france

Le Havre

by James McNally on September 9, 2011 · 1 comment

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Le Havre

Le Havre (Director: Aki Kaurismäki): Working on recur­rent themes, in his usual style and with many actors who have appeared in pre­vious films, Kaurismäki could be accused of making the same film over and over again. But to be fair, each iter­a­tion is just so lovely to watch that it’s easy to for­give him.

In the latest in his series of deadpan melo­dramas, André Wilms plays the perfectly-named Marcel Marx, a shoe­shine man eking out a modest exist­ence with his loving wife (the always won­der­fully droll Kati Outinen) in the port city of Le Havre in Normandy. I say perfectly-named because Marcel is a por­trait in gentle, almost silent, com­pas­sion with a bit of a polit­ical edge. It’s also an apt descrip­tion of the film.

Le Havre is one of France’s busiest ports and a major transit point for cargo trav­eling to Great Britain. It’s not sur­prising that it’s also a hub for illegal migrants trying to find a better life there. When a con­tainer is found to con­tain a human cargo of Africans trying to make it to England, Marcel’s settled life is turned upside down. Kaurismäki’s com­pas­sion and humanism is never more evident than in a sequence where the music drops away and he lingers on the face of each person inside the opened con­tainer. A young boy, Idrissa, evades the police roundup and is soon dis­covered by Marcel, who takes pity on him, bringing him food and even­tu­ally taking him into his own home. This is all the more sur­prising because his wife Arletty has taken ill and is con­fined to hos­pital. Even as he wor­ries about her, he ral­lies the ragtag com­munity that seems to exist in all Kaurismäki films to help the boy find his way to rel­at­ives in London. Similar to Philippe Lioret’s excel­lent Welcome (review), the film’s politics are strictly per­sonal, but with the sense that the protagonist’s growing aware­ness of the issue may change him for good.

It’s a ser­ious story, but told with his typ­ical light touch. Sublime lighting and a won­derful sense of com­pos­i­tion elevate the visuals to the point where it couldn’t be described as gritty or even real­istic, but it finds the beauty in each face and in the slightly shabby homes and store­fronts of Marcel’s neigh­bours. There is also a rather unlikely benefit con­cert per­form­ance by an eld­erly rocka­billy legend, whose pres­ence in the film is com­pletely unne­ces­sary but serves as another indic­a­tion of Kaurismäki’s big hearted loy­alty to his friends.

In the end, it’s not sur­prising that a little bit of magic seems to bring the story to a happy con­clu­sion. One critic I know has called Le Havre a mas­ter­piece, but it’s my firm belief that Aki Kaurismäki doesn’t set out to create mas­ter­pieces, and I don’t think he’d be com­fort­able with that term. Instead, he con­tinues to paint small and lovely por­traits of over­looked people. Whether he really believes in the good­ness of people or is just chal­len­ging us to live up to the ideals of char­ac­ters like Marcel makes little dif­fer­ence to me. It’s just a genuine pleasure to be able to enjoy the work of one of world’s great humanist filmmakers.

Tagged as: #tiff11, finland, france, immigration

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TIFF 2011 Preview: Café de Flore

by James McNally on September 5, 2011

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Director Jean-Marc Vallée

With TIFF almost upon us, this will be my last pre­view post, and I’m happy to be fea­turing another Canadian film from Québec. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (C.R.A.Z.Y., The Young Victoria), Café de Flore has been get­ting great buzz among local critics who have seen it before it screens at the festival.

The syn­opsis describes the film as “a love story about people sep­ar­ated by time and place but con­nected in pro­found and mys­ter­ious ways.”

Atmospheric, fant­ast­ical, tragic and hopeful, the film chron­icles the par­allel fates of Jacqueline, a young mother with a dis­abled son in 1960s Paris, and Antoine, a recently-divorced, suc­cessful DJ in present day Montréal. What binds the two stories together is love — euphoric, obsessive, tragic, youthful, time­less love.

Jacqueline is being played by French act­ress Vanessa Paradis, better known over here as Mrs. Johnny Depp. A beau­tiful woman by any measure, she dares to look very unglam­ourous in the film, which raises my expect­a­tion that she’ll show some ser­ious acting chops. The role of Antoine is being played by Québecois musi­cian Kevin Parent, and it’s inter­esting to note that Paradis was also better known as a singer and model before turning to acting. Music prom­ises to be an important part of the film, with a soundtrack fea­turing Sigur Rós, Pink Floyd, and The Cure, among others, but I wonder if the fact that both leads can sing will figure into the plot at all?

According to Canadian dis­trib­utor Alliance Films, the film will receive a the­at­rical release in the province of Québec on September 23rd, but no release date for English Canada has been announced. All the more reason to catch it during TIFF!

SCREENINGS:

  • Monday September 12, 10:00pm — Princess of Wales
  • Wednesday September 14, 11:45am — TIFF Bell Lightbox 2

Tagged as: #tiff11, canada, france, preview, quebec

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The Hedgehog (Le hérisson)

by James McNally on August 15, 2011

in Books,Theatrical Release

The Hedgehog (Le hérisson)
The Hedgehog (Le hérisson) opens in select US mar­kets on Friday August 19, expanding over the fol­lowing weeks. Check your local listings.

The Hedgehog (Le hérisson) (Director: Mona Achache): Based on the best-selling novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, this 2009 film is finally get­ting a the­at­rical release on this side of the world. Alas, it’s only in the US for now, but I figure that I have at least a few readers out­side of the Toronto area.

Precocious and bored, 11-year-old Paloma decides that on her 12th birthday, she will end her life. She’s sick of her par­ents and older sister and their com­fort­able bour­geois life­style. She com­puls­ively films them with a hand-me-down video camera and protests that she doesn’t want to live like a gold­fish in a fish­bowl. She’s incred­ibly bright and wants more from life, but doesn’t see a way to get it.

Ms. Michel, the wid­owed jan­itor of the luxury building where she lives, seems like she might be a kindred spirit, but she’s extremely private. Everything changes on the day that Mr. Ozu moves into the building. This cul­tured older Japanese man pays no atten­tion to the class dif­fer­ences and petty jeal­ousies of the other ten­ants, striking up con­ver­sa­tions with both Paloma and Ms. Michel within days of his arrival.

An off­hand remark involving a quote from Tolstoy (Mr. Ozu begins the quote and Ms. Michel fin­ishes it) kindles a deeper curi­osity and before long he has asked her to dinner. If you haven’t guessed already, Renée (as we dis­cover is Ms. Michel’s first name) is the hedgehog of the title. As described by Paloma, she is prickly on the out­side, but only to hide her inner eleg­ance. No, I’m not sure how a hedgehog could be described as elegant, either, but it’s a mem­or­able descrip­tion. Paloma begins to spend more time with Renée and tells her that as a jan­itor, she has found a “per­fect hiding place,” as if the older woman had simply chosen to be a building jan­itor out of a panoply of other career options.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery

Our trio of char­ac­ters are all highly intel­li­gent and lonely out­siders, and so nat­ur­ally they come together, but everything seems just a bit too neat. An 11-year-old like Paloma, who draws and paints at a high level, plays Go and speaks some Japanese could really only exist in a novel (or a movie). Renée is another vari­ation on the crusty char­acter who really has a heart of gold. Worst of all, Mr. Ozu is the Franco-Asian equi­valent of the “magical negro,” an exotic char­acter who dis­penses wisdom and brings the other char­ac­ters together while we really know nothing about his own motivations.

But while the film is schem­atic and (mostly) pre­dict­able, it remains enjoy­able, mostly for me due to Josiane Balasko’s per­form­ance as Renée. A vet­eran comic actor (she played the Jennifer Saunders’ part in the French ver­sion of Absolutely Fabulous) and an accom­plished dir­ector in her own right, she por­trays a lonely woman’s bewil­der­ment at being desired with sub­tlety and grace. I also loved the occa­sional use of anim­a­tion to illus­trate some of Paloma’s inner struggles.

As someone who has not read the source novel, I can’t com­ment on whether it is a faithful adapt­a­tion, but based upon the amount of voi­ceover nar­ra­tion by Paloma, I expect that the novel would allow us sim­ilar access to the inner lives of both Renée and of Mr. Ozu. As well, because Paloma’s story seems to be the central thread, I wasn’t cer­tain whether I was watching a film aimed more at the adoles­cent set than at a more gen­eral audience.

Tagged as: france

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The Princess of Montpensier

by James McNally on May 25, 2011

in Theatrical Release

The Princess of Montpensier
The Princess of Montpensier opens on June 3, 2011 for a the­at­rical run at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

The Princess of Montpensier (Director: Bertrand Tavernier): Tavernier was a press agent for the film­makers of the Nouvelle Vague, and has been making films of his own for more than 40 years. He’s made films in both French and in English, nar­rative films and doc­u­ment­aries that have been equally lauded. It’s clear that he’s an accom­plished film­maker with an admir­able range. Which is all pre­lude as to why I found The Princess of Montpensier some­what of a disappointment.

It’s 1567, and the young and gor­geous Marie (Mélanie Thierry) is in love with the roguish Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel), even though she’s been prom­ised to his younger brother Mayenne. Things become com­plic­ated when her father is per­suaded by the Duc de Montpensier to marry his daughter to the Duke’s son instead. The prince (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) seems a decent enough young man, but he’s uneasy because he is vaguely aware of the chem­istry between Marie and Henri, who is also his cousin. But the mar­riage will create a stronger rela­tion­ship between the fam­ilies, and the beau­tiful Marie is a desir­able catch besides. When the prince is called away to fight yet another uprising by the Protestant Huguenots, he leaves Marie in the care of his mentor, the Comte de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), a former war­rior who grew sick of the end­less battles and deserted. As he teaches the finer points of astro­nomy, Latin and writing to Marie, he too falls in love with her.

Meanwhile, the prince and his cousin Henri meet on the bat­tle­field, both fighting on the side of the King. Henri dis­tin­guishes him­self as a brave sol­dier and is quick to remind the prince that he has stolen his true love. Over time, the prince’s jeal­ousy grows to con­sume him, and his wife, though obed­ient, never warms to him with any real affec­tion. Things are fur­ther muddled when the King’s younger brother, the Duc d’Anjou (Raphaël Personnaz) decides that he wants Marie, too, even if just for the thrill of the conquest.

Despite the prince’s increasing jeal­ousy, Marie risks everything to be with Henri again, and ignoring his own feel­ings, Chabannes helps to bring them together. But even as Marie’s love remains pure and con­stant, things around her are chan­ging all the time, and it’s apparent early on that true love will not tri­umph in the end.

A few scenes brought home how determ­ined the lives of women (and to a lesser extent, men) were in those days, even (per­haps espe­cially) among the noble classes. The wed­ding night scene was par­tic­u­larly repug­nant. While Marie is bathed by her ser­vants, naked, her father walks in to observe, and during the couple’s clumsy love­making, the two fathers are playing chess just a few feet away, awaiting the breaking of Marie’s hymen. When evid­ence is presented to the Duc de Montpensier, it’s as if he’s sniffing the cork of a bottle of wine that’s just been opened at his table.

Despite Marie’s early attempts to resist her mar­riage, and her later attempts to stay true to her heart, she remains more a sketch than a fully developed char­acter, and that’s why all the fighting over her seems more about what she rep­res­ents (beauty, inno­cence, con­quest, influ­ence) than about who she really is as a person. At one point, her hus­band tells her, “I don’t know who you are” and just for a minute we sense the char­ac­ters’ power­less­ness in the face of much larger forces con­spiring to keep things that way.

Tavernier has made a tech­nic­ally pro­fi­cient and attractive film out of a very old and simple story. I caught myself numerous times thinking that Shakespeare could have written this plot. But Shakespeare would have provided his char­ac­ters with much more inter­esting things to say. I found the script just adequate and was never really cap­tiv­ated by the plight of the char­ac­ters. The Princess of Montepensier never quite dis­tin­guishes itself from so many other respect­able cos­tume dramas, and I caught myself thinking that the film­making felt “old-fashioned” and not in a good way. The film hints at larger themes that might have been inter­esting to pursue fur­ther: the insti­tu­tion of mar­riage as a force of social cohe­sion vs. the indi­vidu­alism of pur­suing one’s pas­sion, just to name the most obvious one. Surely in its 150 minute run­ning time, Tavernier could have devoted some time to exploring that rather than cap­turing yet another swordfight.

Tagged as: france, lightbox

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Little White Lies (Les petits mouchoirs)

by James McNally on May 17, 2011

in Theatrical Release

Little White Lies (Les petits mouchoirs)
Little White Lies (Les petits mouchoirs) opens at the Varsity Cinema in Toronto on May 27th.

Little White Lies (Les petits mouchoirs) (Director: Guillaume Canet): Let’s get this out of the way first. Nobody does character-driven summer vaca­tion dramas like the French. Whether it was Eric Rohmer in the 80s with films like Pauline at the Beach and Le rayon vert, or more recently, Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours) or his wife Mia Hansen-Love (The Father of My Children), nobody can sur­pass their ability to assemble a cast and create fleshed-out char­ac­ters dealing with exist­en­tial and rela­tion­ship crises during what is sup­posed to be “free” time for relaxing with friends and family.

Which means I shouldn’t be sur­prised that Guillaume Canet’s film is so absorbing. And yet it’s that sense of (re)discovery that makes this such a pleasure to watch. It’s def­in­itely because I don’t see enough films like this and in fact I’m prob­ably in danger of over­praising Little White Lies, but when French dir­ectors like Canet can create this sort of grown-up and layered char­acter piece and make it look so effort­less, it’s hard not to be dazzled.

The film begins with another dazzling sequence, a long and tech­nic­ally dif­fi­cult tracking shot that sets up the rest of the film. After estab­lishing his bona fides as a dir­ector of com­plic­ated camera work, Canet quickly settles down to a less showy style in order to focus on his ensemble of char­ac­ters and the rela­tion­ships between them.

As their friend Ludo lies in hos­pital, ser­i­ously injured in a traffic acci­dent, the rest of his friends debate whether to go on their sched­uled month-long hol­iday without him. They decide to go for just two weeks, vowing to return imme­di­ately should any­thing happen to their friend.

It’s a motley crew, mostly in their 30s, except for Max, a suc­cessful hotelier in his 50s. We know nothing about how these friends came to know each other, only that they are very close, vaca­tioning together year after year at Max’s summer house near Bordeaux. No one else is as fin­an­cially suc­cessful as Max, and his ongoing gen­er­osity doesn’t come without a cer­tain amount of tension.

There’s another kind of ten­sion between him and Vincent. The young osteo­path has recently con­fessed his love for the older man, des­pite the fact that both are mar­ried with chil­dren. Max’s gen­er­ally stressed-out demeanour is cranked right up by this news and their pre­vi­ously close friend­ship is strained to the breaking point, which cannot go unnoticed by their wives and friends.

The slightly goofy Antoine is nursing a broken heart, and an obses­sion with his ex, who mad­den­ingly keeps tex­ting him. Eric the bad boy is taking his gor­geous girl­friend Lea for granted by sleeping around. Vincent’s wife Isabelle is unful­filled (under­stand­ably, as it turns out) and sad when nobody is looking. Most enig­matic of all is Marie (the mag­netic Marion Cotillard), Ludo’s ex-girlfriend who is unable to move on, even when her new lover, a hand­some musi­cian, turns up unannounced.

It’s all a bit over­stuffed, actu­ally, and the film runs a very long 154 minutes. But the actors are such a joy to watch. From the first frame, the char­ac­ters and their rela­tion­ships feel lived-in, and watching this group interact will make you forget you’re watching a film. There are moments of humour, often bor­dering on the slap­stick, but by the end, the film turns sombre. Time passes, things change, rela­tion­ships don’t last or they mutate, hidden things can’t stay hidden and people can’t keep lying to each other and to them­selves. It’s heavy stuff, and that’s even without the emo­tional pum­mel­ling that the film’s final half-hour delivers. But what a joy to see pro­fes­sionals inhab­iting their roles so completely.

Despite a few other reser­va­tions (the “wise rural type” char­acter felt a bit shop­worn, and I’d have liked a bit more of a window into Max and Vincent’s rela­tion­ships with their wives), Little White Lies impressed, inter­ested, and finally moved me. Comparisons have been made to The Big Chill and with its soundtrack of American music and sim­ilar themes, the com­par­ison is fair. But I prefer the French sea­side and this group of self-obsessed and yet sym­path­etic char­ac­ters. They aren’t failed revolu­tion­aries or ideal­ists from the 1960s. They’re just flawed people mud­dling through life and all the changes that life throws at them. And it’s beau­tiful and heart­breaking to watch.

Tagged as: france

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