thomas, the photographer realistially) and he finds the large sack contains nothing but rice husks and dirt. This is after the journalists have been told the Khmer Rouge are producing a preposterously high yield of rice per acre in their farms. So, everythig is a lie. This is a portrait of the mechanics of propaganda.

An utterly surreal and horrible world emerges. The Vietnamese are blamed for every problem, danger, and wiping out of people. It's eplained that "Brother Number 1" will show up when he feels like it without prior warning.

This film is a surreal jumble of fact and invention that gives one, in some ways, a keen sense of what it might have been like to enter the world of this genocidal dictator of communist Cambodia during the three years from 1976 to 1979 1.5 to 3 million people were exterminated. But while Rithy Panh, the director, lost his own famly at this time, this is speculative, and that's perhaps why he makes it seem so intentionally artifical.

Meeting with Pol Pot/Rendez-Vous avec Pol Pot, 112 mins., debuted at Cannes May 16, 2024, also showing at Busan, Rio, the Viennale, Warsaw, and Hong Kong. It opened in French theaters Jun. 5, 2024. AlloCiné ratings: 3.3 (66%) press, 3.4 (68%) spectators. Screened for this revie as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center (Mar. 6-16, 2025). Showing:
Friday, March 7 at 8:30pm – Q&A with Rithy Panh and Elizabeth Becker
Thursday, March 13 at 8:45pm

[Chris Knipp]

HAFSIA HERZI, ISABELLE HUPPERT

PATRICIA MAZUY: VISITING HOURS/LA PRISONNIÈRE DE BORDEAUX (2024)

Friends of convenience

This somewhat oddball film should probably be discussed in relation to André Téchiné's recent Les gens d'à coté/My new Friends, which came out a liitle before Visiting Hours, in which Hafsia Herzi and Isabelle Huppert are also cast as an odd pair of friends, as here. In Téchiné's film, Herzi is part of an anti-police couple who move in next to Huppert, who is a bereaved policewoman, though she hides this from her new neighbors. But I have not seen this , wihch was less well received (AlloCine 3.1: 2.6 vs. 3.3: 2.8) but might cast more light on the pairing of. the two actors.

La Prisonnière de Bordeaux is interesting, and odd, and features two great actresses, if it's not wholly successful. It's a drama of class rather than ideology as Téchiné's appparently is. It resolves itself less successfully when it turns to a genre outcome, becoming a somewhat tongue-in-cheek crime thriller, but concudes in a way that neutralizes the dangers. Nobody gets hurt; but also various strands of the tale remain loose and unresolved, as if the scenarists were in too much of a hurry to finish things up.

Alma Lund (Huppert) and Mina Hirti (Herzi) meet as wives visiting men in the same prison - with this world nicely fleshed out for us. Alma is attracted to Mina's passion when she protests at being denied a visit because she isn’t on the schedule due to a clerical error, and can't come back the next day as requested because school kids and a long commute make that too difficult. Alma steps in and resolves this, inviting her to stay at her nearby mansion. This establishes a pattern, because Alma has time on her hands and finds in Mina an excitement and warmth she lacks in her own life. Huppert is superb as the bored, spoiled woman. It's a variation on many roles she has played before yet still an immensely watchable performance. Herzi, more in the background, is also fine in conveying the toughness and resentment of her lower status.

The husbands' different crimes define their respective class origins. That of Nasser (Lionel Dray) is "bijouterie," jewelry - not making it, stealing it. Christopher Lund, who is, or was, a wealthy neurosurgeon, was driving drunk and committed a terrible hit and run accident that permanently disabled one person and killed another. Alma lives in a chateau in the grand provincial style. It's near the prison. Attracted, she offers to let Mina stay with her to avoid a three-hour trip from far-off Narbonne, where she lives, and then engineers a greater connection so she can stay. She finds her a job. She worked at a dry cleaners. and now, thanks to Alma, she begins working (perhaps more comfortably?) at the laundry of the brain surgeon's former clinic.

Mina brings her two children, and the glib and privileged Alma talks their way into the local school in the middle of the session. The trouble for Mina is her husband's partner in crime Yacine (William Edimo), for whom Nasser took the fall, who thinks he's been cheated out of part of the haul and sees Mina's departure as a way of totally screwing him. He needs to be placated.

Memorable scenes simply show Mina and Alma sipping wine at the chateau, while Mina airs her more realistic view of life and Alma reveals an eccentric wit that has developed in a world of privilege. As Tim Grierson argues in his Cannes Screen Daily review, Mina accepts the relationship even though she may feel treated as a "charity case," Alma's "fix-it project," but "there is a level of mystery surrounding how much genuine affection there is between the women — or if each character sees in the other merely a means to an end."

The plot twist comes with an obvious giveaway scene that may make us wonder just how stupid Alma is (exactly what she says later to Mina) - or whether she is taking a wild risk out of such desperate boredom she is ready to throw her life away. As a French Letterboxd comment (from Antoine Devynck) says, "the scenario is well written" and the main characters are "well developed" thanks especially to the two "exceptional actresses," but "the only problem is in an excess of plot lines that remain unresolved at the end of the film," particularly with regard to the imminent early release of Christopher from his already privilege-based short sentence and that matter of missing loot from the jewelry heist and the angry accomplice. It's also been noted that the tone of this film is surprisingly mild compared to the bracingly harsh outcomes in Mazuy's haunting and dark previous film, Saturn Bowling (R-V 2022). Still, the two brilliant performers with Mazuy's help leave us with some memorable moments and an odd sense of the frangibility of lives while avoiding any conventional moralizing. Mazuy is an original.

Thomas Fouet wrote of this film inLes Fiches du Cinéma: "Convincing in her observation of a relationship transcending class, Patricia Mazuy is more hasty in her borrowings from genre films."

Visiting Hours/La prisonnière de Bordeaux, 112 mins., debuted at Cannes Directors' Fortnight May 18, 2024, also showing in São Paulo, Netherlands and the Viennale fests. French theatrical release was Aug. 28, 2024, with subsequent AlloCiné ratings of 3.3 press and 2.8 spectators (66%, 56%). It was screened for this review as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, NY. Showing:
Saturday, March 8 at 3:00pm – Q&A with Patricia Mazuy
Monday, March 10 at 8:30pm

[Chris Knipp]

CLÉMENT FAVEAU (RIGHT)

LOUISE COURVOISIER: HOLY COW/VINGT DIEUX (2024)

A rough coming of age in the Jura gets an authentic treatment

Another Cannes 2024 French directorial debut by a female filmmaker like R-V's Wild Diamond, this is worlds apart from that portrait of a would be reality TV star and online influencer. This coming of ager instead is immersed in the traditional world of dairy farming and cheesemaking in the Jura mountains. Nowhere near the Côte d'Azur and nothing like the lip enhancement and breast enlargement of Agathe Riedinger's Wild Diamond here. This young woman, Marie-Lise (Maïwene Barthelemy), works seven days a week. She rejects the envy of Totone (Clément Faveau), the rosy-cheeked, red-headed party boy who's forced to support himself and his young sibling when his drunken father suddenly dies in a car accident. The first-time actor, Faveau, is a freshface recruited in the region who this role fits like a glove.

Totone flails around. He takes a menial starting job at Marie-Lise's big dairy that's grueling and exploitive for him, and gets fired. Instead he tries to focus on making his own prizewinning Comté cheese - the field his late father was in - when he learns the gold medal is thirty thousand euros. He doesn't realize that he hasn't even gotten the certification that would allow his cheese to be considered. And when, despite a clash with Marie-Lise's brothers that gets him repeatedly beaten up, he starts getting sexual and then romantic with her, at first he repeatedly can't sdaget it up.

All this, which uses non-actors from the region and real locations, has a richy authentic combination of clumsy earnestness and sincerity and good nature that is very winning, even if as a film perahps Courvoisier's isn't as original or as striking as Riedinger's. What it has though, in spades, is old fashioned French rural spirit. Couroisier has told a story out of the region where she grew up using nothing but real people. And you feel this, but with no awkwardness: she coaxes natural performances from almost everybody.

You get a short course on how to make a wheel of Comté cheese, and you get the traditional cow birthing a calf with a young person helping pull it out. You get local partying, including the custom of a young man stripping his pants off and dancing in front of a sympathetic crowd. It's Totone. And though he keeps messing up, you get the feeling that he's going to do alright: he has shown he can take the hard knocks life deals him and come out with a smile.

The Screen Anarchy critic sees a Cannes Competition film in the future for this first filmmaker. Another reviewer ccalls Courvoisier an Éric Rohmer for the working class. And indeed this is a traditional working class world, not the class-escaping ploy of internet exploiters - though these folks too have wi-fi in their farmhouses, more accessible from what I've heard than what most Americans get.

Holy Cow/Vingt Dieux, 92 mins., debuted at Cannes Un Certain Regard, where it won the Prix de la Jeunesse, May 17, 2024, also shown at Karlovy Vary, Jerusalem, Hamburg, Angoulême many other festivals. France released Dec. 11, 2024, with AllocCiné ratings of 4.1 (82%) press and 4.0 spectators (80%). In the US, it is a Zeitgeist Films release in association with Kino Lorber. Sceduled to open at FilmForum, New York, Mar. 28.
Screened for this review as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center. Showing:
Saturday, March 8 at 12:30pm – Q&A with Louise Courvoisier.

Highest score.


CLÉMENT FAVEAU (TOP LEFT)

[Chris Knipp]

MATT DILLON, ANAMARIA VARTOLOMEI

JESSICA PALUD: BEING MARIA/MARIA (2024)

Maria Schneider's unfortunate path to fame recreated

This is a movie about how Maria Scneider's life got wrecked by doing Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (and maybe we shouldn't like Bertolucci afer that movie). But Being Maria seems, however tumultuous and eventful, a banal piece of work in both style and outlook - in other words, a conventional biopic, though it may be informative; it may surprise uninformed members of its audience that a lot of it is true, although, as the critic for Le Monde wrote, this film is more "martyrology" than biography.

Why do it? Because it's more fun than reading a Wikipedia article. But this film is not as compete as a Wikipedia bio. The filmmakers can justifiably point to its timely nature. This is very much a #MeToo story. The sequences about the making of Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris show that in a rape sequence, where Marlon Brando uses a stick of butter as a libricant for implied anal intercourse with the young actress who was 29 years younger than him, she had not been told in advance what was going to happen. This was by arrangement between Brando and himself, Bertolucci latger admitted, so Schneider would be taken by surprise. Bertolucci "wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress," he said. "I wanted her to react humiliated." As Maria Schneider says here, after the "rape" scene was shot she felt as if she had been raped twice, by Bertolucci, and by Brando.

This very young and inexperienced actress, nineteen years old, was given an "opportunity" that allowed her to be exploited in a blatant way. How could she turn down the chance to costar with Marlon Brando? Incidentallly did Anamaria Vartolomei, the star of Audrey Diwan's excellent and celebrated 2021 illegal abortion story film Happening/L'Évènement set herself up for exploitation by consenting to play Maria Schneider? But again, how could she resist? As for Matt Dillon, he doesn't discredit himself as Brando. He even does good mimicry of the actor at times. Arguably it is brave of him (or is it simply, also, foolhardy?) to take on this role. There is talk of roles taking the actor rather than vice versa. But isn't this rather stupid? Shouldn't the point be made that actors must be careful to make the choice of their roles and not have it made for them? (Or am I being stupid?)

Since this is taking a personal turn, it may be the moment to recoiunt my relation to Bertolucci's controversial movie. I went to see it, but was too horrified by the whole idea of it to watch it, or at least the sex scenes, and stood out in the lobby of the theater in Honolulu, where I was living at the time, till they were over. I was an admirer and constant reader of Pauline Kael, but when she said Last Tango was "a bold and imaginative work—a great work," I did not read how she explained or justified such a claim. There are reasons for questioning many of Kael's opinions and actions, but nothing can take away from how stimulating she was and how much excitement she generated about cinema and film critism, which has not been equaled since, even remotely. The time, 1973, when Last Tango was released, was also a moment of energy and stimulation around movies that hasn't come since.

A Letterboxd French post on this film says "Je n’ai jamais vu 'Un dernier Tango à Paris' et après ce film j’ai encore moins envie de le voir" ("I've never seen Last Tango in Paris and after seeing this film I have even less of a desire to see it." Another entry points out the unkindness of recreating the worst moment of Schneider's life. A third notes that the excess of nudity shows female directors too can be guilty of practicing the "male gaze."

It does not feel to me that Jessica Palud's film recreates successfully or interestingly the making or conceiving of Last Tango in Paris or presents her successive dissolute life, her turn to heroin addiction, and her lengthy love affair with a younger woman she met doing a dissertation about her. In this vein one might compare Mia Hansen-Love's early film Tout est pardonné/All Is Forgiven (2007), for a thought-provoking and elegant treatment of similar lives; and Mia Hansen-Løve has made terrific films since that early one. No director in France today deals with more supleness and intelligence with difficult moments of a life than Hansen-Løve.

Relatively recently it has become a practice to have an "intimacy coordinator" on set whenever shooting scenes that involve nudity or sex, to "facilitate" an environment where actors "understand what is expected of them" and ensure that there is "informed consent." But after recently watching Halina Reijn's new film Babygirl, it has seemed more clear to me that sexiness on screen doesn't come from similating sex,or from nudity, anyway.

Being Maria/Maria 103 mins., debuted at Cannes May 21, 2024, also showing at Seoul International Women's Film, Rio, Malaga, and Thessaloniki. French theatrical release Jun. 19. AlloCiné ratings 3.2 (64%) press, 3.5 70% spectators. In the USA, a Kino Lorber release. Screened for this review as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, NYC. Showtimes:
Saturday, March 15 at 6:45pm – Q&A with Matt Dillon and Anamaria Vartolomei

[Chris Knipp]

ADAM BESSA AND JULIA FRANZ RICHTER

JONATHAN MILLET: GHOST TRAIL/ LES FANTÔMES (2024)

TRAILER (FRENCH)

This is distinctive and single-minded sorytelling that holds you intensely and convincingly from the first frame to the last. We see a group of men dumped off in the desert from a Syrian prison. Then we follow one of them, who we'll call Hamid - he goes by various names (French-born, Tunisian-descent actor Adam Bessa), as, working in construction in France two yers later, he approaches many Syrians with a blurry photo of someone eventually identified as "Sami Hanna" who he is looking for. Eventually he himself finds someone he thinks is this man, who is called Harfaz (Tawfeek Barhoum of Cairo Conspiracy and The Boy from Heaven), whom he believes tortured him in the prison week after week for a year. Hamid is, now anyway, a part of a tight group tracking down criminals from the Syrian regime and he follows their irules, waiting for instructions and meeting regularly with a woman whom he eventually learns is Nina (Julia Franz Richter). He also sees a Syrian woman called Yara (Hala Rajab). Meethings with the group are done online with the cover of a combat video game. He talks regularly to his mother (Shafiqa El Till) in the Beirut Baqa'a Refugee Camp to whom he lies and says he is in Berlin (where most of the refugees are, so it's plausible). The filmmkers plausibly recreate Beirut later, using Amman.

Yara wants Hamid to give up his pursuit, try to forget, and go back to his occupation, when his wife and daughter were alive: lecturing on Arabic literature. He says, "look at me. Do I look like someone who could teach poetic stucture?" This is how well Jonathan Millet can rely on Bessa's face: how effectively it evokes the impossibility of poetry after torture.

Is this the man Hamid thinks he is? We don't know and are on tenderhooks to find out, especially since Hamid gets so close to him he can smell him, in fact scents him like an animal. He says he recognizes his "riha," his scent. There are other suspects named as being this man in other countries. Hamid never saw his torturer. He had a bag over his head when he was tortured. But he is sure he can recognize him and sticks intently to this belief. Is he crazy and doomed? Will he commit violence and wind up in a European prison or dead? We don't know. But the intimacy of the filmmaking, close to that "riha," keeps us from doubting or distancing ourselves from this man who pursues his man almost with a religious fervor.


The film is simple and straightforward and intimate, but moves voices, faces, and places around with its own rhythms. We hear things that have been said to Hamid while looking at him, silent: a simple way of getting us closer to him, as close as he gets to the man he is foolowing. There's a great, sparing use of ominous sound design and score, and a good use of a silence into which the voices come.

These two men, both actors in their early thirties, look younger, and rather frail. The dominent image is the face of actor Adam Bessa, a riveting actor with a look at once weary, haunted, and fiercely determined. The man who may be Harfaz has a lighter air. The effect of putting them close together (eventually they speak) is a litle like Humbert Humbert and Clare Quilty in Kubrick's Lolita, an air of mockery wedded to an air of danger, freedom or death both potentially around the corner in an instant. It's a riveting effect.

Jon Frosch in The Hollywood Reporter calls this film "a tense, terrifically acted thriller" but it also feels like something almost as obsessive as Robert Bresson's films, except that it has elements of both the spy novel and the political thriller. For those reasons it reminded me of Christian Petzold's Transit - there is the same sense of the complexity of world politics being alive in the moment, of one's identity and one's most intmate relations and fate trapped in a web of contemporary history. One never feels the filmmakers are intent on making a point so much as showing us how this could be for those who have lived it. Jonathan Millet's film is as good as Christian Petzold's, and that is very good.

And the horror of torture is evoked. This comes when Hamid listens to recordings of testimonies transmitted to him from the group he is in, while he is mentally comparing them with his own experience. We can't say what happens next but when it does, it's astonishing, with the revelation about "Harfaz," the man Hamid is following, retaining a teasing mystery, for me at least, even to the last.

I'm often a sucker for scoreless films and this is a little bit that, which contributes to the authenticity ahd focus. A terrific film.

Ghost Trail/Les Fantômes, 94 mins., debuted at Cannes Critics' Week May 15, 2024, showing also Warsaw, BFI London, São Paulo, Chicago, El Gouna, Stockholm, Palm Springs, Rotterdam, IFFR in Groningen, Warsaw, BFI London. Relesed in France Jul. 3, 2024. AlloCiné ratings 4.0 press, 3.8 spectators (80%, 76%).High score. Distributedin the US by Music Box Films, it opens in New York on Friday, May 30 at Film at Lincoln Center, expanding thereafter. Screened for this review as part of the Rendez-Vpous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, NYC. Showing:
Sunday, March 9 at 3:15pm – Q&A with Jonathan Millet
Tuesday, March 11 at 9:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

HÉLÈNE VINCENT, JOSIANE BALASKO

FRANҪOIS OZON: WHEN FALL IS COMING/QUAND VIENT L'AUTONNE (2024)

Plot twists enliven the life of a retired old lady

One must bow to the veteran critic Leslie Felperin, who ranks this film in the top ten or even the top five of Oxon's hefty filmography in her Hollywood Reporte review of Quand vient l'autonne which she sees as "a blackly comic thriller" and points out is "a tonal swerve into naturalism" after the "screwball energy" of his last feature the giddy Isabelle Huppert-starring period courtroom drama The Crime Is Mine. Such shifts are not uncommon in this filmmaker. He sent out a period YA gay teen romance with SWummer of 85 four years ago; a deadpan and expository tale of assisted suicide for the elderly the next year with Everything Went Fine ; then the very campy Fassbinder-based Peter van Camp. If we go back to far-off 2018, Ozon cirected By the Grace of God, a very serious and impressive based-on-fact exposé of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests. There are many Ozons.

There are enough twists and turns in his new provincial French noir thriller for a miniseries, but Ozon deftly fits them into one hour-and-forty-two-minute feature, with intentional plot holes as if for breathing room. Overall the theme may be a variation on the old one that conventional, bland-seeming middle-class folks have plenty to hide; and that as the priest who'd heard confession for thirty years told André Malraux, people are a lot less happy than they appear, and none of them are grown up.

The pivot point of the acton is the aging but sprightly and stylish Michelle (Hélène Vincent), who draws sustenance from her country town and its lovely surrounding Burgundy landscapes and is looking forward to happy final years doting on her sweet young grandson Lucas. She's about to be left him for the last few weeks of the summer, when an innocent but very unfortunate mycological accident causes his testy newly divorced mother Valerie (Ludivine Sagnier, back again with the director for the first time since Swimming Pool) to whisk Lucas back to Paris and declare a long-simmering simmering mother-and-daughter feud to berenewed and permanent.

Michelle is shattered, and her best friend and near-neighbor Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko) turns ill and pessimistic; and maybe it's also being hinted here that pessimism causes certain fatal illnesses. A bright spot, but an iffy one, is the release from prison of Marie-Claude's son Vincent (Pierre Lottin) whom Michelle is fond of and in whose reform she believes. His mother holds to the idea that he's a bad'un for life. An unannounced voluntary effort by Vincent to set right Michelle's famiy rift has a surprising and very complicated consequence. Along the way, sme of the family hostility is explained when we learn what Michelle's former occupaton was.

All of this and more shifts around in ways that show off Ozon's slyest and most provocative tricks in a more or less naturalistic provincial setting (with a couple of trips back to Paris). There's a lot of skill about the way this is done. Ozon's provincial bourgeoisie is far from being as flat-out mean and evil as Chabrol's, and this action isn't restricted to the provinces anyway. But there's a dark cast and a danger to this world, even though it's got sweet things like the boy Lucas and his 18-year-old counterpart (Paul Beaurepaire), and even thouigh the depiction of Vincent, while it teases us and slyly hints at potential trouble, suggests people can shape up, despite what his mom thinks.

There's a lot about property, wealth, and parental control here. Before she cuts Hélène off, Valérie, who Michelle has already ceded her Paris apartment to, has declared that she wants to inherit the Burgundy cottage too, even though she doesn't like it, just for the value. Valerie is involved in a contentious divorce from her husband, Lucas' dad, Laurent (Malik Zidi), who wants Lucas to come and live with him in Dubai. Is that ownership or affection? Anyway, eventually Lucas opts for Burgundy: the charms of Dubai must be hard to grasp for a nine-year-old.

When Fall Is Coming/Quand vient l'autonne, 102 mins., Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, premiere, also San Sebastián, Pingao. Oct. 2 French release. AlloCiné ratings: 3.5 (70%) press, 3.6 spectators (76%). A Music Box Films release. Showing:
Friday, March 7 at 3:30pm
Sunday, March 16 at 5:45pm

Sunday, March 16 at 5:45pm[/B]

[Chris Knipp]

GILLES LELOUCHE

LUDOVIC BOUKHERMA, ZORAN BOUKHERMA: AND THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM/LEURS ENFANTS APRÈS EUX (2024)

An admired coming of age novel set in '19's France about class, deindustrialiaation, and diminished hopes

This adaptation establishes the focus right away on youth Anthony Casati (Paul Kircher) and his cousin (Louis Memmi) in the summer, in the Fensch valley (vallée de la Fensch) in northeastern France. It is a desolate area with dormant blast furnaces and a lake with cities the deindustrialization of the time has left empty, others remaining impverished. For two decades we have been learning from movies about the French banlieues, housing projects ringing around French cities where poverty, racial conflict, and crime abound and popular arts like hip hop and parcour are practiced, a setting where lively indigenous action films like Ma 6-T va crack-er have flourished. We haven't heard so much about the Fensch valley or lost steel mills. The prize-winning novel by Nicolas Mathieu depicts the coming of age and disenchantment story adapted by the Bukherma twins, Ludovic and Zoran in their feature film debut. It's an ambitious film that might have used more narrative economy and clarity but contains some dramatic scenes and lively performances.

What happens is that Anthony is woven in and out of the loosely told tale, with four summer touch points ending in 1998, that provides us with bad-boy flirting and a stolen canoe, gate crashing, and a feud with an Arab boy over a stolen motorbike as a framework to hang a portrait of a generation struggling to come out of nothing.

Anthony initially steals the motorbike from his embittered and depressed alcoholic father Patrick (veteran actor and director Gilles Lellouche) to attend a bourgeois party. He and his cousin met girls who invited him when they stole the boat club canoe on the lake. To get to where the posh people live he and his cousin can't walk. But the motorboke is sacred and it's almost suicidal when he takes it, definitely so when some Arab boys, including Hacine (up-and-comer Sayyid El Alami) who get rudely expelled when they crash the fête, steal Patrick's moto for parts in misplaced revenge thus, in a way, punishing their own underclass.

This event, the fight at the party between Anthony and Hacine, and the theft of the motorboke, resonates through the years that follow in four subsequent summers till Anthony, who has not wound up "at Austen, in Texas" as he boasted to Stéphanie (Angelina Woreth), the girl he first met at the lake, winds up after a bout in the army in a medial job reencountering Hacine in a "friendly" atmosphere, the jubilation of the 1998 when "les bleus", the French national team, have won the nation's forst World Cup in soccer. He talks Hacine into letting him take a solo ride on his bike. He steals it for a while, to visit Stéphanie. But it's over.

There's not much sex in the story. It's as if poverty has diminished the sex drive.

We get a picture, however momentary, of the life of Hacine, who's a Moroccan immigrant and gets sent back the the bled for a while for the trouble he stirs by destroying Patrick's moto. There is a different, less definable tension with his father Malek (Lounès Tazairt). They address each other in French, not Moroccan Arabic. There is a cultural and generational cloud that separates them but not the cloud of alcohol and defeat.

The opening canoe-stealing scene with the hush of the lake had promise, but this film, for all its ambition, becomes a disappointment as if meanders on. Enthusiastically acted but criticized as more superficial compared to the Goncourt winning novel source, it was also callled 'baggy' by Guy Lodge in his Variety)) review.

The blurb calls the film "Inspired equally by the works of Émile Zola and Bruce Springsteen" but that's just the trouble: neither fits, ahd successive loud pop song passages are a simplistic way of injecting period flavor. Lodge suggests the more literary allusisons, including John Steinbeck, have been lost in an adaptaption he finds executed "with an earnest heart and a heavy hand."

Paul Kircher, so of French actors Jérome Kirchder and Irène Jacob, is virtally French cinematic royalty and definitely going places. He would seem a good young actor to hang your melodramatic class-conscious coming of age movie on. But he comes off less well here than he did in in the previous year's French sci-fi hit Animal Kingdom, where his child-like intensity, baby face and bee-sting lips play well as just a kid to Romain Duris's rugged dad, maybe even better the year before as the precocious but troubled gay boy from the provinces arrived In Paris in Le Lycéen as a younger version of the pooymath writer-director from Rennes Chistohe Honoré, who formerly adopted Louis Garrel, then Vincent Lacoste as his muses or alter egos. In Winter Boy (the English title), Kircher performs the feat of making instability and anguish feel lighthearted. He got nominated for César for the Most Promising Young Male Actor (Meilleur Espoir Masculin) for both of these films. In this new one, also a big French film, Kircher is fourteen when first seen. The subsequent years, including the brief military stint, don't seem to harden him. Nonetheless he has a great presence and he won the Marcello Mastroianni Award at Venice for this perfornance. He is definitely an actor to watch, and so is Sayyid El Alami, whom we don't get to see enough of here. (He has a bigger role in the higher rated Cannes Critics' Week film La Pampa/Block Pass, which opens in Paris March 5.)

And Their Children After Them/Leurs Enfants après eux, 146 mins., debuted in competition at Venice Aug. 31, 2024, showing also at Namur, Rio, Bordeaux and Leiden. French release Dec. 4, 2024. AlloCiné ratings: 3.5 press, 3.6 spectators (70%, 72%). Screened for this review as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center. Showing:
Thursday, March 13 at 1:00pm
Saturday, March 15 at 3:15pm – Q&A with Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma


PAUL KIRCHER, ANGELINA WORETH

[Chris Knipp]

ABOU SANGARÉ

BORIS LOJKINE: SOULEYMANE'S STORY/L'HISTOIRE DE SOULEYMANE (2024)

TRAILER

An African immigrant's struggle in Paris

This film is above all the story, ripped from the headlines but intensely and richly fleshed out, of the plight of an African emigrant (Souleymane from Guinea) who has gotten to Paris and is awaiting an immigration interview with great nervous uncertaintty. This interview, which will determine his future, is coming for Souleymane in two days, and the film runs up until he walks - or staggers - out of it. This format nods to Cristian Mungiu’s 2007 Cannes winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days as well as the Dardennnes' Two Days, One Night. It also fits into a small but memorable recent genre, the food delivery saga. Of the latter I have previously reviewed two, the 2003 Sean Baker and Tsou Shih-Ching docu-feature Take Out (2003) and Taku Aoyagi's 2021 Tokyo Uber Blues, a wearying tour de force in which the cinematographer-editor is also the Uber Eats toiler, filming himself.

Boris Lojkine is juggling many balls here, and creating his own cinéma vérité using actual people of the street and mostly black men in those strets and in homeless shelters where Souleymane goes to sleep for the night. We get a glimpse of the Uber Eats form of exploitation, as we did in Taku Aoyagi's's film, where it's possible, as two men who advise Soulaymane show, just like two who advised Aoyagi, that there are strategies the beginner is ignorant of for making more money by going to sources that are faster and more reliable. On the other hand, Sean Baker's early piece focuses on old school New York restaurant delivery boys, simple back and forth drudgery before apps and electronics made everything faster and more complicated.

For Suleymane life is a complicated non-stop challenge. Besides his difficulty negotiating the food delivery job, which he's failing at every day - he makes too little, has an accident, and eventually altogether loses the account he has been renting from a duplicitous person, there are also the matters of his housing and money difficulties weighing him down. But above all that, he is trying to buy documents from an unreliable street agent and, when we first meet him, taking lessons about how to present himself at the imigration asylum interview.

The latter is the crux of the matter. It turns out he has been memorizing a story to impersonate a political refugee, and thereby get greater preference than a merely personal one who has come not to escape danger but to find a better life.

Abou Sangaré here is "making an unforgettably persuasive and poignant debut," wrote Jessica Kiang in her Variety review. The drama is "propulsive" and "compassionate." It is also wearying, ambiguous, and rather depressing, like the granddaddhy of all such films, Roberto Rossellini's 1948 Ladri di biciclette or Bicycle Thieves. Only this time, the system may be more sympathetic and more savvy, and the refugee, a young man with boundless energy, is in touch with his mother and his fiancee in Guinea, and the many African and other black people on the streets and borders of Paris provide a different landscape of a global refugee crisis that is only going to grow in the future. I provided links to some of my reviews of films related to the refugee cris in my review of Megan Mylan's Simple As Water.. There is no question that Abou Sangaré recreates the plight of this man with unforgettable presence and energy.

Souleymane's Story/Histoire de Souleyman, 94 mins., debuted at Cannes Un Certain Regard May 19, 2024, receiving the Jury Prize and the Best Actor Award for newcomer Abou Sangaré. It has showings also at Karlovy Vary, Jerusalem, Reykjavík, Toronto, Leiden, Thessaloniki, Stockholm, Taipei and other international festivals. The French theatrical release was Oct. 9, 2024, with subsequent AlloCiné ratings of 4.1 (82%) press and 4.2 (84%) spectators. (A series high score.) It was screened for this review as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln center, NYC.
Showing:
Sunday, March 9 at 1:00pm – Introduction by producer Bruno Nahon
Friday, March 14 at 4:00pm

.

[Chris Knipp]

LOUIS GARREL, LÉA SEYDOUX
\
QUENTIN DUPIEUX: THE SEOND ACT/LE DEUXIÈME acte (2024)

Jokey Cannes opener

A Pirandellian, glossy performance , this Quentin Dupieux signals his mainstream arrival, in a way: it features three of France's most high profile actors, Vincent Lindon, Léa Seydoux, and Louis Garrel, along with Raphaël Quenard as Willy, a friend of David (Louis Garrel) who brings him in to have sex with his girlfriend Florence Druckder (Léa Seydoux), a famous actor, because he can't. She then brings in her father Guillaume Tardieu (Vincent Lindon), just because. Things aren't fully explained: it's very much a world of gesture and facade.

And of quietly show-offy cinematic technique. The opening segment of the film consists of two very long dialogue-intensive tracking shots, first of David (Garrel) and Christian aka /willy (Quenard) walking and talking side by side, , then of David and Guillaume doing the same. Then they arrive at a rural outpost, like a road house, called Le Deuxième Acte (The Second Act).

As the dialogue preceeds it emerges that this is all a film shoot, though when they're doing the film itself and when they're just talking out of character is intentionally kept vague at times. The whole game is to shift back and forth between the two, to blur the boundaries without stopping the flow of talk. Guillaume and Willy both say improvisationally un-PC things during the long tracking walks that David fusses about because he says since this is being filmed, they'll get in trouble. And at the end, Guillaume, who has said he can't abide trans people or "fags" (the traditional un-PC French term used here is "pédés,") turns out to be, himself gay and now talking to his male partner/lover - unless, as is possible, this last scene is that, a last scene. Get it? No, well, this is a Quentin Dupieux film.

Other scenes: a waiter comes to serve the four inside the Second Acte restaurant, but pouring them all glasses of wine, his hand shakes so much it spills the wine all over the place. He is no waitor at all but a bad actor. He reveals that this is his first job performing as an extra (figurant in French) and he is so excited about it he can't control his hands. He has to quit eventually and, in his car, takes out a pistol and shoots himself. It's all a stunt.

In another sequence Florence and Willy are in a back room and he approaches her for a kiss, which she takes as an assault. He says since they are going to do this in the fllm, he was merely getting in a bit of practice. But she threatens to sue, and calls her agent or advocate to insist she be allowed to withdraw from the shoot and still be reimbursed.

Guiallume takes a call, interrupting the shoot, which turns out to be an offer to perform in the next film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Guiallaume often talks about how important he is, his enormous experience as an actor (for which he demands authority over everyone else, including the AI director), but he insists also on his worshipful admiration of Paul Thomas Anderson.

All this, the biggest joke or gimmick of all, is the first ever case of a film enirely directed by AI. The "director" appears on a laptop held up to the actors by an assistant.

Some of this reminds me of Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier's (less jokey, more intellectually challenging) [The Five Obstructions (2003). The Second Act is a film that deconstructs itself constantly and breaks down the fourth wall. It also allows the actors sometimes to make sophisticated fun of themselves, though whether Seydoux spends excessive amounts on clothes and makeup or Lindon is excessively macho and boastful or Raphaël Quenard has some sexist and ideas or they are ever actually thought to have these failings I don't know.

I found this all very funny until, that is, I started to think it wasn't as much of a laugh as most average episodes of "That '70s Show." And then it came to feel rather tame. But it's still a neatly constructed, stylish, and above all star-studded p iece from Dupieux, perhaps his most elegant and widely accessible film, while still quite odd.

The Second Act/Le deuxième acte, 80 mins., was the Opening Night film of the Cannes Festival May 14, 2024 and simultaneously opened theatrically in Belgium and France. It was included in a dozen other international festivals throughout 2024 including the Viennale, Taipei, and Rotterdam. AlloCiné ratings: 3.8 (76%) press, 3.3 (66%) spectators. Screened for this review because of its inclusion in the Rendez-Vous With French Cinema at Lincoln Center (Mar. 6-16, 2024). Showing:
Saturday, March 8 at 9:00pm – Introduction by Vincent Lindon
Thursday, March 13 at 4:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

VINCENT LINDON, STÉFAN CREPON, BENJAMIN VOISIN

DELPHINE COULIN, MURIEL COULIN: THE QUIET SON/JOUER AVEC LE FEU (2024)

A family ripped apart by fascism in its midst

The Quiet Son/jouer avec le feu is a powerful fllm about a disturbing subject done in a striking simple style; its look generated by dp Frédéric Noirhomme was perhaps the most distinctive visual style of the films in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema this year, and the acting has a contained explosivenes that understandably won a prize at Venice. The Coulin sisters, Delphine and Muriel, focus on two closely bonded brothers -- they may know first hand about strong sibling unity.

The brothers are 22-year-old Félix, callled "Fus" (Benjamin Voisin) and the younger Louis (Stefan Crepon) who's the academic star and about to enter university. They, have grown up alone with their SNCF French railroad engineeer dad Pierre Hohenberg (Vincent Lindon), thrown together because their mother died a long time ago. They live by the railroad in Metz, Lorraine in northeastern France like a bear clan. The warm, rock-solid bond is shaken and then ripped away when Fus turns out to be involved in the violent street actions of members of the ultra right.

Based on a novel, this film is not about the intricacies of poliitics or the various shadings of fascism. Nor does it elucidate the kind of union- and worker-centric liberal humanistic thought Pierre was involved in in younger days but now has no time to actively support. The allegiances are visceral and the new direction of Fus is felt as a gut-wrenching betrayal. The iinsight of the Coulin sisters is to see audiences will feel the new menace of fasism better depicted in the heart of a small family.

The pared-down monolithic focus of this novel adaptation from Laurent Petitmangin's Ce qu'il faut de nuit is a template for the striking visual and editing styles. We're not given time to think. It's enjoyable for while to be in such confident directorial hands.

Emotionally this film works very well and stylistically it impresses with frame after frame. France's shift to the right is a delicate, complicated thing and that, plus the relentlessness of the screenplay and the editing, can be hard to take even if one admires the film, and leads some viewers to object that this is oversimplification. Willing to accept the bold strokes for how they wedded compelling acting with striking visual style, I nonetheless felt manipulated by the screenplay's neat relentlessness.

The great Vincent Lindon excels in playing strong, masculine men, and he delivers the simple sincerity and outrage of Pierre with the kind of solid masterful force he has brought to more delicate roles like Those Who Remain (2007) and Mademoiselle Chambon[/I] (2010). The quality of his performance won him the Volpi Award for best actor at the Venice festival. Rising star Benjamin Voisin was previously seen as a confident gay teen in Ozon's YA adaptation Summer of 85 and the buoyant but doomed commercial journalist the Xavier Giannoli's 2021 Balzac recreation, Lost Illusions/Illusions perdues. He has an explosive enthsiasm, suggesting passion in search of a direction, which it finds in the dangerous conneries of his new skinhead pals. Given his bright spirit, the cold sullenness that follows is all the more dramatic.

Unless we are fascists, we're likely to feel instant sympathy for Pierre, and any parent or potential parent must sense how devastating it is for a son to turn into someone you don't know. But the hard edge and suddenness of Pierre's rejection of Fus shows his own monolithic extremism, which the younger son, Louis, perhaps the brihtest of the three, cannot so easily join in with.

The film doesn't only simplify the issues down to a few hints, a terrible involvement, and a terrible double consequence. It becomes a harsh solo cello sonata of a film whose dark, intimate visual style, lighting, color, and framing are so dstinctive it's a bit distracting, but if a distinctive style is a great one we don't want to complain. We may end by feeling that we've been manipulated by the assured, monolithic story development, however. There is no breathing room, and there is no allowance of second chances or second guesses. The progress of the action is relentless. However, unless you've been forewarned, there are bound to be surprises, and the relation between Louis and Fus starts to modulate once the older boy helps the younger one find a place to live in Paris and move there so he can study at the Sorbonne. And then it becomes terribly difficult for all three. There is a grim finale.

A typical negative view is expressed by Jessica Kiang in her Variety[/I] review, wose heading is "Stolid Parenting Drama With a Social-Issues Slant." The film, Kiang writes, "...states and restates the problem of rising, increasingly aggressive alt-right sympathies among young, working class populations, without providing any novel or particularly useful insights into it." But be that as it may, the stating and restating delivers a visceeral message we may need, and the images with their dark innner spaces, linger in the mind.

The Quiet Son/Jouer avec le feu, 11 mins., debuted Sept. 4, 2024 at Venice (Best Actor award for Lindon), also showing at Chicago, Montreal (Cinemania), and (Göteborg . I. was releazed theatrically in France Jan. 22, 2025, with resulting AlloCiné ratings of 3.6 press (76%) and 3.4 spectator (68%). It was screened for this review as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center Feb. 2025. Showing:
Saturday, March 8 at 9:00pm – Introduction by Vincent Lindon
Thursday, March 13 at 4:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

INDIA HAIR, CAMILLE COTTIN

EMMANUEL MOURET: THREE FRIENDS/TROIS AMIES (2024)

Mouret's accomplished ronde of relationship shifting

Handsomely directed and tactfully performed,Three Friends/Troies amies shows Emmanuel Mouret reaching a peak style he's been perfecting from film to film, or from one onscreen tryst to the next. This is his preferred kind of ronde that is an updated version of Éric Rohmer, reimagined as adult farce.

There is also an element of gentle spook, in the form of Victor (the ubiqitous Vincent Macaigne), a schoolteacher who dies, but returns to counsel his widow Joan (India Hair), who all along seems incapable of love. (She does do like, but even that doesn't always last.) She did not love Victor with whom she has had a chld, and she soon loses interest in other men who appear. But has the ghost of Victor found someone for Joan at the end? Or, in the the manner of a ronde, has she just come full circle?

Anyway, there are those two best friends, Alice (Camille Cottin of "Call My Agent") and Rebecca (Sara Forestier) who negotiate unstable affairs while keeping each other company through each surprising emotional development that Mouret lays out for us. The setting is Lyon.

There is something a bit disspiriting about a tale of romance that hinges, as this one does, on a woman who seems largely asexual. But viewers at the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema press screenings were heard saying this seemed to them a spot-on picture of how love works, or simply, alternatively, "essentially French." Jordan Mintzer says as much in his Hollywood Reporter review: "it doesn't get more French than this." It does conform to a notion of traditional Frenchness about love, in some way at least; but in humanity and beauty it falls short of Rohmer by a good margin. Visually it's only so-so: there is something odd about Laurent Desmet's cinematography that makes faces look a bit bleached out.

Guy Lodge, reviewing the film in Variety., described Three Friends as "a diverting, lithely acted but surface-level relationship comedy of mid-life marital unrest." He saw it while debuting at Venice "in the top tier of a Big Three fest," and he thought its appearance in that position might raise the international profile or the director, who's had 13 César noms but still isn't much recognized abroad outside of series like this one. Whether or not Mouret is essentially French, Lodge spots that he "channels Woody Allen from the opening credits onwards." But his scenarios show a more cool and philosophical and less jokey approach to romantic comedy than Woody's - and are rather more distinctive. Mouret may be Mouret, but he has always seemed a bit watered down and derivative to me. Nonetheless by practicing the same thing over and over, he has by now achieved a degree of polish that explains the Venice niche.

As Lodge concludes, "Mouret doesn’t probe very deeply into his characters or their changeable desires, though he moves them around with some elan." They are pieces in a speed chess game of partner-switching.

Three Friends/Trois amies, 117 mins., debuted at Venice Aug. 30, 2024, also featured at Busan, Göteborg, Rotterdam, and Québec. French theatrical realease Nov. 6, 2024 with resulting AlloCIné ratings of 3.9 press (78%) and 3.7 spectators (74%). Screened for this review as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, New York. Showing:
Thursday, March 6 at 6:00pm – Introduction by Emmanuel Mouret and India Hair
Thursday, March 6 at 8:45pm

[Chris Knipp]

OLIVIER ASSAYAS: SUSPENDED TIME/HOURS DU TEMPS (2024)

Covid lockdown in the provinces

The festival blurb effuses about this picture, describing it as a "tonally masteCrful dramady from the great Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Personal Shopper)" that amasses "a wealth of insigghts into the foiundational relationships and rural backgroud that shaped him" and "equally adept at thoughtfully reconstructing an unprecedented moment in our shared history with the grace and compassion that only a master filmmaker can bring." This is what festival blurbs do: whatever they're given, they make the best of it. And there are some interesting things here, especially for diehard fans of Olivier Assayas, or those interested in how well-off French movie directors spent the covid lockdown period. The lengthy monologues of the Assayas stand-in, played by the obiquitous Vincent Macaigne, which go on and on self-indulgently, have some interesting things to say. But these monologues are totally undramatic. The entire film is a setting waiting for an action that never takes place: it is static.

The Assayas stand-in is director Paul Berger (Vicent Macaigne), who is living through the covid lockdown in April of 2020 with his brother Etienne (Micha Lescot), a middle-aged music journalist, and their respective romantic partners, Carole and Morgane, of whom not as much is seen. This is an occasion for the two brothers to reconnect, and to remoinisce about their childhood spent in this syvan setting. Actually shot at the property where Assayas grew up. The whole thing is thus doubly autobiographical.

This is a challenge for Macaigne to deliver Assayas' long, complicated, highly intelligent and interesting speeches with admirable fluency. But they may seem more reciting than acting.

An AlloCiné spectator comment summarized by saying, "The best part of the film is the end credits with a song by Brassens, as if to reward us for having stayed until the end of this detestable film." However, the AlloCiné press and spectator scores are in the 60%-70% range. This is a film that would have more meaning for some segmants of the French audience, who would appreciate the nuances of French culture ad society and the context of French intellectual life. Nonetheless I found it interesting, even if at tines I felt that I was more being read to than watching a dramatic film.

The squabbles and silliness of the lockdown are familiar, such as ordering too many expensive and inessential things from Amazon because it is something to do, while the brothers argue over this. Another AlloCiné gleaning is a review that says that when it was the introductory film at Cannes, it was unique in reflecting exactly what was going on in the minds of everyone in the audience. It does reflect the covid lockdown experience, if from a rather upperclass-white point of view, of course. This film may be destined to be more a footnote thanone of Assayas' important films.

Suspended Time/Hors du Temps, 105 mins. debuted at Berlin Feb. 17, 2024, showing also at Sydney, Busan, Rio, the Viennale and Mumbai. French theatrical release Jun. 19, 2024. AlloCiné ratings: 2.3 (46 press, 2.1 spectators (46%, 42%). Low score.

[Chris Knipp]

ÉDOUARD SULPICE, ANGELINE WORETH

SOPHIE FILLIÈRES: THIS LIFE OF MINE/MA VIE MA GUEULE (2024)

Portrait of a woman at the end of her tether

Sophie Fillières will make her zany comedies no longer. She died July 31, 2023 at the age of 58 following a long illness. She was a graduate of La Fémis, France's national film school. She was married to Pascal Bonitzer, himself a filmmaker: his recent work was the excellent The Stolen Canvas/La toile volé (R-V 2024). Fillières is said to have been known for her romantic comedies that combined intimacy and high-mindedness and to have begun as a representative of the "young French cinema" of the 1990s. This Life of Mine/Ma vie ma gueule, perhaps a fitting farewell, with autobiographical elements, is the partly droll, partly serious portrait of a middle-aged woman and single mother of two adult children who lives in Paris. Age 55 becomes a midlife crisis for her. She is losing her mind. But for us, at first at least, it's a laugh.

There is something very French about this. It's much funnier than the only other Sophie Fillières film I can recall seeing, the 2014 If You Don't, I will/Arrête ou je continue, featuring Emanuelle Devos and Matthieu Amalric, who play a squabbling couple. The low-keyed borderline-crazy eccentricty of Jaoui's character, Barberie 'Barbie' Bichette, works considerably better, I think, and has more profound implications.

The film stars Agnès Jaoui (The Taste of Others, Look at Me), herself a filmmaker as well as comic actress, and someone whose own style seems absolutely tailor-made for this tale of eccentricity and "losing it." Jaoui's work with her equally distinctrive collaborator husband Jean-Pierre Bacri is more forceful and aggressive than Fillière's compositions here. By reducing her action to dozens of small bird-blink flicks of the eye and twists of the neck, Jaoui creates from the start a series of delights. If you get on the wavelength she gives off as "Barbie," you will have a lot of laughs. Not out-loud laughs, but inner ones. For a while. Eventually being unhinged is not fun. It means being lost, cut off from the world. But it begins with eccentric charm, charming eccentricity, and from that the character gains sympathy she will need when things take a darker turn.

It is droll, and entertaining, to see Barbie talking to herself in the shower or in the mirror or making up a poem on a large tablet for her bemused office-mates. She is crazy, but it's droll. These are really a series of little skits, like the nicely rounded one when she orders soft drinks and writes a poem on a pad for two fake "deaf" girls running a scam at a cafe. These things could go on and on.

But underneath there lurks bitterness and a sense of hopelessness, and there are thoughts of death. A still point--still droll--is the moments when Barbie is with her shrink, who, rather conventionally, refuses to utter a word to her. This still provides the impulse for an amusing soliloquy on what it will be like when she grows old, when they both do, and she still sees him, tottering in to his bureau on her cane. But the "deaf" girls incident ends badly, with Barbie having a crisis precipitated perhaps by troubling thoughts of death, and winds up in the hospital, helped there by a man named Bertrand, a young love she's forgotten.

The hospital is a clinic, and she is there now. Eventually her attentive son Julien ("Junior," Édouard Sulpice) and daughter Rose (Angelina Woreth) are allowed to come to visit her. Fillières recreates here, telescoped, the experience of a mental hospital and tentative recovery, singnalled by Barbie's learning the orderlies' and doctors' real names and not calling them all "Fanfan" anymore.

There is a Nouvelle Vague feel about the jerky, fancifal action that finishes the film. Rose, Junior, and Barbie are ready to celebrate her release from the clinic by going together on a trip to England. But then Barbie chooses to go by herself, abruptly, taking all three passports and leaving behind her suitcase, going to find an old friend, Maddie (Clara Simpson) from decades ago. BUt then she is off to Scotland to "become a lord or lady of Glenoaig Lodge," in Strathcarron, from an old advert she has dredged up. Does she find peace in the wilds of Scotland? The critic for Cahiers du Cinéma calls this "the comedy of despair."

Some of the Letterboxd French viewers seem to hate the film. (Note below the wide variation between the reactions of critics and ordinary viewers.) Has it perrhaps cult potential? Certainly for deep fans of the late Sophie Fillières and of the admirable Agnès Jaoui. Successive viewings may make more sense of the flat-seeming final moments.

This Life of Mine / Ma vie ma gueule, 99 mins., debuted at Cannes May 15, 2024 in Directors' Fortnight, where it won the SACD Prize for best French film. It also was the opening film at Seoul International Women's Film Festival and included at Montreal (Cinemania). Released in French theaters Dept. 18, 2024, it received AlloCiné ratings of 3.9 press (78%) and 2.5 spectators (50%). It was screened for this review as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, NYC. Showing:
Thursday, March 6 at 3:00pm
Monday, March 10 at 6:00pm – Introduction by producer Julie Salvador