French Film Festival 2015: Preview
The annual French Film Festival returns for its 23rd edition, with another diverting, varied programme – we select some highlights
Love, l’amour; it fascinates and tortures us in equal measure, and forms the subject of countless works of cinema. And as universally human as that emotion may be, there’s an inimitable hot-blooded sensibility to films from the continent, especially France. Naturally, then, highlights from the 23rd annual French Film Festival (5 Nov-13 Dec) include films of torrid, agonising, time-tested relationships; of bittersweet betrayal and infidelity; of love in its many forms.
My Golden Days is Arnaud Desplechin’s tenth film, and the prequel to his 1996 drama My Sex Life... or How I Got into an Argument. Mathieu Amalric reprises his role as anthropology professor Paul Dédalus, but steps back to allow new blood Quentin Dolmaire to play his younger self, as he relives his heady teenage years and all their social and romantic entanglements. Dolmaire is magnetic as the burgeoning academic with a steely-gaze, as is Lou Roy-Lecollinet as his siren-like paramour Esther.
Where Desplechin charts tempestuous adolescent love, Maïwenn opts for the complexities of marriage. My King, her newest film since the 2011 Cannes Jury Prize-winning Polisse, stars trusty firebrand Vincent Cassel and Emmanuelle Bercot as a wealthy married Parisian couple. Praised for its fresh take on otherwise established archetypes, the film also has Bercot in one of her best roles to date, scooping the Cannes award for best actress.
Michel Gondry's Microbe and Gasoline
Infidelity catches the prolific Philippe Garrel’s eye in In The Shadow of Women, a bracingly intimate examination of the strains a relationship can suffer in the wake of extramarital romance, and the differing perspectives on what it means to be unfaithful. Variety called it “an exquisite three-hander about life, art and the delusional male ego.”
From relationships with people to our relationship with society and the state; some choice picks from this year’s programme deal with humanity versus ‘the system’. Frederic Teller’s SK1, loosely based on the true case of serial killer Guy Georges, is as much about the inhibiting bureaucracy of the French police force in the 1990s as it is about the case itself, while taut investigative thriller The Clearstream Affair (Vincent Garenq), also with a grounding in reality, dramatises journalist Denis Robert’s uncovering of Luxembourg bank Clearstream’s shadowy corruption.
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For the very human consequences of our modern economy, Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure of a Man explores the frustrations of fruitless unemployment through Vincent Lindon’s stoic security guard Thierry. And to rebel entirely against it all, Cédric Kahn’s Wild Life has anti-consumerist couple Carole (Céline Sallette) and Philippe (Mathieu Kassovitz) roving the countryside in a caravan, living off the land and raising their children, until that lifestyle is tested by certain realities. It’s also based on a true story.
Few socially conscious films, however, surpass the seminal 1919 pacifism paean that is J’accuse, also screening at this year’s festival. Simultaneously anti-war and its own self-contained love story, J’accuse was shot at the end of the Great War and has scenes of real returning soldiers (the famous ‘return of the dead’ sequence). It is a timeless, moving depiction of the senselessness of military conflict.
Luc Besson's Big Blue
Cornerstone studio Gaumont, the oldest film company in the world, celebrates its 120th anniversary this year, and so the French Film Festival are screening, among select others, Luc Besson’s1989 cult classic The Big Blue. A fictionalised story of the machismo-driven relationship between two real champion free divers, and though not strictly Francophone, the film is seen as Jean Reno’s ‘big break’ career-wise, paving the way for higher profile roles (including other Besson productions like Léon).
We’d be remiss not to recommend the reliable, playful Michel Gondry and his latest adventure, the quasi-autobiographical Microbe and Gasoline, set to feature his usual trademark whimsy and charm, but told through the eyes of two misfit boys. Worth mentioning too is up-and-coming director/long-time actor Louis (son of Philippe) Garrel (starring, incidentally, in My King above), who brings his feature debut Two Friends to the festival. All eyes are on him to see if he’ll follow in his father’s accolade-filled footsteps.
The programme is fit to burst with highlights, so we urge you to explore beyond these picks. And the festival is screening in Newcastle, Warwick, Leeds, Hereford, Belfast, Aberdeen, Dundee, Inverness, Kirkcaldy, Hawick, as well as the main sites of London and, of course, Edinburgh’s Filmhouse and Glasgow’s GFT, so you can go almost anywhere this month to catch some premium Gallic cinema.
The French Film Festival runs 5 Nov-13 Dec
For full details, go to frenchfilmfestival.org.uk/FFF2015