LA CACHE aka THE SAFE HOUSE**** - Berlin Film Festival 2025

Writer-director Lionel Baier's LA CACHE is by turns a delightful, whimsical comedy and an increasingly profound discourse on trauma and co-dependence.  Based on the memoir by artist Christophe Boltanski, it tells the story of a multi-generational family living in a ramshackle apartment in central Paris during "les evenements de 1968" with flashbacks to 1942.

The family is led by the indomitable matriarch known as The Hinterland, played beautifully by the iconic Liliane Rovere. She smokes like a chimney, self-mythologises her childhood in Odessa, and her many lovers while a dancer in a Ballets-Russe style company.  She casually asks her young great-grandson if he wants a cigarette; flips the bird to her stuck up neighbours; and feeds her grandchildren as a mother hen.

Next we have grandma and grandpa - the former a fearless social documentarian who drives the family around in her crazy Citroen - the latter an anxious and kindly doctor.  

And then we have their three sons - a struggling artist - an academic - and an activist journalist - who is himself father to the young charismatic kid through whose eyes we see much of the early parts of film.

For the first half hour, LA CACHE plays like a cross between THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS and a Michel Gondry film. Full of marvellous production period detail, zany costumes, zanier characters, all with their own particular neuroses. Just as I was starting to tire of its arch style, the film pivoted to something darker and more complex, a turn similar in itself to Wes Anderson's greatest film, GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL.

We realise that grandpa isn't just anxious, he has PTSD from his experiences in WW1 and WW2.  We realise that the kids aren't just co-dependent in their reluctance to leave their familial enclave, but find in it a genuine refuge and a literal safe house.  We realise innocent little posters telling residents not to play ball in the courtyard can soon escalate into far more sinister interdictions. And that snobbish neighbours can have far more sinister intentions.

I loved the careful and deliberate layering of motifs and emotions building to two pivotal scenes - one in which we flashback to a husband and wife in 1942 - and one in which grandpa explains to a surprise guest what his words meant to him in that dark time. It takes real chutzpah to try and shift tone from comedy to profundity but I feel that Lionel Baier absolutely pulls it off. Indeed the more I think about this film, the more genuine pathos I find in it, and the more hilarious lines I remember.  If you have watched it, just remember, "Cuba does not yet have this technology"!

LA CACHE has a running time of 90 minutes and had its world premiere today at the Berlin Film Festival.

NAPOLEON**

Ridley Scott's NAPOLEON gives us at least one stone-cold classic battle scene, one decent runner-up and an admirably concise tour through the iconic French General and soi-disant Emperor's career.  It's all wrapped in a pacy two and half hour historical epic complete with luscious costumes, lavish locations and emperors aplenty.  But the film as a whole does not coalesce - it is not as compelling a story as Scott's GLADIATOR - and this is because of screenwriter David Scarpa's fatal decision to balance fifty percent battles with fifty percent love story.

In Scarpa's retelling, the tragic story of Napoleon is not one a military genius brought low by his political egotism and tyrannical excess.  No, in Scarpa's view this is the tragedy of a man who succeeded when he was with Josephine and failed when he was not. The problem is we never actually see what Josephine does for him. Did she perchance give him confidence, or teach him etiquette, or inspire his victories, or make him happy? We see none of this on screen - at least in the theatrical cut. Rather, we get Joaquin Phoenix's childish, sex-obsessed, possessive boor acknowledge his wife is a "slut" but remain loyal to her regardless. And poor Vanessa Kirby is saddled with some laughable dialogue as Josephine, and precious little character development. It isn't clear why either of these characters like each other, let alone love each other.

The major crisis in their relationship is that she can't bear him a child and heir. In real life this was explained by the fact that she was older than him and fifteen years into the marriage, past her child-bearing years. But Scott has cast a woman visibly much younger than Phoenix so all the chat about fertility just feels bizarre. 

The casting is even more problematic when it comes to Phoenix, who is a fine actor, but just too old for the vast majority of this film. He works well as the weary, older, defeated, delusional egomaniac. But he does not work at all as the younger, charismatic, soldier who inspired not just a nation but a world of progressive liberal democrats.  We see nothing of his charisma - no explanation of why his coup d'etat succeeded, why the French accepted him as Emperor, or why soldiers returned to him in 1815 despite his having been responsible for so many deaths in Russia.

You can probably gather that I am not a fan of this film, although I will withhold final judgment until the contains one stone-called classic sequence: the recreation of the battle of Austerlitz. Napoleon's most famous tactical victory against the Russian-Austrian alliance is visually arresting, clearly delineated, and profoundly moving.  Moreover we see its political importance in bringing about a temporary peace in the European wars that would absorb the continent for the better part of twenty years. 

The rest of the battles are more or less fine. Toulon is depicted as Napoleon's early triumph.  Borodino is scarcely touched: wise, given that Sergei Bondarchuk's WAR AND PEACE will never be beaten in that regard. And Waterloo is compressed and flattened but basically does the job it needs to do.  I am not entirely sure why Ridley Scott cast Richard Everett, twenty years too old, to play Wellington. After all the British General was Napoleon's exact contemporary: they were born on the same day. I rather enjoyed Everett's robust performance as a no-nonsense British victor, but let's be honest, it bears nothing to do with the real Wellington.

But here we get into the realm of nitpicking. Of course Napoleon didn't see Marie-Antoinette beheaded, or bomb the pyramids, or ride into battle sabre in hand once a General. Ridley Scott says we should "get over it". I kind of agree. I don't require my historical fiction to hue to the facts. I love big historical dramatic films.  The problem with this one is that it gains nothing entertaining from its inaccuracies, and forces us to watch an altogether limp love affair when we might have seen more battles.

NAPOLEON is rated R and has a running time of 158 minutes. It was released in cinemas today and will be released later in a director's cut on Apple TV.

LIE WITH ME aka ARRETE AVEC TES MENSONGES***

Two seventeen year old boys fall in love in small-town France.  One leaves for America to pursue his dream of becoming a writer and living a life true to himself.  The other stays back, weighed down by obligations toward his family farm, and maybe because of a lack of courage to come out.  Thirty-five years later the writer returns to find his lover has died, but also that a handsome young man, his son, is insinuating himself into the writer's life under false pretences.

The more accurate translation of this film's title isn't Lie With Me but Stop With Your Lies, or Stop Making Up Stories. And everyone in this film is lying. Stephane, the author, is lying about what Thomas meant to him, and why he writes, and fearful of publishing something that truly deals with what happened.  Thomas lied his whole life about his sexuality, but also left enough clues for his son Lucas to figure it out. And Lucas lies about his obsession with finding out until he is exposed. 

The resulting film is gentle, elegant, beautiful and moving but also rather slow, plodding and obvious.  It never really captured my heart. It felt rather safe and anaemic and gentle.  The novel upon which it is based is apparently a best-seller so I may try that instead.

LIE WITH ME played BFI Flare 2023 and is currently on release in the UK. It has a running time of 93 minutes.

WINTER BOY aka LE LYCEEN****

 

Theatre and cinema writer-director Christophe Honore (MA MERE) returns to our screens with a deeply personal, heartfelt and affecting retelling of the loss of his father and the impact this had on him as a young gay man.

The film opens in contemporary rural France with high-school student Lucas speaking not quite to camera as an unreliable narrator of his own story. We later find this is part of a therapy session. He describes his final trip to boarding school with his father, played courageously by Honore himself, who we come to realise probably committed suicide by driving his car into oncoming traffic.  Very quickly, the father is dead, and we see the rest of the film unfold in grief and trauma.

At the start of the film, Lucas is an out gay schoolboy with an active sex life. But when his father dies he decides to close off all feelings and live for physicality and the moment. He goes to Paris with his elder brother Quentin and develops a crush on Quentin's room-mate Lilio. He also flirts with religion, indulges in a random hook-up for the first time (nicely inter-cut!) and flirts with sex work in a kind of twisted act of protection for Lilio.

Clearly he is acting out, and struggling to come to terms with grief and his own sexual power as a near-adult. It's a lot and when the waves finally break the ramifications are severe and sensitively handled. 

There's so much to love in this film. First and foremost, newcomer Paul Kircher's magnetic central performance as Lucas but also Erwan Kapoa Fale's heartbreakingly sensitive turn as Lilio. I love that Honore depicts gay sex beautifully and openly, and also that he depicts the love-hate of siblings so authentically. Vincent Lacoste is fantastic as big brother Quentin. I really felt like I knew this trio and felt invested in their lives. 

But there are things I didn't like in the movie too. I didn't like that the opening therapy scene carried on into voiceover over the immediate reaction to the death. I found it mannered and distracting rather than elucidating. I think Honore means it to be mannered: he's making a point about a disjointed, fragmentary and contradictory narrator. Fine. I just could've done without it.  I also didn't like what felt like a forced focus on the mother (Juliette Binoche) late in the film. It felt as though Honore had to give her one big scene to get her to do the film.

That said, this remains one of the most beautifully told and affecting movies I've seen in a while, and well worth seeking out. I can't wait to see what Paul Kircher does next. 

LE LYCEEN has a running time of 122 minutes. It played Toronto, San Sebastian and London 2022 and BFI Flare 2023.

PARIS 13TH DISTRICT***** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 10

Jacques Audiard (UN PROPHET) returns to our screens with a beautifully rendered examination of modern relationships, based on Adrian Tomine's graphic novel.  The film focuses on three friends and how their love lives intersect and lead them to greater emotional understanding. The first is the Emilie, played by the charismatic breakout star, Lucie Zhang. As the film opens, Lucie is living in her grandma's apartment and leading a sex positive life. She seems carefree, strong and great fun. But as the film develops we realise that she is struggling with familial pressure to live up to her great academic career and is working a series of dead-end jobs. We also discover that despite her predilection for online hook-ups, what she really wants is a committed loving relationship with her former room-mate, Camille (Makita Samba).  Camille is also a bit mixed up, a wannabe PHD student who ends up running his friend's failing estate agent. At first he rejects the idea of dating Lucie and runs the gamut of various colleagues before discovering where he truly wants to be in life. These colleagues include Nora (Noemie Merlant - PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE). It's this final story that I found the most fascinating and daring. Nora starts off as a naive provincial mature student who ends up in Paris to restart her education. But one night she goes to a student party in a blonde wig and is mistaken for a sexcam worker called Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth). The students bully her, she drops out, and ends up working with Camille. But as she struggles to deal with what happened to her, she makes contact with Amber and begins a friendship that is both deeply touching and surprising in its outcome. 

PARIS 13th DISTRICT shows us how to portray relationships that are complicated and honest and evolve. I loved how Audiard - in contrast to Eva Husson in MOTHERING SUNDAY - used nudity and explicit sex scenes to propel character and evolve story.  Nothing here is gratuitous. Everything is honest. I felt as though I really knew all three lead characters - their flaws and their charms - and was utterly involved in how their stories would turn out. Meaningful revelations are dropped in with a very light touch - a half-heard phone-call or a camera glancing at pictures on a wall. I also absolutely loved Paul Guilhaume's stunning black and white photography that renders modernist and brutalist architecture as a stunningly vital and beautiful backdrop that made me hanker for city-life again after my Pandemic-driven suburban isolation. And Rone's electronic, award-winning sound-track is spectacular. 

Overall, this is a film that pulses with vibrant real life. It makes you hanker for cities and people and serendipitous meetings that can be life changing. This is film-making at its most glorious and vital.

PARIS 13TH DISTRICT aka LES OLYMPIADES  has a running time of 105 minutes. It played Cannes where it won Best Soundtrack. It will be released in France on November 3rd but does not yet have a commercial release date for the USA or UK.

AFTER LOVE - BFI London Film Festival - Day 9

Aleem Khan's AFTER LOVE, is a deeply moving drama that is told with a controlled, spare austerity and visual style that is truly impressive in a debut feature.  The film stars the superb Joanna Scanlan as Fahima - a white English woman who converted to Islam when she married her husband many decades ago.  As the film opens we see a scene of normal and apparently happy domesticity before the husband quickly dies. Fahima discovers an ID card and mobile phone among her late husband's effects with messages from a woman - Genevieve - in Calais. It soon becomes clear that her husband had another family a mere 20 miles away across The Channel.  Fahima takes the decision to go and confront this woman, but in a very telling moment, she is mistaken for a cleaner, and in a state of shock, assumes that role and discovers more about the Calais family. 

So much is said and left unsaid about the immigrant experience in that assumption that she's a cleaner, and in setting the film in Calais.  Indeed, in the film as a whole, there is very little dialogue. Scanlon shows Fahima's reactions through her physical and facial acting.  There's also something extremely clean and disciplined and austere about how Khan chooses to show her journey. A great example is Fahima's journey across the Channel is a bus, which is shown with three rather elegant  scenes of her sitting in exactly the same place on the bus and on our screens, cut to show the passing of time.  Khan also has a beautiful way of capturing still tableaux and landscape. When he moves his camera, it is with slow and deliberate intent.

In the other roles Nathalie Richard is a great foil for Scanlon as Genevieve, but it's really Talid Ariss who steals the show in a role I won't name for spoilers.  Both contrast nicely with Scanlon's Fahima in their ease with expressing their emotions.  By contrast, there's a moment near the end of this film where Fahima embraces someone but pauses beforehand, unsure about whether she's going to allow herself this moment of emotional catharsis. It's as though she's been waiting all film to exhale.  The power of the moment is intense. 

AFTER LOVE has a running time of 89 minutes. The film played Toronto and London 2020. It does not yet have a commercial release date. 

TWO OF US - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Day Eleven

TWO OF US isn't the showiest or flashiest film in this year's London Film Festival but is has to be one of the most beautifully acted, cleverly constructed and deeply moving. It's all the more impressive as it's director Filippo Meneghetti debut feature, and displays a lot of subtle style. Take for example his use of camera shots through peepholes in doors - or the way in which he uses a subtle flashback/dream sequence at the start - or the sound design around an overheating frying pan as a woman lies in a stroke on the floor, hidden from view. This is a confident director who knows how to frame a shot and stage a scene. 

The film centres of Madeleine and Nina, two old women who have been in love and together for 20 years. The only problem is that Madeleine cannot find the courage to tell her grown children, especially the son who blames her for not loving his father enough. So the women maintain two apartments, across the hallway from each other.  One is empty, and one is their home.  But the kids think that Nina is just their mother's neighbour and friend. 

This charade is blown out of the water when Madeleine has a stroke, and is then brought home with a carer. She slowly restores mobility but cannot speak.  Poor Nina finds herself cut out of Madeleine's life, and indeed her home.  Increasingly frustrated she tries everything she can to insinuate herself back into Mado's life, and when the kids suspect, to track down Mado in her nursing home.  Even more moving, we see the strength of love, and how a severely restricted Mado struggles to physically find Nina and be with the woman she loves.

The resulting film is wonderfully observed and deeply affecting. I absolutely believed in the strength of Mado and Nina's love, and in the uncomprehending anger of the children. Martine Chevallier is superb as Mado but this is really  Barbara Sukowa’s film. Her Nina can be tender, angry, clever, defeated - but always, always in love.  There's nothing more beautiful and sympathetic than that. 

TWO OF US has a running time of 95 minutes.  The film played Toronto and London 2019.  It does not yet have a commercial release date. 

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Day Seven

Writer-director Céline Sciamma has been creating beautifully acted, intimate portraits of female friendships since WATERLILIES, which was also the first movie in which I saw, and was impressed by, Adele Haenel. In her latest film she gives us another film by women, about women.  Set in the 18th century, it stars Noemie Merlant as a portrait painter called Marianne, commissioned by a Countess (Valeria Golino) to capture the likeness of her daughter Heloise (Adele Haenel). The only problem is that the likeness must be captured in secret: Heloise doesn't want her portrait to be painted as it will be sent to her future husband in Milan.  So the two women start to go for walks, and over the first hour of the film form an uneasy friendship.  It's only when the Countess leaves for five days in the second hour of the film that their closeness can be expressed as love.  But this is not just the story of a life-defining week of love. Huge kudos also to Luàna Bajrami playing the servant girl Sophie, trying to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy using old wives' herbal remedies and finally a backstreet abortion.

This is a film with very little interest in men. Apart from a sailor or servant at the start and end of the film, they rarely feature.  Rather this is a film about the impact that men have on women, and the spaces they try to create for themselves to provide support, friendship and love. The Countess is imprisoned in a deserted manor house, desperate to return to her beloved Milan.  Heloise is being forced into an arranged marriage. Marianne cannot fulfil her promise as a painter because the Academy won't allow her to paint male nudes and so learn anatomy, or submit pictures in her own name. And Sophie has to take increasingly desperate steps to not fall victim of her own biology.

As a result, the hinge of the film is a deeply evocative scene half way through the movie, where our three heroines go to a kind of women's meeting on a heath. As they sing and dance around a fire at night, it almost feels like a kind of witches coven - but in the best kind of way. It's a place where women can bond, have fun, let loose, express emotions they had kept suppressed, and seek. The result in a deliberately paced, evocative, intimate film about women viewing women, loving them, supporting them, and daring to snatch moments of happiness within the constraints of the patriarchy.  

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE has a running time of 119 minutes. It played Cannes where it won the Queer Palm and Best Screenplay.  It also played Telluride, Toronto and London. It opens in the USA on December 6th. It does not yet have a commercial release date in the UK.

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. 

COLETTE - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Day Two

Wash Westmoreland switches gears from his wonderful STILL ALICE to a period drama about the French Belle Epoque novelist Colette, and her marriage to the literary impresario "Willy".  As the movie opens we see the charming, avuncular Willy come to rural Burgundy to woo the girl over a decade younger than him, but our expectations over-turned as this apparent innocent meets him later in a hay barn for a quickie.  They then move to Paris and begin their married life. She is frustrated by his affairs and flirtations - he says it's just what men do.  But the real conflict will come when Willy enlists Colette to be on his "factory" of writers. They provide the words - he the brand name and marketing.  Colette pours her childhood memories into books that effectively create a new genre - coming of age stories with a hint of subversive sexuality for young women.  Combined with Willy's carefully orchestrated PR machine, the books are a success. But all under Willy's name....

What's wonderful about this film is its recreation of a fascinating period of history - one of bold ideas, beautiful art, freedom and flirtation.  The costumes and sets are beautifully done, and even Thomas Ades' score introduces what would then have been cutting edge compositions. After all, it's this artsy salon crowd that would first have embraced Satie's Gymonpedes. I also love the completely unflamboyant way in which the film embraces colour-blind casting, and its straightforward depiction of gay relationships and gender fluid living.

As for the main strokes of the story, the script (Wash Westmoreland, the late Richard Glatzer, Rebecca Lenkiewicz) commits sins of omission rather than commission.  It is very true to the life of Colette and Willy, and especially to their facility with words. What might have been quite a dirge-like film about a woman exploited by a man is thus transformed into something very smart and witty, and often laugh out loud funny. To that end, Dominic West - who has been getting away with rogueish behaviour since THE WIRE - is perfectly cast as the "fat arsehole".  Indeed, after a rather triumphant speech by a career-best Keira Knightley, one feels rather uplifted and hopeful at the end of the film - something confirmed by end title cards that tell us how happy and successful Colette was, and of her position as the premiere women of French letters.  

My only slight complaint is that the film wants to subtly shoe-horn the Colette story into having an ending that's more streamlined and progressive than the reality would prove.  If you knew nothing else about her than what you saw in the film, you might suppose that she fought for and won all the rights to be seen as the sole author of her work and that she had a long and happy relationship with Missy.  By contrast, the relationship with Missy ended (Missy ended up committing suicide after the war) and Colette married a man and had a child.  And while she did win the rights to be sole author after Willy's death, after HER death, Willy's son contested the authorship again. 

COLETTE has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated R.  The film played Sundance, Toronto and London 2018. It went on limited release in the USA on September 21st and will be released in the UK on January 25th 2019.

YOUNG AND ALIVE - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Preview

Matthieu Bareyre's documentary, YOUNG AND ALIVE, follows a bunch of French teenagers on a night out in Paris.  Some of the footage shows them dancing in clubs or making out on street corners.  A lot of it shows them doing the kind of feckless stuff that has people of my generation rolling their eyes - getting wasted, running through the streets aimless, generally wasting time. But what the documentary shows is that amid the wasters are teenagers that are acutely politically aware, cynical and frustrated. 

A theme that comes up time again is the lack of job opportunities in a country with rigid labour laws and high youth unemployment. Added to this, a number of them point to outright racism on the part of recruiters: you can't get a job at McDonald's because your name sounds like a terrorist.  Some say they had to drop out of school at 16 to earn money, only to find out that drug pushing was the only job opportunity. Another says she has to stay in school because these days a school leaving certificate or even a first degree isn't enough to secure a job.

The other theme that comes up repeatedly is that of systematic inequality - particularly on the grounds of race or religion. Shot in the wake of Charlie Hebdo, one particularly articulate interviewee starts crying describing how many people die in Ghana each day but no-one cares.  "Liberty for who? Equality for who? Fraternity for who?" That same interviewer draws a parallel between the history of concentration camps taught at school and the situation in refugee camps today.  "We're not killing them with gas but we leave them to die in the mud." These are profound observations about what it means to live in a society that calls itself civilised. And that teaches us something profound too - not to stigmatise youth as feckless because they do what we did - drink and do stupid goody shit - but to recognise them as politically aware and active and sometimes victims of a stacked system.  It's rare for a doc to change your perspective but this one really did. 

YOUNG AND ALIVE has a running time of 96 minutes. It played at the Locarno Film Festival where it won three prizes. It is playing in the documentary competition at this year's BFI London Film Festival. There are still tickets available for both screenings. 

A PARIS EDUCATION aka MES PROVINCIALES - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Preview

Sweet tap-dancing Christ, this film really is the most boring pile of pretentious wank. Sit around for over 2 hours and watch whiny French film students have apparently deep and meaningful conversations about Art while fucking indiscriminately and being arrogant and bitchy.  The central character in this film - Matias - is meant to be our hero - an uncompromising wannabe auteur of integrity who worships the greats. But in reality he's just a jumped-up arrogant prick.  And he is worshipped by the film's protagonist Etienne - the provincial rube of the title who goes to Paris to study cinema, even before Etienne has even met Matias. In fact, as many women as Etienne cheats on his girlfriend with, this is the real love story of the film. The problem is that while Matias is unlikeable, Etienne is a banal void - dull, reactive, artistically blocked so we never actually see him create anything.  What makes this talky, endless, actionless nonsense even worse is that it's shot in black and white and laced with a Beethoven-heavy soundtrack for no real reason other than its director Jean-Paul Civeyrac is as pretentious as Matias. And let's be clear, this is not that kind of crisp elegant black and white photography of films like MANHATTAN. Nope. DP Pierre-Hubert Martin's whites are never white, his blacks lack depth - the whole thing just feels muddy.  Quite like the mind of its characters.  Avoid at all costs. 

A PARIS EDUCATION has a running time of 136 minutes. It played Berlin 2018 and was released in France and USA this summer. There are still tickets available for all three screenings at this year's BFI London Film Festival.

LOST IN PARIS

The writing/directing partners Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon (THE FAIRY) return to our screens with another zany comedy with a social conscience - LOST IN PARIS. It stars Fiona as a Canadian librarian of geeky appearance and MR BEAN-like hapless physicality who goes to Paris to rescue her aunt, the majestic Emmanuelle Riva (AMOUR) who is being forced into an old-age home. The problem is that when she gets there, her aunt has gone missing.  At this point the fictional Fiona meets the equally nerdy, quirky Dom, a homeless Parisian who somehow finds enough money to dance the tango with her in an expensive riverboat restaurent and falls in love - only to find that he has a rival for Fiona's affections - a Canadian mountie!  

What I love about this film is that is does something relatively unique in modern cinema, but arguably the oldest of the cinematic arts - proper technically brilliant slapstick comedy in the best tradition of Keaton, Chaplin and Tati.  And just like those great films, it makes us laugh out loud at its silliness while also pulling at our emotions and genuinely moving us. Gordon and Abel are truly talented, and make movies of such unabashed joy they deserve to be better known. And if you thought that hackneyed park bench foot tapping dance scene in LA LA LAND was cute, check out Emmanuelle Riva and her fellow nursing home paramour in the most adorable dance scene I've scene in a long time. And that speaks to this film's social conscience - asking us about how we consign old people to a parking lot waiting for death, rather than acknowledge their same yearning for love, dance, magic!  This is a film not to be missed.

LOST IN PARIS has a running time of 83 minutes and is rated 12A for infrequent strong language and moderate sex references.  The film played Telluride and the BFI London Film Festival 2016. It was released earlier this year in France, Estonia, Belgium, Lithuania, Switzerland, Hungary, Argentina, South Korea, Sweden, the USA, Brazil, Japan, Poland, Germany, Bulgaria, Uruguay and Mexico. It's currently on release in the UK and Ireland in cinemas and on streaming services. 

120 BPM - Day 4 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

120 BPM is an absolutely harrowing and beautifully constructed and acted 90 minute love story surrounded by a less compelling slightly Basil Expositiony story about AIDS activists in late 80s and early 90s Paris. 

To deal with the latter part first, we open up the movie at a weekly ACT UP Paris meeting where an old hand explains the concept of ACT UP and how the meetings work to four new joiners.  This is evidently just for the audience's benefit and is very heavy-handed. We get this intermittently all the way - this or that drug remedy explained.  And I have to admit that while it was fascinating to see the first ACT UP action, I didn't really need to see them debate again and again with the apparently evil drug companies.  After all, it felt to me that it was the regressive social forces in France that were more to blame for Mitterand's failure to act. And even more frustrating and depressing, it wasn't clear from this film at least that ACT UP achieved anything other than provide each other with a sense of community and support. 

All of this is irrelevant though because the love story at the movie's heart is so beautifully acted, and genuinely affecting rather than cheaply emotionally manipulative.  It's the story of a young boy called Sean who catches HIV the first time he has sex. When we meet him he's courageous, and proud and active and vital but as we see him move through the film he becomes increasingly sick with AIDS.  We watch him fall in love with Nathan and Nathan become his full time carer. And as their story moves to its inevitable conclusion the power and weight of its conclusion becomes almost unbearable. I didn't cry as much as I did in STRONGER, but the weight of emotion is still with me and will take some time to process.  Kudos to all involved but especially the actor playing Sean - Nahuel Pérez Biscayart - he deserves all the awards. 

120 BPM has a running time of 140 minutes. It is rated 18 for strong sex, nudity, sex references, language. The movie played Cannes 2017 and won the Fipresci Prize, the Queer Palm, the Grand Jury Prize and the Francois Chalais award. It also played Melbourne, San Sebastian, Toronto, New York and London. It was released earlier this year in France and Italy. It opens in the USA on Oct 20th, in Sweden on Dec 1st, in Bulgaria on Jan 26th and in the UK on April 6th.

SHORT FILM AWARD PROGRAMME 1 - BFI London Film Festival 2017 Preview

The following short features are  showing as part of the BFI London Film Festival Short Film Award Programme 1.  Tickets are still available for both screenings.

THE RABBIT HUNT opens at sunrise on a beautiful landscape shot of Pahokee, Florida, before we cut to a factory belching out steam, and then to a large extended family preparing for some kind of excursion in near blinding sunlight.  A sugarcane field is set on fire and the smoke obscures the landscape and in its ruins the family catches wild rabbits, stringing them up onto their belts.  We then see the rabbits skinned and cooked and sold, making this an inappropriate film for the faint-hearted or vegetarians. (Conversely, meat eaters should not watch this hungry as those rabbit thighs dripping in hot sauce look SO good!)  Patrick Bresnan's 12 minute is beautiful shot and framed, and does what all great documentaries do - it takes into the heart of something obscure that we would't otherwise have a chance to see, understand or be provoked by. I look forward to seeing his feature length treatment of the same locale, now in post-production.

GODDESS/DEVI is set in contemporary Bengal and starts in the midst of a foul-mouthed fist-fight as men cruelly taunt a woman for being gay. The girl in question - Tara (Aditi Vasudev) - is picked up by her disapproving mum (Tanvi Azmi) and brought home to the sounds of cheesy Bollywood songs with their promise of everlasting heterosexual romance.  Once inside the confines of the house, we realise that Tara is attracted to Devi (Priyanka Bose) - the maid - and these feelings are reciprocated.  However, the mother's interruption provokes so many questions that are brilliant left ambiguous by director Karishma Dube.  This 13 minute movie is outstanding insofar as it contains a fully developed, provocative story with nuanced characters within its short running time.  By the end we aren't sure if Tara's feelings really were genuine or whether she just didn't have enough courage to defend Devi.  Is she just as bad as her mother, who summons a new maid with a portable door bell, and idly eats her breakfast as she washes the steps?  What does it say about contemporary India that the rich speak to each other in English and address the poor in a different language.  Has Tara unwittingly taken on this proprietary attitude?  I could talk about this film for far longer than its running time and that speaks to its richness.

MARTIN PLEURE/MARTIN CRIES is a devastatingly dark tragicomic 16 minute film from director Jonathan Vinel about a teenage boy who wakes up one day to find all his friends have disappeared.  It's filmed as a kind of contemporary video game, opening with the guy kicking the crap out of his bedroom, and then taking out his frustration in a variety of game levels to rap music.  The most brilliant part about this film is how one realises from little clues, like the avatar like names of the friends, the fact that they somehow evaporated, the activities that they did together, that Martin is a kind of character inside a kind of Tron.  It's ambiguous as to whether he's the avatar of a real-life kid who's been ghosted by other online players. Or whether he's an AI with no-one to play with any more. Either way this is a beautifully imagined and slipper film with all kinds of strange implications for the nature of modern "friendship" and alienation.  It's frightening and bizarrely affecting and believable.

THE ARTIFICIAL HUMORS /OS HUMORES ARTIFICIAS is a delightful film by Gabriel Abrantes (A BRIEF HISTORY OF PRINCESS X) about an AI robot called Andy Coughman (geddit?!) who is being programmed by his maker to be a stand-up comedian.  While researching facial reactions to humour Andy falls for a young indigenous girl and that relationship continues to blossom when she smuggles herself to Sao Paolo to escape her strict family.  Once there, Andy continues his "sentimental education" but a bout of reprogramming plus social media fame distracts him from his true love.  She is left behind by the modern world, and her opportunities are muted - so what does it say about us and her family that the most attention and love she receives is from an AI? Provocative but also sweet, the longer-running time of 29 minutes is well used. 

9 FINGERS - BFI London Film Festival 2017 Preview

9 FINGERS is a stylish, self-conscious and fascinating movie but one that ultimately fails to cohere.  It's a fun idea but stretched too far.  As the film opens, our protagonist Magloire (Paul Hamy) is standing in a moodily lit train station. The mood is one of film noir meets Indiana Jones. Shot in black and white, 9 FINGERS features a lot of men smoking, wearing macs, with pencil moustaches.  It's like the bad guys in Tin Tin got a movie.   The action kicks off as Magloire is chased from the station by the police, is given a bunch of money by a mysterious stranger, and then gets taken up by a gang of criminals led by the charismatic leader Kurtz (Damien Bonnard - DUNKIRK).  There's a hold up and a MacGuffin like plan to somehow get some polonium, and before we know it we're stuck in a claustrophobic freighter with Pascal Greggory's philosophising gang member, discussing the disappearance of Kurtz, the mysterious "9 Fingers" and a never-ending journey to Nowhereland. 

How much you enjoy this film will depend on how far you are willing to let yourself be enveloped by Simon Roca's beautiful cinematography and the darkly comic existential non sequiturs.  I could easily see how the entire exercise could grate on viewers impatient for an actual point to the film.  I found myself oscillating between the two, at once admiring the film's beauty, it's love of genre cinema, and it's wit while also become more and more frustrated about where if anywhere it was going. This is clearly a film for people with a sense of mischief and a tolerance for meandering subversive homage. 

9 FINGERS has a running time of 99 minutes.  The film played Locarno 2017 where FJ Ossang won Best Director.  It is playing the BFI London Film Festival 2017 and there are still tickets available for all three screenings. 

THE ODYSSEY

THE ODYSSEY is a beautifully constructed melancholy tale about a man who sacrifices his family for fame, and then tries to redeem himself late in life. That man is the French naval officer turned submariner and film-maker Jacques Cousteau - a figure handed down to us almost as parody as STEVE ZISSOU. One forgets - and it's delicious to be reminded - that he was once a truly respected and international star. That his oceanographic films earned the Palme D'or and huge global TV audiences.  That he was something of a rock star. And yet for all this fame, he was never financially secure.  His wife sold her jewels and fur to finance the refurbishment of his first ship and was steadfast on board despite his philandering.  His banks could barely keep up with the ever more outlandish plans for films.  And he would foolishly mis-sell movies to TV studios at a fraction of their cost. And yet, somehow he prevailed, bringing images of exotic animals and Antartica to his fans. 

The emotional arc of this film creates a two act drama. In the first act we have the relentlessly driven Cousteau neglecting one of his sons in favour of the one who is also a diver. And you have Cousteau having affairs and abandoning his wife.  In a more subversive narrative, we also have Cousteau financing his film with petrodollars, effectively researching the best place to dig for oil in the Arabian Sea. In the second act of the film, inspired by his beloved ecologist son, Cousteau becomes an evangelist for the environmental cause and founds the Cousteau Society. It brings precious little reconciliation with the neglected son and wife, and he becomes even more famous, even though that fame is now tinged with deep personal loss. 

Jerome Salle's film is not afraid to show both sides of Cousteau - his charisma and energy as well as his callous disregard for people and financial facts. He manages to capture the wonder of underwater ocean-cinematography and the majesty of Antartica in a way that - as Cousteau did - inspires us with the romance of ocean exploration.  But he always manages to undercut this with the darkness of family life chez Cousteau.  In particular, I liked the lead performance from Lambert Wilson - capturing all of Cousteau's ambiguity - and some of the touching set pieces - particularly that between Vincent Heneine's Bebert and Audrey Tautou's Simone. 

THE ODYSSEY has a running time of 122 minutes. It opened last year in France, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Russia and Switzerland. It opened earlier this year in Netherlands, Romania, Canada, Bulgaria, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal and Norway. It opens today in the UK.

DHEEPAN - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Ten

Jacques Audiard has announced himself as the most reliable creator of tough, visually beautiful, emotionally nuanced films set in a gritty and socially deprived contemporary France. And DHEEPAN is his best movie to date. It tells the story of Deepen - a Tamil tiger who flees Sri Lanka under the guise of being a family man, with a wife and daughter - in reality utterly unknown to him and each other - in tow. When they reach Paris he becomes one of those annoying street pedlars, and then thanks to a helpful translator at the immigration interview, the “family” gets moved to low-rise apartment complex on the edge of town. Dheepan becomes the janitor, his “wife” Yalini cares for an elderly disabled man, and their “daughter” tries to integrate into a local school. For the first hour the film plays almost as a slow burn romantic drama as we see this family start to forge an actual relationship against a backdrop of petty drug dealing in the projects. Dheepan turns out to be almost more gentle than Yalini, despite his violent background and is clearly smart to boot. But as we move into the second hour of the film we realise that leaving behind the traumas of the Sri Lankan civil war is easier said than done. As gang violence breaks out the position of the family becomes dangerous, cracks begin to form and old gut reactions take over.

The resulting film is simply stunning. The two lead performances from Antonythasan Jesuthasan as Dheepan and Kalieaswari Srinivasan as Yalini are scarily convincing and sympathetic. Director Jacques Audiard (RUST AND BONE) has a visual style that is just stunning. From near the opening when Dheepan and his fellow street pedlars emerge from the darkness wearing lit headbands, to the delicately elegant scene in which a naked Yalini blends into the darkness, to the way in which he handles the action scenes through smoke and dust...You just know you're in the hands of someone who understands how to use the camera to convey pregnant meaning as much as plot and character.

For me this is the film of the festival and arguably of the year, alongside CAROL, which is quite different in nature.  But I suppose both, in a way, are concerned with the hidden lives of people that we normally wouldn't give a second glance - a shopgirl and a street pedlar.  Both are deeply relevant to the social crises of today - from the gay rights movement to migrant issues.  And both combine both deeply complex characters with a unique visual style. Both deserved the Palme D'Or but I can see why DHEEPAN just edged it. It's because there's a surprising discovery and unfamiliarity about this story and these actors that deserves to be showcased.

DHEEPAN has a running time of 110 minutes. It played Cannes 2015 where it won the Palme D'Or, and also played Toronto. It opened in France in August, in Iceland and Sweden in September and opens in Italy on October 22nd, in Greece on November 19th and in Germany on December 10th.

COWBOYS - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Ten

LES COWBOYS is a strange dark drama, quite unlike anything the rather whimsical title had let me to expect, but entirely in keeping with the superb dramas written by first-time feature director Thomas Bidegain. In movies like RUST AND BONE and THE PROPHET, directed by Jacques Audiard, Bidegain had helped to create worlds that documented a gritty reality of contemporary France. He also seemed to focus on characters at just the key moments of life-changing reversal. They come to us with no history, and we observe them tackling great obstacles.

In this case we are in provincial France in the mid 1990s. A family is attending some kind of American country music festival, complete with father (Francois Damiens) in cowboy hat singing the Tennessee Waltz. But at that very event, their teenage daughter Kelly disappears, and it is soon revealed that she has a muslim boyfriend, is studying Arabic and was potentially being swayed by Islamist propaganda. Spurned by the police and viewed with suspicion by the Ministry of the Interior, the father takes it upon himself to follow every lead to try and find Kelly. This takes many years, and takes him to many countries so that eventually he too learns to speak Arabic. And eventually, their son, Kid (Finnegan Oldfield) becomes embroiled in the quest, travelling as far as Pakistan after 9/11 and coming across John C Reilly’s mercenary.

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

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