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. 

LA MOME - LA VIE EN ROSE - stunning central performance; baffling direction

Writer-director Olivier Dahan and co-writer Isabelle Sobelman have fashioned a biopic of Edith Piaf that is infuriating in its narrative structure. The movie flits back and forth through the iconic singer's life like a demented squirrel. Flashbacks, flash-forwards and inter-cut scenes add nothing to the viewer's understanding of her character or motivations. Far from enlightening us and drawing perceptive links, they confuse and infuriate Even within a scene, the director affects attention deficit disorder. The most grievous offense is in the final scene where Piaf - her whole bitter-sweet life building to this moment - sings "Non, je ne regrette rien". All good directors know that when a performer is giving their all in an iconic moment the best thing you can do is keep the camera firmly on them. Think of Liza Minelli as Sally Bowles singing her final song, "Life is a Cabaret" or when John Travolta does his solo dance number in Saturday Night Fever. The key is to let the talent do the talking without any flash camera-work or too many cuts. Olivier Dahan, however, cannot resist cutting away from Marion Cotillard's breath-taking performance. He switches to pictures of Piaf as a little girl; Piaf making a death-bed revelation; Piaf in Paris. It all serves to under-mine what should be the triumphant, heart-breaking finale.

Not only in this biographical material badly organised and badly directed, the choices concerning what to show and what to omit are bizarre. The exact nature of her relationship with her "sister", Momone, is left vague; the fact that she had a child is only revealed in the denouement for no clear reason; and World War Two doesn't seem to happen at all!

The miracle is that the film survives the baffling directorial choices. The reason is partly that it is handsomely designed, beautifully photographed, well-scored and exceptionally well-acted. Marion Cotillard's performance as Piaf is astounding. She plays Piaf from a teenager to death and is convincing at every age and in every mood. But the supporting cast are also strong, with an especially strong performance from Testud.

The other obvious reason is that however you slice it, dice it and genrally dick around with it, Piaf's life is fascinating and the material is mostly all there once you decipher the running order. Edith was born in 1915, the daughter of a singer and an acrobat, and grand-daughter of a brothel keeper. By the time she was discovered by an impresario (Depardieu), she had already lived with whores, travelled with a circus, taken up with the alcoholic Momone, lost a child to meningitis and become embroiled with the mafia. After the murder of the impresario, she retrained as a music hall singer and achieved worldwide fame. She found love with the married boxer Marcel Cerdan, who tragically died in a plane crash. Later she married twice, suffered in a horrific car-crash and became addicted to morphine. She died young - her body exhausted and racked by arthritis, cancer and drug addiction. Throughout it all, the film suggests, she never lost her faith, her willingness to love and to live a full life.

This is, then, a grand story that befits a great spirit and iconic singer. Cotillard's performance does Piaf justice. It is a shame that Dahan's directorial choices did not.

LA MOME - LA VIE EN ROSE played Berlin 2007 and has already been released in Belgium, France, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Israel, Canada, Greece, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Lebanon, Denmark, Taiwan, Slovenia, Span, Italy, Argentina, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, the USA, Iceland and Hungary It opens in the UK on June 22nd, in Australia and Russia on July 12th, in Singapore on July 26th, in Turke on August 3rd and in New Zealand in September.

GABRIELLE - brutal and brilliant chamber drama

GABRIELLE is a merciless depiction of a strained marriage, based on a novella by Joseph Conrad and brought to the screen by outstanding French director, Patrice Chéreau (LA REINE MARGOT). Brilliantly designed, photographed and acted - it is an intense and memorable costume drama complemented by a fascinating score. However, it will not be to everyone's taste. I loved it, but it left Nik cold.

The story itself is nothing new. it features a rich middle-class man whose social class and upbringing have taught him to value impassivity, propriety and respectability above all else. He is not a bad man so much as a limited man, and he chooses his wife by limited criteria. Will she prove an elegant hostess - faithful, stable, predictable - an ornament to his carefully appointed his? In these stories, the wife always marries the husband aware in some sense of the bargain she is making - a passionless life in exchange for comfort and dependability. But then comes the regret and the moment of rebellion. This is the story that forms the backbone of novels from Anna Karenina to The Forsyte Saga. In general, I have a great appreciation for this genre - Anna Karenina is my favourite novel after all. However, if you know that you don't have a taste for this sort of domestic drama, then you should probably avoid GABRIELLE, despite the fact that it is a superior example of the genre.

In GABRIELLE, the familiar story is situated in pre-WW1 Paris and is filmed like a Three Act drama within the confines of a sumptuous house. The husband is a rich financier who lives in this beautiful but claustrophobic house filled with classical busts under glass domes. We meet him as he walks from the train to his house. He has the fine clothes, confident swagger and cigar that denotes the self-satisfied man of property. But it is credit to Pascal Greggory's nuanced performance that he does not appear odious - rather, in some way, pathetic. The husband buys a small newspaper and so his salon becomes wider in scope - he is suddenly entertaining radical journalists and less "safe" characters. With dizzying camera-work we see a typical Thursday At Home. The conversation is vapid, the people unbearable and yet the evening is a success! It seems insupportable. And so it is. For the husband returns home the next day to find a note from his wife, played by Isabelle Huppert telling him that she has left him. However, she returns some hours later.

The "second act" of the movie follows the husband and wife in their private space. He has to re-examine everything that he took for granted and come to a slow realisation about his feelings for his wife. She has to summon up the ability to tell him why she left him. These scenes - especially one over the dinner table - are absolutely excruciating to watch because the acting is so powerful and the characters so deliberately malicious and yet genuinely hurt. The "third act" sees the same couple navigate another public Thursday At Home and the consequences of moving beyond the boundaries of impassivity.

GABRIELLE is, for me, a misnomer. The movie is as much about the husband's emotional journey as the wife's and, perhaps surprisingly given some of his actions, I found him to be a more sympathetic character. The story may be familiar but the movie feels new because of its intensity and because of the daring camera-work. While structured in some ways like a theatre piece it is undoubtedly "cinematic" in its use of the camera, editing from black and white to colour, use of subtitles. The orchestral score in particular is very fine - and is used in an obvious and deliberate manner rather than as a subconscious manipulative device to underline the emotions we are meant to be feeling.

So, it should be clear that I think that GABRIELLE is a very fine movie. However, more than usually, the "genre warning" applies. But if you do like psychological domestic drama, then this is a superb example of the genre.

GABRIELLE played Venice and Toronto 2005 and opened in continental Europe and the US earlier this year. It opens in the UK on Friday and is available on Region 1 DVD on December 19th.

THE PAGE TURNER/LA TOURNEUSE DE PAGES - best served cold

THE PAGE TURNER is not a film of bloated ambitions - there are no pretensions to change our political views, the future of cinema or the world. Maybe because of this it feels like a cool refreshing glass of water after the rich food of the London Film Festival. For here we have a movie that is just 85 minutes long, contains no pyrotechnics or melodrama, and yet holds your attention and imagination throughout. The premise is simple but executed with an austerity and perfection that is arresting.

In the prelude, a severe imperious young girl called Mélanie Prouvost is practising for a piano exam. These scenes are intercut with the hanging carcasses of pigs and cows - a vogue in current cinema it seems. It transpires her parents are butchers. The tight-lipped intensity of Mélanie is brilliantly portrayed by the young actress and accomplished pianist, Julie Richalet. Mélanie begins her exam well, but catches the guest examiner - a famous concert pianist - discourteously signing an autograph for an acolyte. This breaks the young girl's attention and she fails the exam. In a telling scene, she deos not burst into tears or recrimination - she simply leaves the room with a tear on her cheek and slams a piano lid down almost trapping the fingers of another entrant.

Years later and Mélanie is a grown woman, now played by Déborah François (last seen in L'ENFANT). She no longer plays the piano but remains austere - speaking little, revealing less - an apparently impassive beautiful woman who wears perfectly correct yet unbecoming clothes. She is hired by a rich Parisien lawyer to be an au pair for his son Tristan and stay with them and his wife Ariane at their palatial country estate. Mélanie is confronted by her nemesis - the wife is also the discourteous concert pianist - brought low by a car crash and suffering from stage fright.

The plot now unravels in the manner often seen in cinema. The young girl makes herself trusted and irreplacable - maneouvring herself into a position of power without seeming to do anything. We have seen variations on this theme from ALL ABOUT EVE onwards. What makes THE PAGE TURNER special is the economy with which the plot unfolds - the perfect harmony between actors, set design and score - and the sinister ambiguity of the piece. It is never entirely clear at what point Mélanie begins to manipulate - at what point she becomes an active agent of Ariane's downfall. Watching the movie, I thought it began rather late - after the first concert, when she sees another autograph hunter - but looking back I realise it may have started much earlier....I also love the moral ambiguity of the piece. As we watch the family interact we realise that they are perfectly harmless. Pascal Gregory - perhaps best known to English speaking viewers as Anjou in LA REINE MARGOT - plays Jean Fouchécourt as a wonderfully supportive, if slightly clueless corporate husband. And Catherine Frot gives a marvelously nuanced performance. Her Ariane is certainly self-involved but ultimately well-meaning and incredibly vulnerable. These are not monsters who deserve to see their world crumble and yet there is a certain thrill in seeing THE PAGE TURNER'S plan being perfectly executed....

THE PAGE TURNER/LAS TOURNEUSE DE PAGES played Cannes 2006. It opened in France and Belgium this summer and is currently on release in the UK. It opens in Israel and the Netherlands later this month and in Finland on December 1st.