Frogfest is scoring the occasional
capacity turn out though day time sessions are still thinly attended. Prices prevent a
more complete assessment of the content with what is on view so far on the glum
side.
Hard to relate Tran Anh Hung’s Éternité,
his glowingly art directed ‘scope family saga, to the director of Cyclo (France/Vietnam, 1995).
It’s set in a society of women, not
unlike the one I grew up in, where the only events are children and funerals.
The men are off somewhere earning the living and making the occasional
father appearance. Here the marriages however produce seven children.
It is a film that plays on the senses.
The scope screen is packed with colour and detail. The water at the beach
outing is unnaturally blue. The camera pans off the action to a single orchid.
You can near to smell the varnish and stuffed furniture of the elaborate
interiors and the wet foliage mulching all those sunny flower gardens. They
even manage tactile - holding naked babies with their tiny fingers closing
round their mothers’ hand. The sex is deliberately tame however, the
inexperienced bride nervously rounding the screen where Pierre Deladonchamps
waits on their wedding night.
The thing that makes this one remarkable
is that below all this glowing, beautiful family life texture there is the hint
of menace and decay which only occasionally breaks the surface. His
daughter reproaches Jérémie Renier for his constantly pumping babies out of
Mélanie Laurent to the point where she lies dying in the bed with her new born
or the cut to Bérénice Bejo (now at peak star status) screaming in close up.
Audrey Tautou disappears until we go back to her as the matriarch almost
forgotten by her descendants.
Religion, normally a matter of marriages
and baptism, intrudes when Alice Hubball tells mother Tautou she’s going
to become a Carmelite nun. The sons are headed for the wars.
The form is curious, with the bulk of the information carried in elegant French language narration by the director’s wife Tran Nu Yên-Khê and the characters themselves only rarely shown speaking, all backed by solo piano.
I was becoming restless with the minimal
development (someone in the row in front was snoring) until it became obvious
that the motor was not the film’s almost peripheral narrative but its
shifting moods, its gradually progressing reality. The finale is the voice over
telling us about the hundreds of descendants all this baby making has produced
as a girl runs ecstatically across one of the present day Seine bridges in
sunlight to meet her admirer.
It will be curious to see if a film
pitched to such a refined taste will do even the business of the Tran Anh Hung
Asian movies.
Roschdy Zem’s Chocolat gives off
a sinister vibe right from its opening glimpse of the tatty nineteenth century
French provincial Cirque Delvaux where Omar Sy (The Intouchables) does
an African wildman act with a chimp, to scare the kids. It makes James Thiérrée
(recognisably Charlie Chaplin’s grand son) jump, visiting afterwards with a
proposal of what will be their pioneering Footit & Chocolat act. Circus
proprietor Frédéric Pierrott is sceptical until his thin audience starts
laughing.
Elegant Olivier Gourmet, conspicuous in
the scruffy spectators, watches and offers the pair a spot at his metropolitan
hard top. Despite their ratty costumes they are an
immediate hit in their try out, resented
by the clowns already working, but they become the draw of the show - intensive
marketing, posters, toys, the flip book we see in the final scene and an
exhibit at the musée Grevin, where a boy slips away from the fetching Clotilde
Hesme’s education tour to see the famous Chocolat posing with his wax
mannequin.
She convinces Sy that he should
entertain the children in the hospital where she nurses and they become an
item. However things don’t go well with Sy. He spends his earnings on an
(impressive) motor car, gaming and laudanum - better than liquor - gets into
arguments about the act with Thiérrée and the gendarmes take him away to throw
him into a cell and do their own comedy act of turning him into a white man,
scrubbing him with street brooms till he bleeds. There he’s politicised by
an Haitian who alerts him to the racism of this society and the fact that he is
popular because whites like seeing a black man humiliated. He introduces him to
a tattered copy of Othello.
Sy finds a manager who will stage the
play, making him the first black actor in French theatre and becoming the most
confronting experience of his life.
The Sy as Chocolat story runs parallel
with that of Thiérrée who manages to emerge as the real Pagliacci character
with his break down, telling Hesme of his unrelieved loneliness.
Handsomely mounted and exceptionally
played by a strong cast, it has the occasional flourish like the tilt from a
highlight on the lake to the city lights they dissolve into or Sy’s wonder at
their arrival in busy Paris streets or his repeating the child’s gesture of
fingering his face to see if the colour will come off with an objectionable
black face clown. Gabriel Yared’s unobtrusive score is a major asset.
As an actor Rochdy Zem is one of the
strengths of French cinema. His work as a director is less assured. Apart from
being a real downer, the emphasis in this one wanders distractingly - document
of theatre history, anti racist tract, over familiar rise and fall drama. Can’t
help noticing that the routines they stage are less effective than the real
Footit & Chocolat Lumiére reel the film ends with. That includes the
sitting on the bench gag that Abbott and Costello will do in Wistful Widow
of Wagon Gap incidentally.
Frédéric Mermoud’s Moka has been
cited as an overlooked film. It’s mainly made up of ‘scope medium shots of
Emanuele Devos looking stressed, which in a more varied movie would be a
valuable element.
The plot emerges as her on the vengeance
trail over the hit and run death of her teenage son. Detective Jean-Philippe
Écoffey has traced four large brown vehicles fitting the witness description.
At the second attempt Devos finds the bottle blonde Natalie Baye and David
Clavel couple. She moves into a near by Evian hotel and passes herself off
separately as a prospective buyer for the car and a customer for Baye’s beauty
salon, being unnaturally chummy with them.
The heart is scenes between the two
women, backed effectively by the unfamiliar, menacing Lausanne locations, with
funiculaire, the lake where people go to drown themselves, gendarmes wait on
the dock looking for smugglers and there’s “one shitty club” for the young
people of Evian.
The switch ending (“You stop even for a
dog”) and the school meeting with the son’s girl friend partly redeems
draggy body of the film.
With a bit of luck, more shortly.
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