GLORIA MUNDI - Venice Film Festival

GLORIA MUNDI is another in a long line of French social realist director Robert Guediguian's Marseille-set Marxist dramas. In this one, he's trying to tell us how modern life crushes the honest worker's hopes and dreams, leading them to crime out of desperation.  This is illustrated through the life of the family pictured. Mum is a cleaner, locked out of earning a wage because of a strike.  Dad is a bus driver, on suspended leave because he was caught using his mobile phone while driving. The elder daughter is a feckless millenial who can't hold down a job as a sales assistant.  The son-in-law is an Uber driver beaten up by conventional taxi drivers scared of the competition.  Ranged against these unfortunates is the younger half-sister and her husband - clearly depicted as front men of evil nasty capitalism. They run a pawn shop, and view their family as losers.  And entering the picture as a kind of catalyst to the story, are the elder sister's baby Gloria, and her ex-con grandad newly out of prison: a silent solemn presence.

The film is well-acted and despite its heavy-handed politics and an obvious plot worthy of a cheap British soap opera, it did hold my attention. There are a couple of set pieces that are truly affecting. One is a scene where the nasty capitalist daughter forces an obviously distressed Muslim woman to remove her veil in order to sell her toaster for five euros. That's nasty and powerful. I also really liked the depiction of the parents marriage - loving and secure, so secure that the dad and the ex-con can form a kind of friendship, jointly caring for their gran-daughter. 

The problem I had - apart from the obvious plotting and pretentious opening and closing scenes - was that the anti-capitalist message was badly executed.  These people are in trouble because they do stupid, sometimes illegal, stuff, and are rightly punished. Don't use your phone while driving - don't chat to your mum when you're meant to be working - don't start a fight.  And seeing the parents try and bail out their narcissistic irresponsible daughter again and again suggested to me that the message of the film was really to admonish Boomer parents from over-indulging their kids. 

GLORIA MUNDI has a running time of 106 minutes and had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. 

London Film Fest 2010 Day 6 - THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER

Lifeless French costume drama set at the same time as LA REINE MARGOT and suffering by comparison with that passionate, violent film. Melanie Thierry is decorous but banal as the Princess, married off to her dull cousin Montpensier, rather than the man she loves, wily, manipulative Henri de Guise. Left alone in a rustic castle she inspires the love of wise, gentle Huguenot, the Comte de Chabannes, but it's hard to see why. And then when the Duc d'Anjou, heir to the French throne pops by, he also falls for her. Sent to Court, we then get the Princess attracting the admiration and jealousy of her husband, Chabonnes, Anjou and Guise - at the same time. I kid you not, but there are messages given to the wrong man behind the mask, and a lot of hiding on staircases for a man who never comes. People get pissed off, lovers recoil, and it all runs out of steam long before it ends. This film lacks any passion, spark of sense of stakes. Which is amazing when you consider that we have Catherine de Medicis as a character and the St Bartholomew's Day massacre as an event. Altogether, this movie feels less like a costume drama/romance and more like a lo-fi soap opera. Dull, dull, dull.

Additional tags: Bruno de Keyzer, Melanie Thierry, Raphaël Personnaz, Bertrand Tavernier, Francois-Olivier Rousseau, Jean Cosmos.

THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER played Cannes 2010 and was released earlier this year in Greece. It will be released in France on November 3rd.

London Film Festival Day 2 - LA BELLE PERSONNE

LA BELLE PERSONNE is French auteur Christophe Honoré's loose adaptation of Madame de la Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves. In Honoré's version, the tale of unrequited and unconsummated love takes place in a dreary Parisian high school populated with over-sexed pupils and staff. In uncharacteristically slippery style, Honoré completely side-steps the moral difficulty with teacher-pupil relationships. Indeed, his film has a curious democracy to it - pretty much everyone - young, old, gay, straight - is emotionally wrecked by love.

Léa Seydoux plays the enigmatic Junie who transfers into school and begins a relationship with earnest Otto (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) even though she doesn't really love him. Thereafter she falls for the dishy Italian teacher, Nemours. (Louis Garrel in an unusually low-key performance - and all the better for that). Nemours clears the decks for a relationship with Junie but is curiously resistant to pursuing her. And Junie in turn is sceptical about Nemours' capacity to remain interested once the relationship is consummated - hence an emotional stand-off.

The story is economically told and nicely photographed, and doesn't feel like a TV film that somehow stumbled into a cineplex. However, I have to say that despite all the constant blubbing, I found it to be a rather slight film. I think this is because Honoré has a tendency to compose his films like a series of over-wrought French pop videos. He indulged this fully in LES CHANSONS D'AMOUR but even here, he sometimes seems more interested in the moody close-up than emotional truth. Indeed, it was with great dismay that I found Honoré slipping back into his lip-synching addiction in the most dramatic scene of the film, reducing it to pop video banality.

LA BELLE PERSONNE is a TV movie. It opened last month in France and Germany and played London 2008.

Justifably overlooked DVD of the month - LES CHANSONS D'AMOUR / LOVE SONGS

After the marvellous bittersweet family drama DANS PARIS, French writer-director Christophe Honoré returns with a bittersweet contemporary musical LES CHANSONS D'AMOUR. It's a drama about the impact of love affairs and loss on a group of young people in a rather dismal, gloomy, contemorary Paris. The movie sees Christophe Honoré continue his collaboration with the young actor, Louis Garrel, who appears in an all-too familiar role as a cheeky, good-looking erotomaniac. Ismaël (Garrel) is an infantile exhibitionist, who'll play with puppets to cheer people up. Some may find this charming (Honoré evidently does). I found it deeply irritating. The fact that I was irritated is, however, simply a matter of taste. The more serious charge against Garrel's performance is that it undercuts the serious subject matter of the film. We have to believe that he is genuinely torn between his love for his girlfriend Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) and his attraction to his co-worker Alice (Clotilde Hesme). We have to believe that when a tragic event occurs, "every second is a sob". We have to believe that he starts to shag anyone he can - even the sweet young boy who genuinely loves him - so that he can at least connect again. Sadly, Garrel's performance is not one that convinces that such an emotional weight lies behind his actions. The result is that he simply looks like a confused young man indulging in some opportunistic shagging. (Contrast this with Romain Duris' performance as a guy with REAL emotional problems in Honoré's previous film DANS PARIS.) The other big problem with LES CHANSONS D'AMOUR is that, surprise surprise, the story is told through music. I didn't particularly like the style of Alex Beaupain's rather insipid acoustic songs. Neither did I like the breathy, half-spoken singing style of the actors. The problem is that pop song lyrics, which their short lines and easy rhymes, often sound banal. Even when Honoré wants to do something poetic with them, they just end up sounding pretentious. All in all, it's a big fat failure. Never mind. With a director as talented as Honoré we can always look forward to the next film! 

LES CHANSONS D'AMOUR played Cannes and Toronto 2007 and was released in Belgium, France, and the UK last year. It was released in the US, Russia and Greece earlier this year and goes on release in Germany next Friday.