French Film Festival UK 2013: Vive le cinéma!

Sylvain Chomet makes a perfect headline act for the UK’s annual celebration of French cinema, particularly for Francophiles north of the border. Few filmmakers have rendered Scotland with the kind of fine-grained detail he brought to The Illusionist, his elegant third feature based on an abandoned Jacques Tati script, which Chomet relocated to Edinburgh and the Highlands when he fell in love with the landscape. "Scotland is very like Provence," he told the Guardian back in 2010. "Laugh if you like, but they are very similar. The light is exactly the same... and you only get this special light in these two places, nowhere else." Which is fair enough, but when he calls North Berwick "this lost bit of the Caribbean" in the same interview you realise that this is a man who, like Isaac Davis to Manhattan, adores this country, he idolises it all out of proportion.

He returns to Edinburgh, where he made The Illusionist, to open the French Film Festival (FFF) with ‘a live gift,’ his first live-action feature Attila Marcel, which is reported to be a modern fairytale that calls to mind the two Jacques who have influenced Chomet’s whole career, Tati and Demy. Chomet insists that working with flesh and blood actors wasn’t too much of a departure, though. "I’ve always made animation as if it was a live-action film," he says. "Animation is filmmaking, it’s the same thing. And you really train as a director when you do animation. You get the eye, the sense of composition and timing."

Talking of Demy, the FFF’s revival screening of his bittersweet debut feature Lola , from 1961, is another festival highlight. On the surface it suggests a soapy love story, where the nightclub dancer of the title must choose between the trio of men in her life, but beneath the breezy narrative and flowing camerawork there’s a melancholic core. This mix of brio and wistfulness became, as fans of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort will know, Demy’s trademark.

There’s less nuance to Love is in the Air, a high-concept romantic comedy that seems fine-tuned for box-office success. Antoine (a slick-dick Casanova, played by Nicolas Bedos) and Julie (Ludivine Gasnier, who gives a fine, Gallic take on the manic pixie dream girl) are exes who find themselves seated next to each other on a flight from New York to Paris. Sparks fly between Bedos and Gasnier, and director Alexandre Castagnetti keeps things interesting with some Michel Gondry-style flourishes.

But if you’re looking for a more challenging look at amour, the mercurial François Ozon is on hand. Following his delightfully entertaining In the House, which was concerned with the voyeuristic fantasies of a horny teenage boy, he turns his attention to female desire with Young & Beautiful. Former model Marine Vacth plays Isabelle, a middle-class 17-year-old who turns to prostitution not out of desperation or necessity, but out of curiosity. What’s so impressive is that Ozon manages to avoid sensation and salaciousness, and takes this hand grenade of a story into interesting areas. Told over four seasons, it offers few easy answers to Isabelle’s malaise, but its comparisons to Belle de Jour, France’s other great film about a woman in the world’s oldest profession, are justified. Look out for a cameo in the final act from an old friend of Ozon’s.

Another fine female character study comes in the form of the stark and gripping Camille Claudel 1915, from Bruno Dumont, which tells the story of the eponymous late-19th-early-20th century sculptor. Dumont being Dumont, though, he centres his film not on Claudel’s successful career, but over a few days in her later life, when she was confined to a church-run mental institution. Juliette Binoche is electrifying in the lead role.

Other films to look out for in the wide-reaching programme are Alain Gomis’ beguiling meditation on death Today, about a young and healthy Senegalese man who believes today is his last day on earth; remakes of Marcel Pagnol’s Marius and Fanny, which form the first two installments of Daniel Auteuil’s Marseille trilogy; and Becoming Traviata, a riveting documentary following French theatre/opera director Jean-François Sivadier and celebrated soprano Natalie Dessay through rehearsals for La Traviata. All this plus three obligatory films from the holy trinity of French acting: François Cluzet (11.6), Gérard Depardieu (The Man Who Laughs) and Catherine Deneuve (On My Way). Formidable.