"So Frenchy, so chic, so so, so far..." Barrie Pattison is at the Alliance Francaise FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Vincent Elbaz, Laure Calamy, Iris et les hommes/It's Raining Men

The French Film Festival, the 35^th we are told, is a mixed bag but not quite a dog’s breakfast,  if you are looking for a suitable cliché. Misjudged star vehicles share with accomplished professionalism and at least one spectacular blockbuster that can expect to find a place in movie history. 

Caroline Vignal’s Iris et les hommes/It's Raining Men has the Antoinette dans les Cévennes team try to repeat that feel-good success while being cutting edge and confronting at the same time but poor Laure Calamy’s genuine forty something charms have to carry a heavy load.

She comes on as a successful Parisian dentist with a so nice apartment, husband Vincent Elbaz and a couple of teenage daughters, however all is not well at bed time. Another mum at the daughter’s school alerts her to the Tinder site where married people, who want to play about, can hook up. Cell ‘phone jokes with Laure trying to photograph her butt or select from the awful head shots her dental nurse Suzanne De Baecque has made of her. The Metro carriage ride, where Laure imagines the fellow passengers speaking the texts her listing attracts works better than her getting erotic messages while she has a patient in the chair. The film can’t manage to keep these routines coming.

The bulk is her encounters with a variety of takers, meant to be funny – nervous Sylvain Katan proves a problem, Laurent Poitrenaux & Ismaël Sy Savané & Nicolas Godart make suitable partners but she didn’t pick up on the coded information from bondage enthusiast Alexandre Steiger and opts out as he’s fitting her leather gag. We get dental work timed to the “Man & a Woman” theme and, to tell us Laure is having a good time, they break out in a choreographed “It’s Raining Men” number with pedestrians joining in. That worked better first time round in the Bridget Jones movie.

Discussion of the polyamorous life style is would-be daring but we still end up hearing about the only game in town. Coming close on Drive-away Dolls embracing its own kinky morality, this is all on the sedate side. There’s a hint of the risks involved for Laure’s comfortable domestic life, in the way friends react to her new liberated personality and the humiliation to which she subjects her reserved daughter, but this is disturbingly marginal. We’ve done better in Sophie Marceau land.

What we get is really like a glossy sixties sex comedy, except the leads replace Doris Day and Rock Hudson, it’s Paris locations and not Hollywood sound stage, instead of gleaming Eastmancolor we have the current dim digital imaging and people do actually take their clothes off. I got bored with the prototype sixty years back and I got bored with this one.

 

John Malkovich, Fanny Ardant,
Complètement cramé/Well Done! /Mr. Blake at Your Service

Gilles Legardinier’s Complètement cramé/Well Done! Mr. Blake at Your Service is a problem. It’s a polished big budget A feature with name stars. … and it totally lacks conviction.

Listening to the opening commentary you suddenly realise that that’s being delivered in assured French by John Malkovich, quite eclipsing Erich Von Stroheim, Jean Seberg and the other Hollywood names who set up their tents there down the years. Malkovich is a British (!) businessman of the year, who embarrasses associate Al Ginter by not turning up to collect his award. Our hero treasures the memory of the chateau where he proposed to his one true love and the mother of his grown daughter. He jets off for a visitor stay he has booked there. However, things are not well in the so picturesque French countryside. Widowed chatelaine Fanny Ardent is not making a go of it and pins her hopes on striking it big on mail-in lottery coupons. Housekeeper Émilie Dequenne is taking guest bookings and advertising for staff to deal with them. Confusion lands John anonymous in the spot of butler, on a périod d’essaie trial.

Everyone has problems. Final demands litter Fanny’s desk. Emilie is hiding from a failed liaison with a Michelin-star chef and talking to her cat. Maid Eugénie Anselin is sleeping in the stables rather than tell her family the awful truth. Chess-playing gardener Philippe Bas, who takes a shot at John when he thinks he’s a burglar, pines for Émilie and has a curious relationship with the estate’s hedgehogs. He treats the videophone he and John repair as a confessionel.

It’s actually quite touching when they all sit down together to one of Émilie’s epicure meals, that we never get a good look at. John’s interventions have improved all their lives. I can’t help making an adverse comparison with the much funnier The Devil and Miss Jones, where their incognito rich guy Charles Coburn screws up all his attempts to help.

Then John falls off a ladder … and there’s a surreal robbery.

The revelation comes at the end when they run up a Xmas tree on the lawn and we realise that what we are watching is a ritzy version of one of those feel-good pieces that TV engulfs us with in the holiday season each year. By March its shortcomings are too obvious. The fact that the whole thing has been re-voiced in studio interior-sound French, though they all lip synch. impeccably, undermines any ambitions. 

 

Vincent Macaigne, Cecile De France, Bonnard: Pierre & Marthe

Art bio films – particularly the French examples - try to look like glossy paper coffee table books.  Martin Provost's Bonnard: Pierre & Marthe runs to some great images styled after post-impressionist art. An abandoned almond tree blooms and of course they get to devour a tempting roast fowl in the open air, even if the meal does end in a tantrum and the female leads shouting, up to their waists in the river, that contributes some of the film’s most appealing scenic elements. 

 

The times being what they are we concentrate on an overlooked female muse, think Isabelle Adjani as Camille Claudel or Christa Théret in Renoir. Prévost has been here before with his Seraphine. This one centers in an imposing performance from Cecile de France in big hats - skinny dipping, ageing decades, surviving the doctor’s prediction of her demise, getting to do a threesome with Vincent Macaigne’s Pierre Bonnard & Stacy Martin (Vox Lux) before she finds her own artistic vision. The always imposing De France gets our attention, if not all that much sympathy.

Macaigne’s Pierre Bonnard has more to work with making the artist a buffoonish juvenile who at least generates our curiosity – will he do the right thing? The plot asserts, with his involvement with fetching Martin, who figures as one of the film’s most striking images – the spectre in the bridal gown. The always admirable Anouk Grinberg gets some attention too. Otherwise it’s a parade of indistinct performers name dropping as characters are rowed to the leafy Bonnard home - Claude Monet, Maurice Ravel, José María Sert, Edouard Vuillard, Diaghilev, the cubists, les nabis. Idyllic rural life challenges the stimulation of the city. Though the film gives us close-ups of brush work and canvases shape in front of us, we learn perilously little about painting or the controversies of art. We do get to be reminded of the twentieth century with a glimpse of a developing photo or an authentic looking Edison cylinder to hint that there’s more going on.

This one manages to muster the shortcomings of its cycle in the usual unsatisfying manner, despite all the talent on show.

Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Ella Rumpf,
Le théorème de Marguerite/Marguerite's Theorem

I was beginning to think so Frenchy, so chic, so so so far. My luck however changed with Anna Novion’s Le théorème de Marguerite/Marguerite's Theorem. This one gets attention for its novelty even if we can find some familiar entertainment formulas lurking below the surface.

Severe twenty something Grad Student Ella Rumpf is on a fellowship at Paris’ prestigious École Normale Supérieure, tasked with solving the centuries-old math problem Szemerédi's theorem, under the unshaven supervision of Jean-Pierre Darroussin. Nice to know he’s still about. She feels threatened when Darroussin takes on another student, who turns out to be hunky Julien Frison. We know what to expect. After an original antagonism they’re going to work out their differences and she’s going to take off her glasses. However, when Rumpf is in the lecture theatre expounding her progress to date, Frison points out a fault in her calculations which invalidates all her work. Shattered, she flees the hall and abandons her project despite Darroussin’s objections, meaning she will have to refund the hefty sum advanced for her fellowship.

At this point it looks as if we are going to get a more interesting film about someone, who has been sheltered within the academic cocoon, having to face the reality of outside life. Rumpf gets thrown out of a cosmetics sales seminar for pointing out the flaw in the survey they are supposed to administer, with black girl Sonia Bonny already a walk-out after Rumpf demolished the training. Rumpf uses her cash in hand to buy into Bonny’s flat share and they start clubbing together after the day job selling sneakers at Ultimate Sport. However, Bonny uses the rent money to bankroll a dance course and it looks like Chinese landlord Xiaoxing Maurice Cheng will have them out on the street, until Rumpf proposes using her last three hundred and fifty francs to join the back room mahjong game she noticed, prompting her to study the game on her iPhone. Applying her maths know-how, she cleans up and Cheng sets her up as a pro gambler, solving her finance problems. We’ve been here with Robert Luketic’s 21 or even Donald O’Conor in Are You With It? Come to think of it, all this blackboard stuff (no computers and overhead projectors here) recalls the spacemen dazzling the academics in the versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

At this point, the film fleshes out the characters with Rumpf’s clumsy pick up of club patron Idir Azougli, background with her single-parent school teacher mother Clotilde Courau, Darroussin’s defence of pure mathematics, pointing out the research, that disclosed the world was round, changed human history, though we suspect his interest in Rumpf is to advance his own academic career, and the re-appearance of Frison, whose varsity brass band trombone is soon left outside Rumpf’s bedroom - about the time they start painting the flat walls black to do calculations.

Comes the major Lausanne conference, where Darroussin was to present their findings and Rumpf bowls up with the revelation of her turning the pyramid diagram upside down. Academics gather in the hall where the blackboard slides away to reveal another one underneath and she finally puts the square symbol at the end of her calculations to all round applause - nice ending where all the characters come good.

Novion, is an ex film student (Thesis “Anguish, Guilt and Despair in Bergman's oeuvre"), who is a couple of features into a career where she’s worked regularly with Darroussin. She creates a lively, populated ambience and gets strong performances. Newcomer Bonny in particular registers as a complex, sensual character. Novion even manages a couple of showy pieces of filmcraft – bafflement is Rupf’s face dissolving through the chalk board calculations to a white screen or the running figure left distant in the final scene, as the camera follows Frison.

 

Can’t help wondering how many more intriguing films like this play in European neighbourhood cinemas without us hearing about them.