The Current French Cinema - Tom Ryan reviews THE RICHEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD (Thierry Klifa, 2025) & THE STRANGER (François Ozon, 2025)

La femme la plus riche du monde /The Richest Woman in the World (2025, Thierry Klifa, 121 minutes)

Thierry Klifa

Former film journalist Thierry Klifa’s film is, an opening caption announces, “loosely inspired” by the 2010 Bettencourt affair. So, first, some background. Billionaire Liliane Bettencourt (who died in 2017) was the wife of a high-ranking French cabinet minister. He’d formerly been a member of a pro-Nazi group supported by her father, from whom she inherited the L'Oréal empire in 1957. Thirty years on, she met a photographer (for the magazine, Egoïste), befriended him and became his benefactor, their relationship eventually opening the door to a scandal that embroiled not only members of her family but also the Sarkozy government. (1)

The details of that case are more or less consistent with what happens in the film, although the characters’ names have been changed not so much to protect the innocent, presumably, as to ensure that the filmmakers don’t end up in court. Klifa puts it slightly differently: “Rather than illustrate the story we already know,” he recently told The New York Times. “I thought I would show something we didn’t know, represent a milieu that has almost never been represented in France: the milieu of the grande bourgeoisie, of the ultrarich, of very chic families who slip under the radar and who are never spoken about – especially in the 1980s and 1990s, when there was no social media and everything wasn’t all over the press.”

In the film, co-written by Klifa, first with Cédric Anger and then Jacques Fieschi, Bettencourt becomes Marianne Farrère (played by Isabelle Huppert), the head of Windler Paris, a woman lost in an airless world where everything is in its proper place and money is the everyday currency of intimate exchange. 

Guy, her cabinet-minister husband (André Marcon), is solid and supportive but staid, his values in sharp contrast those of flamboyant photographer Pierre-Alain Fantin (Laurent Lafitte), who works for a magazine that’s now (hilariously) Selfishand who likes to light up every room he enters. Although he can be entertaining – Marianne is immediately drawn to him – he is most certainly not to be trusted. 

Lafitte exuberantly embraces the part, as he has similar roles in recent times (Th e Party’s Over! / Classe Moyenne, Class Reunion / T’as pas change and the TV series, Class Act / Tapie). “There’s nothing more sinister than good taste,” his Fantin reflects, loudly, as he’s introduced to the conservative claustrophobia of Marianne’s existence, going on to draw her out of the prison of her wealth that she’d thought was her fortress against the world.

 

Isabelle Huppert 

Alongside them, their presences gradually increasing in significance, are Marianne’s stepdaughter, Frédérique (Marina Foïs), her husband, Jean-Marc (Mathieu Demy, son of Jacques and Agnes Varda), and Marianne’s butler, Jérôme (Raphaël Personnaz). Initially, Fantin charms Frédérique by telling her she’d look very pretty without her glasses – she removes them immediately and we never see her wearing them again – but she’s soon suspicious of his motives and bewildered by his bravado. “Have you always been like this?” she asks. “We’re happier when we dare,” he replies past a provocatively raised eyebrow.  

He immediately sums up Jean-Marc as a man who’s doomed to mediocrity because he doesn’t. On the other hand, his radar remains on full alert, and with good reason, as soon as he encounters Jérôme, who, like him, is gay. And, embodying the spirit of the proverbial cat among the pigeons, he knows everyone’s secrets (except for Jérôme’s) and how to exploit them. 

Klifa’s film doesn’t sidestep the dark aspects of his story – specifically its connections to what took place in France during the years of the German Occupation – and the film maintains its distance from all the characters. But he still manages to make us care: “I never tried to make these characters likeable, or to force any emotional attachment,” he says. “What mattered was staying as close as possible to their inner truth. 

They are both monstrous and deeply childlike. If emotion does emerge, it’s through their vulnerabilities, their solitude.”  

     (1) The affair is the subject of the three-part 2023 documentary, The Billionaire, the Boyfriend and the Butler, currently available on Netflix.

L'Étranger/The Stranger (2025, François Ozon, 122 minutes)

François Ozon

The Stranger is François Ozon’s 25th feature, co-written with regular collaborator Philippe Piazzo and based on Albert Camus’ famous novel, first published in 1942. Both book and film are set in Algiers in 1938, a time of turmoil marked by increasing hostility to French oppression. With a population of around seven million, six million of whom were Muslim, it had been a colony for more than a century with independence still more than two decades away. (1)

Shot in black and white with Morocco playing Algiers, Ozon’s film – like Luchino Visconti’s 1967 adaptation (2) – remains relatively faithful to Camus’ original with its simple plot, its enigmatic protagonist and narrator, Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), and its sketch of a society trying to make sense of a man who’s simply not interested in its rules. Its chief difference lies in how it draws to the surface the social and political circumstances in which Meursault finds himself. “I felt I was pulling on a thread that Camus had woven without developing,” Ozon says.

The film opens with a French cinema newsreel from the 1930s, effectively an advertisement designed to attract Europeans to view Algeria as a desirable place to visit, totally erasing its troubled history. A precursor perhaps to the current American president’s visualisation of Gaza as a tourist destination! 

Benjamin Voisin

In the next sequence, Meursault is introduced, a shadowy figure finding himself sharing a large detention cell with a group of Arab men. Asked why he’s there, he announces, “I killed an Arab,” before the film plunges into the past that has led to his incarceration and that has determined his fate.

Like Camus’ Meursault, Ozon’s remains a mystery, a metaphorical blank page who tempts us to try to inscribe motives on him for his mindset only to thwart us at every turn. The lack of emotion in Voisin’s performance is compelling; he could easily be an actor in a Bresson film. As Ozon’s studied compositions watch Meursault either in close-up or wide-shots shared by others, Voisin’s responses give nothing away. And Meursault is watching too, an impassive observer as the world passes him by, perhaps wondering about what he’s seeing, perhaps not. Several times during the course of the film, he says he’s bored by it all. (3)

For the actor, the demands of the role made for an unexpected challenge. “Playing absence is extremely draining,” Voisin says. “Doing almost nothing, saying almost nothing, is intensely physical! At the end of each day of shooting, I was utterly exhausted.

One effect of this air of detachment attached to Meursault is to shift our attention on to what’s happening around him. When news arrives of his mother’s death, Meursault travels to the countryside to visit the aged-care home where her body awaits burial. As he indifferently goes through the motions of what’s required, what emerges in scene after scene are the rituals ruling what’s going on: the expectation that he’ll want to see her body for the last time (“What’s the point?” he asks), the vigil as he sits overnight with her coffin, the other residents at the home filing in to say their farewells, the horse and carriage that serve as a hearse, the procession to the church, the mass, his black armband… 

He’s a person with desires – and they’re manifested in his relationship with Marie (Rebecca Marder, who has the demeanour of a young Juliette Binoche) – but his disengagement is palpable, and that makes the world around him a key issue for the film. The signs in the cinema foyer forbidding entry to “indigenes”; his neighbour (Pierre Lottin) brutalising his Arab mistress; Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit), whose brother Moussa (Abderrahmane Dehkani) is the man Meursault subsequently kills; the traces of racism that infect interactions in the street; the courtroom rituals; the propositions put forward there about his crime. Was it premeditated? Was it in self-defence? Was it chance?

The film invites us to decode all of this, and to see it in a wider context, social and historical. In a scene that doesn’t happen in the novel (the only one from which Meursault is excluded as a witness), Marie and Djemila come face-to-face during a break in the trial, Djemila’s protests about how her brother has been forgotten by the trial leading to Marie’s attempt to defend Meursault’s place in the scheme of things (“His home is here”), which produces a scoff from Djemila that says everything that needs to be said. Neither Djemila nor Moussa have names in Camus’ novel.

Featuring an edgy score by West African Arab composer Fatima Al-Qadiri (and including The Cure’s 1980 song “Killing of an Arab” over the closing credits), Ozon’s film is gripping, politically astute and, finally, like its source, deeply unsettling.

 

            (1) Algeria was where Camus was born (in 1913) and where he lived until 1942,     when he moved to Paris, eventually joining the Resistance.

        (2)     Ozon on Visconti’s adaptation: “I obviously watched Visconti’s 1967 film. In one of his interviews, he confessed that he hadn’t been able to make the film he wanted, that he had been frustrated, that he wasn’t happy with it, and that his initial choice for Meursault was not Mastroianni, but Delon, which was honestly a much better idea. The perfect incarnation of Meursault in the 1960s was indeed the young Delon, who featured in Le Samouraï, or, even better, the Delon from Antonioni’s L’eclisse, who, in my opinion, would have been the ideal Italian director to adapt The Stranger.”

            (3) Ozon on Meursault: “I identified with him completely! To me, he’s a filmmaker! He looks around him; he sees characters, actors. The others are acting their lives. But not him, he refuses to play along. He never lies. Life is a stage play from which he is absent. However, he sees the beauty of the world, and its violence too. And when he observes this violence, he doesn’t intervene. He remains a spectator. Until the very end, when he finally rebels and becomes the actor of his own life!”

At CINEMA REBORN - CJ Johnson's introduction to the Sydney screening of ONE HOUR WITH YOU (Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1932

Editor's Note: CJ Johnson has introduced a number of films at our Cinema Reborn seasons. CJ has been a resident critic on ABC radio since 2008 and lectures on cinema at the Art Gallery of NSW. In October he will be leading a tour presented by the AGNSW to the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon and participants will have the opportunity to discover the birthplace of cinema and attend one of the cinematic world’s most prestigious annual events. Experience highlights of the week-long Lumière Film Festival, one of the largest international festivals of classic cinema, in Lyon, home of the Cinematograph and where cinema was born. Wander through the Musée Lumière and learn about the Lumière brothers, the fathers of cinema and inventors of the revolutionary camera and projector. Enjoy day trips to the surrounding countryside, with its rolling vineyards and charming medieval villages.

• Attend the internationally renowned Lumière Film Festival in Lyon, the cradle of cinematic history.

• Visit the Musée Lumière and discover the various inventions of the Lumiere brothers, the fathers of cinema.

• Uncover the secrets of filmmaking at the Musée Cinéma et Miniature.

 Click here for more information  

Renaissance Tours 
Tel 1300 727 095 
info@renaissancetours.com.au

ONE HOUR WITH YOU has encore screenings at the Ritz Cinemas Randwick and the Lido Cinemas Hawthorn on Wednesday 13 May at 11.00 am. Tickets available at the door of both cinemas. Just click on the cinemas names to go through if you wish to book in advance.

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Two years ago I had the great pleasure of introducing Mitchell Leisen’s delightful screwball comedy Midnight, from 1939, for Cinema Reborn, and when I did I questioned, and attempted to answer, why Leisen was not remembered, watched and celebrated in the same way that Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch continue to be. Self-evidently, I don’t need to answer that question about Lubitsch. Lubitsch is the sex comedy OG. 

For those of you who weren’t into early 90s Gangsta Rap, ‘OG’ means “Original Gangster”, which you might translate as ‘first great pioneer.’ The OG doesn’t need to have invented the artistic form in question, but rather to have been the earliest pioneer of most defining impact. There is no doubt that, for sex comedy, and romantic and screwball comedy, worldwide, that was Lubitsch. Here’s the thing: with many art forms, once the OG has set the basic template, the artists in their wake tend first to imitate, then build upon, the OG style. Gangsta rap changed radically over the years, from an upbeat party sound to a grittier, more autobiographical, and ultimately brutally violent record of Black American urban life. It grew more radical. 

But the OG of sex and romantic and screwball comedy, Ernst Lubitsch, brought the radical from the get-go. Instead of future practitioners pushing the boundaries of the form, Lubitsch’s followers evolved towards the mainstream, to the point that, ultimately, screwball died off, and sex comedy absolutely died off, leaving the much more middle-of-the-road form of Romantic Comedy as the enduring legacy. Lubitsch’s work was both the pioneering and the radical forms of itself, and very few have managed to match it for its subversive, ground-breaking, rule-breaking joie de vivre. 

Lubitsch really went to town in 1932 and 1933, for he gave us today’s film in 1932, followed in 1933 by Design for Living, the greatest movie ever made about thrupples. Thrupples, for those who may not be aware, are romantic partnerships of three people. Design for Living is about a thrupple. It ends with Miriam Hopkins in the back of a limousine with her two loves, Frederick March and Gary Cooper. They’re heading off into their fabulous new life together. First, she deeply kisses March, then she turns her head and deeply kisses Cooper. Then they all smile and giggle before the screen fades to black. They’re off to have a good time. 

We can have a good time thinking about their good time, even though most of us would find it tricky to emulate in real life. Jack Thompson did, and not only that, he did it with two sisters, for fifteen years. Lubitsch would have loved that. He could have made a very funny film based on that. In Lubitschland, thrupples are funny! 

While Design for Living pushed sexual and societal norms, One Hour With You also pushed filmmaking ones. From the very first scene, which isn’t a song but is spoken in rhyme, this film stands out as radical. When a Parisian police chief instructs his officers in rhyme, something is up. There aren’t that many rules yet and Lubitsch is simultaneously creating and breaking them. The very next scene, he takes another rule - don’t look at the camera - and smashes it. He allows Maurice Chevalier to turn to camera and speak directly to us, the audience. In Chevalier’s hands it feels natural; indeed, he’d done it a few times before with Lubitsch, and it wouldn’t be the last time: famously, 26 years later, Chevalier opens Gigi the same way, extolling the virtues of grooming little girls so that when they come of age you can be ready to pounce. 

Chevalier has always been cast as the classy sleaze, and that’s his role here. His opening monologue to camera, broken down, is basically saying, “Can you believe how young and hot my wife is? My god, I have to tell you, I love sleeping with her and I do it as much as I can.” His wife is played by Jeanette McDonald, who was 29 to Chevalier’s 44, so you can appreciate his enthusiasm. It’s not the world’s biggest age difference, and  certainly not by Hollywood standards, but it’s enough for the policeman in the park scene to assume, and assume very confidently, that these two could not be husband and wife. 

So about that park scene, the second in the film, right after the police chief instructs his officers in rhyme: let’s decode it, let’s all get on the same page, which is to say, on Lubitsch’s page. The police chief, at the beginning of the film, after reminding his cops that the tourists who flock to Paris are coming for one thing and one thing only - sex - instructs them to basically let all the tourists get away with whatever they want, except for making love in the parks after dark. It seems the fabled Parisian cafés are losing customers once night falls, because they’re all going off to root in the bushes, and it’s up to the constabulary to root them out of the bushes and back into the cafés. So in the next scene, the cops do exactly that. 

The production code, that hideous studio agreement designed to appease the Catholic League of Decency and keep federal government censorship at bay, was created in 1930 but barely enforced until 1934. This self-muzzling set of restrictions is the reason that the rest of the world, watching American movies made between 1934 and about 1960, thought that American married couples slept in separate beds or even bedrooms, that there was no interracial romance, that there were no homosexuals except self-loathing or homicidal ones, that people didn’t bleed when they got shot, that nobody swore or blasphemed, that adults wore pyjamas, that all adultery ended in punishment, and that nobody went to the toilet. (It’s true - Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960 was the first American mainstream release to show a toilet bowl.) 

Films released in 1932, like One Hour With You, are considered ‘pre-code’, which allowed them a great degree of naughtiness but not, perhaps, some of the explicit imagery of the silent era. One Hour With You is pure pre-code; just as Design for Living is a celebration of the joy of threesomes, so too One Hour With You is a hearty endorsement of adultery. In this film, it doesn’t wreck your marriage, it makes it more fun. But that doesn’t mean that Lubitsch was able or willing to show a parkfull of grunting fornicators, so he encoded it. When the cops raid the park, what you’ll see on screen is a lot of couples making out on park benches. But what Lubitsch wants you to see in your mind’s eye is those same couples gleefully humping al fresco. So have that locked and loaded, and make it as filthy as you like. That’s what Lubitsch would want you to do. 

This is a film that is completely, unashamedly, joyously about one thing: sex. It’s about sex in the park and sex with your wife and sex with your wife’s best friend. Credits. Indeed, the key to having the most fun with Lubitsch is simply to remember this: every time you think you’re hearing a dirty double-entendre, you are hearing a dirty double-entendre, and in any given moment, vocal inflection, cutaway shot or simple gesture you can decipher a possible sexual metaphor: bang! You’re right on the money. Every possible lewd interpretation is the right interpretation. That’s part of the Lubitsch touch! 

Marurice Chevalier was all about sex. His persona was very clearly established in the public’s perception as ‘randy Frenchman’. In one of his previous collaborations with Lubitsch and leading lady Jeanette McDonald, The Love Parade - 1929 - his character is a diplomat who has to be reprimanded by The Queen because he’s been bonking everyone at the Embassy including the Ambassador’s wife. Then, right before One Hour With You, Lubitsch directed him in The Smiling Lieutenant, which may as well have been called The Horny Lieutenant. That film, full of Chevalier winking and raising his eyebrows before walking into ladies' bedrooms, was Paramount’s biggest hit in 1931, and Chevalier’s reputation as a lascivious continental was truly cemented. 

All of which is important to know to fully appreciate what’s going on in One Hour With You. Chevalier’s speech directly to the audience at the beginning of the film is a big in-joke. The subtext, which would have been clear to all audiences in 1932, was that Chevalier was a man who was always on the make, regardless of anyone’s marital status, so his declaration that he was married, deeply in love with his wife and enjoying plenty of monogamous sex with her, was risible, an ironic metatextual gag. “Chevalier? Married and monogamous? Pah! Pull the other one!” That’s the set-up. We know that’s not his true character and in a way, we’re now put into the position of waiting for him to be tested. It doesn’t take long. But in the early stages of the film, as he valiantly tries to resist the allures of the extremely eager Mitzi, the fact that this is Chevalier, the man who cannot resist the primal urge, raises the comedic stakes. It would be like opening a film with W.C. Fields claiming that he had gone sober and then locking him into an unattended liquor store overnight. 

Chevalier’s trademark was a straw boater hat and bow tie, and the fact that he wears these accoutrements in the film, as he did in most of his films, makes it even clearer that we’re meant to bring our Chevalier baggage with us into the movie. Like W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers and others, although Chevalier plays different characters in his different films, he is also always playing ‘Maurice Chevalier’, and ‘Maurice Chevalier’ is a lecherous horndog. That was his reputation in real life, too: Jeanette McDonald called him ‘the quickest derrière pincher in Hollywood’.  

Supposedly, and certainly to do with that derrière-pinching, Chevalier and McDonald did not get along too well, but you’d never know it from their four films together. They had fabulous on-screen chemistry, and that is integral to One Hour With You. We can believe that these two are enjoying a good marriage and are attracted to each other romantically and sexually, and that makes the dramatic and comic tension of Chevalier’s almost inevitable philandering all the stronger. That, and the fact that we don’t want to see McDonald get hurt. Her Colette is the most sympathetic, likeable character in One Hour With You, and McDonald gives perhaps her best performance among her four collaborations with Lubitsch. 

Lubitsch himself did not have a reputation as a groper, lech or adulterer; he was married twice but there is no existing evidence of the kind of sexual adventurism he celebrated in his films. There’s a great quote from critic Michael Wilmington: Lubitsch’s films “were directed by a man who was amused by sex rather than frightened of it – and who taught a whole culture to be amused by it as well.” And that is a huge part of what came to be known as ‘The Lubitsch Touch’. It was a light-hearted, joyful and hugely permissive approach to sex that allowed us to laugh along with things like adultery rather than be shocked or offended by it. In Lubitschland, sexual desire is omnipresent and unregulated: the Parisian cops encourage it, just not in the park. There are no priests tut-tutting, and certainly no children weeping as their parents engage in bitter custody disputes. Sex is free and easy and, most importantly, fun. It’s something to be looked forward to. 

In One Hour With You, the eager Mitzi, played very coquettishly by Genevieve Tobin, schemes to be visited by Chevalier’s Andre, and when her maid confirms he’s on his way over, she moans, falls back on her divan, kicks off her shoes and wiggles her feet in lustful anticipation. She can’t wait to knock Chevalier off this silly, sanctimonious ‘monogamy’ kick he’s on, and neither, quite frankly, can we. You can’t have a sex comedy without sex, and married sex, especially in Lubitschland, is just not very funny. Thrupples are funny. Adultery is funny. And if you can get on board with that, there’s nothing in One Hour With You to shock or offend or disgust or appall you. Lubitsch isn’t trying to provoke you. He just wants you to have a good time. 

Enjoy.

On Australian Film History - Rod Bishop reviews THE LAST DAYS OF ZANE GREY by Vicki Hastrich, Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2025

In the 1930s, Americans didn’t believe sharks ate people.

Hollywood celebrity novelist Zane Grey knew they did, and came to Australia to big game fish in 1935 and 1939. The great white shark rarely attacks humans, but it was Grey’s holy grail and he fished at Bermagui, Batemans Bay, Hayman Island, Lady Musgrave Island, Sydney Heads and Port Lincoln. 

He also acted as himself in White Death (1936), a feature film about catching a great white off Hayman Island.

Zane Grey wrote over 100 novels and short stories. His literary output contributed to 112 films and 3 television series. Starting with the publication of his first book Riders of the Purple Sage in 1912, he became regarded as a major force in establishing the underlying mythologies of the Western genre.

Grey had a clause in his Hollywood contracts insisting the films he wrote should be shot on locations where his novels were set. This opened up the startling landscapes of America’s south-west (such as Monument Valley) to many Americans who were seeing them for the first time.  

At his peak in the 1930s, Grey’s novels and his Hollywood assignments earned him $350,000 a year. In today’s terms, that’s millions a year. 

Enough for him to arrive on our shores with a retinue of helpers, including a business manager, three cameramen, several boats, tents, copious fishing gear (valued today at $AU1,350,000) and 166 suitcases, requiring a two-ton truck. His elaborate camps were set up with kitchens, sleeping tents, temporary wooden floors and even offices where he could continue writing and managing his business.

His arrival in Australia was very big news. Some have even suggested the mass hysteria over Grey’s swashbuckling fishing expeditions in Australia are only matched in this country by the arrival of The Beatles.

Author of The Last Days of Zane Grey, Vicki Hastrich writes: “We just went crazy for him. As far as I can tell there were something like nine of Grey’s films in circulation when he arrived in Australia in 1935.”

The media fiercely chased him for fishing tales, Western stories, photos, interviews and public appearances. Writing home to his wife Dolly in the USA, Grey said between 250 and 500 visitors came to his Bermagui camp each day hoping to see him. 

Hastrich writes: “The constant incursions on his privacy at the Bermagui camp were becoming intolerable. The stream of stickybeakers wandering through had never stopped, all of them wanting something…One woman walked through the camp on the morning after the Zane Grey birthday party: there were no people, she said, but she did see the remains of his birthday cake left out on a table. This qualified as news, as did many other petty invasions.”

Grey said of Australia: “This is the greatest country I have ever visited…the finest fishing in the world…You are developing an individual race, somewhat like the south-west Americans. The New Zealanders are more English than the English.”

Despite the patronizing attitude to First Nations people in the cast of White Death, Hastrich says: “Grey had seen Aboriginal people as intelligent, skillful and knowledgeable – qualities rarely ascribed to them by white Australia.”

This very readable account of Grey in Australia is exhaustively researched. It details all of his fishing expeditions, his prodigious spending, his precarious financial state, his numerous extramarital affairs (some scandalous), his plans for Australian novels and his literary legacy. But love affairs and letters back to Dolly apart, we don’t get too many insights into the man. One, however, is his reaction to reading John O’Hara’s ‘dirty’ BUtterfield 8. He burnt his copy in the camp fire, then argued with defenders of the book on his staff, who promptly quit and returned to the States in disgust.

Made on a budget of $AU2,700,000 and shot on Hayman Island in Queensland, White Death can be found on three YouTube  files, although sound drops out for 10 minutes. Grey, on screen for the first time in a feature film, plays himself, and it makes a lucid definition of near unwatchable, wooden acting. 

Grey’s business manager Edwin G. Bowen directed, produced and edited. It was his first, and his only, feature film and it plays like an embarrassing amateur production. The predominately English voices are just one of its cringe-worthy offerings. So too is the portrayal of First Nations people, the lame comedy and the atrocious acting.

Then there’s the shark. The best parts of White Death are the footage of Grey fishing for swordfish. But decent shark footage eluded him, and as for the great white, the crew had to paint one shark white and also construct a model for other shots. The fakery is hopeless, and the pathetic chase for the great white sucks whatever life was left out of the film. 

White Death bombed and there’s no evidence of it ever being released in the USA. 

In 1939, only months before his death in California, Grey caught several great white sharks off Port Lincoln, but the fish of his life, a 17-foot great white escaped.   

AT CINEMA REBORN - Barrie Pattison's introduction to THE WATCHMAKER OF ST PAUL (repeat screening on Thursday)

Philippe Noiret, The Watchmaker of St Paul

Editor's Note: THE WATCHMAKER OF ST PAUL  drew a very good crowd at its screening at Cinema Reborn in Sydney screens again in Sydney on Thursday 7 May at 4.15pm. It screens in Melbourne at the Hawthorn Lido on Saturday 9 May at 11.40 am, introduced by Andrew McGregor, and on Wednesday 13 May at 4.00pm.

Below is Barrie Pattison's introduction to the first screening in Sydney. The intro wont be repeated on Thursday at the repeat screening at the Randwick Ritz.  Barrie was a friend of director Bertrand Tavernier and his introduction recalls this friendship.

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This is a slightly expanded version of the introduction I did to the 2026 Cinema Reborn screening.

I’m going to give you a little Film History, so here’s an apology to the people who know this already.

The first archival screenings we hear about, happened in the thirties in New York, London and Paris. The French activity was different, not conducted by institutions’ salaried officers  but by enthusiasts who gathered (and sometimes stole) copies which the Companies were discarding as no longer having any value. This appears to have been a boutique activity, with Henri Langlois and Georges Franju storing their prints in Langlois’ mother’s bathroom.

However (and this they don’t tell you) during The Occupation, a German Major put things on a more business-like basis, expanding the collection substantially from a couple of hundred titles (not a year’s programs for a serious Cinémathque). In the post war period, Paris became known as the only place in the world where you could see many important films. People like director Bob Swaim or writer Carlos Clarens came there, because that was where La Cinémathèque Française was.

A devoted core audience watched Langlois’ screenings at night and,  in the day time, wrote for magazines like Positif,  Cahiers de Cinéma, Présence de Cinéma, Cinéma Soixante dix, and the rest. They developed the celebrated Politique des Auteurs which said that movie directors were as much the authors of their work as composers, painters, sculptors and dramatists and they applied it to Hollywood professionals like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, rather than heavyweights like Carl Dreyer or Robert Bresson.

… and they started making films, the celebrated La Nouvelle Vague.

After their phenomenal success with titles like Francois Truffaut’s Four Hundred Blows, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Louis Malle’s Zazie in the Métro, near three hundred films were made by French directors in their twenties. This process was peaking when I arrived there in the early sixties. 

I encountered press agent and critic Bertrand Tavernier, who was already doing episodes for sketch movies. He drew on his enthusiast background, scooping Laetitia Roman’s resumé out of the pile on his table, exclaiming “Gold of the Seven Saints!” and reviving her wilting career giving her the part in  Les baisers.

Shortly after this,  the authorities took the Cinémathèque away from Langlois - and his indignant supporters staged a demonstration outside the Trocadéro auditorium, which turned into a riot when the gendarmes broke it up. Bertrand Tavernier was seen leaving the event with blood streaming down his face. It was the first of the succession of manifestations of May ‘68, reverberating round the world - Le joli mai! 

I can’t help noticing that that messing with La Cinématèque Française brought down the French government while wiping out the Australian National Film Theatre only stirred interest among the people who wanted to make off with its funding and real estate.

Meanwhile Bertrand Tavernier had interested Philippe Noiret in Tavernier’s proposed adaptation of L’Horloger d’Everton, a story by Georges Simenon,  creator of Inspector Maigret. Noiret become a star out of his Nouvelle Vague movies.  His participation ensured finance and the film that you are about to watch was made. Tavernier rejected the night and fog of preceding Simenon productions.  His  L’horloger de St. Paul/The Watchmaker of St. Paul was about May ‘68, most obviously in the motif of the burning car and in Noiret’s final affirmation. But it’s not just a propaganda exercise, also incorporating a study of the Lyons neighbourhood where the work of the plumber, the glazier, the neighbourhood cafe or even the Cathedral where Noiret maintains the steeple clock,  get mixed in with the action. It is also, centrally, a father and son relationship examined in serious detail.

The film was a notable success and Tavernier followed it with other message pieces. I wasn’t the first person to tell him he was repeating himself and he had already set in train his jazz film ‘Round Midnight, the one that emboldened Clint Eastwood into making Bird, and the the first of the productions that turned Tavernier into one of the major film makers of the late 20th Century - Dimanche  dans la Compagne/Sunday in the Country, La Vie et rien d’autre/Life and Nothing But, Laisser passer/Safe Conduct.

However, he remained an enthusiast. He fronted a season of Julien Duvivier’s thirties Harry Baur films. He toured a retrospective of French war movies to promote his Capitain Conan and he was instrumental in setting up a film museum in his Lyons home town, in the building which had housed the Lumière factory, where what is generally considered the first motion picture had been made. He staged a history of westerns there.

I’d watched Tavernier do the sound mix on a couple of reels of l’Horloger de Saint Paul - the railway scene. Tavernier’s wife is the passenger out of focus behind the actors.  (His daughter Tiffany also appears in the opening scene looking at the car burn from the moving carriage window).  Tavernier was actually singing, caught up in the euphoria of starting his dream career. I’d see this a couple of times more - Peter Fonda after Easy Rider came out  and Oliver Stone when Platoon took off. Being part of a community largely made up of wannabe movie directors, however one of the most interesting things I got to do was watching Bertrand Tavernier go the distance.

I’m placing a 1974 interview I did with Tavernier after the London Premier of Watchmaker, on my Sprocket Sources Blog

THE CINEMA REBORN 2026 CATALOGUE IS NOW ON SALE

Here’s the splendid cover of the Cinema Reborn 2026 catalogue. Editor Anne Rutherford and designer David McLaine have assembled 88 pages of superbly written commentary by 30 contributors ranging from highly esteemed international critics to a bunch of insightful young local writers, critics and scholars. 

In Sydney the catalogue is on sale ($15) at Radio Free Alice 136a Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst, Store Hours: Mon - Sat: 11am - 6pm. In Melbourne its on sale at Asphalt Books,Nicholas Building, Level 4, Room 23/37 Swanston St, Melbourne, Thursday, Friday & Saturday 12-6pm

It will be on sale at our foyer Information Desks at the Ritz Cinemas in Sydney and the Lido Cinemas Hawthorn throughout the festival.

For those out of town who would like a copy we can send it by post for $20. Send an email to cinemareborn2025@gmail.com and we’ll give you the bank details for direct deposit and post it off as soon as we receive payment.

The Current Cinema - another new Australian movie that might fall through the cracks - ALPHABET LANE (James Litchfield. Australia, 2025)

Anna (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), Alphabet Lane 

I'm warning you. Pay attention. Remember the first line of Alphabet Lane. Think about the last. It takes less than  an hour and a half to get from one to the other.

Dont think about the title. Unless I missed it, there's not even a road sign to indicate what it means. 

Alphabet Lane is set in the Monaro. High up. A young couple have left the big smoke for a quieter life, which proves to be a duller life. She's a doctor who works nights at the local hospital. He works on the Snowy Hydro. They start telling stories to each other to brighten up their humdrum existence. They invent things about their neighbours, indeed invent neighbours.

But you'll be asking questions. Why do the couple park their cars a hundred metres apart ...Why didn't Michelle just get in her car and drive away...and why dont they put stamps on the letters. Such mysteries... 

You might, if you wanted to be critical, ponder just what a master like Claude Chabrol might have made of this material. The Chabrol of the 60s and 70s, of La Femme Infidele and Juste Avant La Nuit might have produced a much more beefier movie, something with some serious consequences for role playing and games, something with some eros and more danger to make the stakes higher. But Chabrol had made maybe twenty movies before then and on more than a few was just marking time or perfecting his craft as they say. Nobody in Australia ever gets to have those options unless doing tv soaps counts.

Two starting points. Alphabet Lane and Le Beau Serge. Does James Litchfield have a career stretching out before him making interior melodramas and mysteries about the wayward middle classes. If his career trajectory is like everyone else in Australia we'll likely at best get a second look in about three or four or five years. Not at all satisfactory for someone who just might offer something a lot more thoughtful and subtle than the squalid horror derivatives that seem to be the lot of our commercial film-making.

Streaming on Netflix - Rod Bishop recommends - DETECTIVE HOLE aka Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole (Jo Nesbø, Norway, 2026)

Any Norwegian serial killer, police-procedural that uses the German philosopher Martin Heidegger as a running joke, has got to be worth a look.

Tobias Santelmann plays Detective Harry Hole (pronounced Hurl-ah) as a self-loathing, destructive introvert, almost completely lacking in social skills and occasionally suicidal. An alcoholic with a taste for prescription meds, he’s brilliant with forensics and highly skilled at serial killer profiling. It’s the booze that keeps getting him into trouble, causing an on-and-off relationship with his current partner Rakel (Pia Tjelta). It also means he’s constantly in danger of suspension from the police force.

He gradually bonds with Rakel’s 14-year-old son Oleg (Maxime Baune Bochud) and scores big time with the teen by introducing him to the Ramones. Despite the threats of suspension, Harry’s serial killer expertise means the Oslo cops can’t do without him.

Tobias Santelmann as Jo Nesbø’s troubled cop in Detective Hole

His adversary is Tom Waaler (Joel Kinnerman), a seriously corrupt, narcissistic police colleague with a sociopathic idea of social justice. Tom also blames Harry for being drunk and killing Tom’s friend (possibly his lover) in a police car chase. Forced to work together, Tom and Harry have nothing but contempt and suspicion for each other. All this - and more - is revealed in the first episode. Another eight follow. 

Adapted for television by Jo Nesbø from his fifth Detective Hole novel (The Devil’s Star), Nick Cave and Warren Ellis add a brooding original score to the copious collection of songs. The ‘needle drops’ include Iggy Pop, Ramones, Los Lobos, Sex Pistols, Warren Zevon, Donovan, The Doors, Slayer, PJ Harvey, Leonard Cohen, The Falls, Muddy Waters, Elvis Costello, Otis Brown, Tammy Wynette and others.

Jo Nesbø 

At times graphically violent, this crime thriller is set in an often gritty and grimy Oslo. Although many of the tropes are familiar, the psychological character studies are interestingly heightened, and Nesbø has loaded the series with enough Nordic pickled herring plot twists to keep most viewers guessing and absorbed.