Pantheon Movie of The Month - LA REINE MARGOT - Podcast edition

Bina007 is joined by Beric175 for a DVD commentary of the classic 1994 Patrice Chereau film La Reine Margot, based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas.   Starring Isabelle Adjani, Virna Lisi and Daniel Auteuil, the film is a beautifully filmed exploration of the power politics that led to the St Bartholomew's Day massacre in sixteenth century France.

Bina and Beric discuss the 2hr 17 minute version of the film and make reference to George R R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.  Naturally, the commentary contains spoilers for both the film and the novels.

[MP3] Download or play this episode directly

[Archive] View this episode’s page on Archive.org

[IMDb] La Reine Margot at IMDb

[Ebert] The Roger Ebert review

[Beric] More podcasts from Beric

[iTunes] Subscribe to Bina007 on iTunes

MON MEILLEUR AMI/MY BEST FRIEND - thin

Patrice Leconte is a director of whom I expect better. His 1996 period piece, RIDICULE was a quirky love story and a tart dissection of the superficiality of society. But with time, Leconte's ambitions have narrowed. This is not a problem per se. L'HOMME DU TRAIN, for example, was a small quiet film but unusual and affecting nonetheless. Quite simply, it told of two very different men who met by chance and tacitly decided to swap lives. But in MON MEILLEUR AMI, Leconte's sets the bar lower and still fails to meet it.

Leconte's basic point is that we have commodified relationships: we network more easily than we make friends. Contrasted with the Greeks' idolisation of friendship, pace Patrochlus and Achilles, modern-day "contacts" seem rather thin indeed. This modern fault is embodied in an antique dealer called François who isn't above the odd scam, but is short of any true friends. Challenged to produce a best friend by his colleague or forfeit an expensive vase, he sets about trying to become amiable. To do this, he engages a cheery taxi driver with a passion for trivia, called Bruno (Dany Boon). Auteuil plays François like a less loathsome version of David Brent. He's congenitally awkward - guaranteed to empty a bar even as he offers to buy everyone a round. By contrast, Boon's Bruno is a delightful creation and genuinely sympathetic.

It doesn't take a PhD to work out that Bruno and François will form an odd-ball friendship. Nor was it utterly surprising given the mawkish build-up that we'd end with a televised high-drama denouement with all the subtlety of the Julia Roberts declaration of love at the end of NOTTING HILL. What's missing is the wry understatement of L'HOMME DU TRAIN. Or indeed, a sustained comic element. In other words, MY BEST FRIEND may be nicely photographed and well-cast but it is also thinly written, patchy in its comedy, and obvious in its plotting and character development.

MON MEILLEUR AMI/MY BEST FRIEND played Toronto 2006 and opened in Italy, France and Belgium in 2006. It is currently playing in the UK and opens in Australia on Mat 24th and in the USA on July 13th.

36 QUAI DES ORFEVRES is a flawed French cop thriller

36 QUAI DES ORFÈVRES starts off as a slick, captivating hard-boiled cop thriller. The opening half hour is filled with dark, moody shots of motorcycles and cars screeching on wet Parisian highways and hard-core violence in basement rooms of smoke-filled nightclubs. Paris has never looked more sinister. The plot and characters are similarly intriguing, operating on a sliding scale of ethics. There are no heroes and villains – just a bunch of gangsters, molls and cops who are more or less in it up to their ears. However, grotesquely, there is honour among thieves, and justice is meted out summarily and in extreme terms. The movie is all the more gripping because it is underpinned by some gritty performances. The ever-brilliant Daniel Auteuil plays against type in his portrayal of a cop, Leo Vrinks. Vrinks has brutal strength and a mission to bring in a wanted gang of thieves by any means necessary. Gérard Depardieu also gives an outstanding performance as another cop, Denis Klein with an even hazier grip on the code of ethics. It is one of his quieter, more subtle performances – a welcome change from the Cheery-Gaul-For-Hire act that he usually subjects us to in his English-language films. Both are in competition to take over from their boss, played by André Dussollier, who seems to specialise in playing ultra-smooth amoral men.

As the complex plot unfolds we see both Vrinks and Klein bring in the gang of thieves in a set-piece shoot-out around half way through the movie. This sets in train a chain of events that are catastrophic for both cops and hoods. The nihilistic message of the movie seems to be that we cannot escape the cycle of violence. The set-piece shoot-out also sets off a chain of directorial choices that undermine the movie to the point where I wanted to leave the cinema. The project descends from hard-boiled thriller into soupy melodrama. You know the kind of the thing. One guy is shot and the director pans to his best friend who is now seen in slow motion shouting “Noooooooooh!” with a full-on sweeping orchestral score hamming up the moment for all it’s worth. This sort of lazy use of camerawork and score occurs with increasing frequency as the movie winds down to the point where it feels like a glossy version of a TV melodrama. And then the movie ends with all ends neatly tied up in incredible fashion, and a nagging feeling that the whole story rests on a massive plot hole. (If you want to know what I think that is, email me.) Despite my deep dissatisfaction about the second half of the movie, I still think 36 QUAI DES ORFÈVRES is a decent thriller – but perhaps one for DVD rather than the cinema. (And by the way, the significance of the title is that this is apparently the address of the French version of Scotland Yard - the HQ of the police.)

36 QUAI DES ORFÈVRES was originally released in France in winter 2004 and is currently on release in the UK.

HIDDEN - Intellectually demanding thriller, superbly executed

Austrian director Michael Haneke's new flick HIDDEN is superb. Indeed, for what it is worth, this is my Best Film of 2005, a triple honour shared by A History of Violence and Kung Fu Hustle. It is a thriller that is tense from the first second to the last; it demands utter concentration and intellectual engagement from the audience. One scene in particular will take your breath away. It repays dividends.

The movie is set in present day Paris (though one of the filming locations is Vienna.) Daniel Auteuil (perhaps best known as Henri of Navarre in La Reine Margot) gives a bravura performance as George Laurent and Juliette Binoche plays his wife Anne. They are a successful couple - he is a famous TV literary figure, a Melvyn Bragg if you will - and she is a succesful publisher. They have a teenage son. They start getting video cassettes of surveillance footage of the street where they live and threatening pictures. The police are powerless to help. George's reaction to this "terrorism" is to become aggressive, taking action on thin evidence, becoming deceptive. Anne "gives in" to the terrror. So by now you should realise that as well as being a superbly executed face-value thriller, this movie can also be taken as an allegory for France's colonial history and recent political/military history.

In a rare example of Awards ceremonies getting it right, HIDDEN won the prize for Best Director at Cannes and was nominated for the Palme d'Or. I can't say more for fear of ruining the tension, but believe me, if you are not feeling tired and could do with an "adult" movie you could do worse. It's this or David Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, and for me, HIDDEN edges it out.

HIDDEN is already on release in France. It goes on nationwide release in Austria on the 18th November, limited release in the USA on 11th January 2006, and nationwide release in the UK and Germany on 26th January.