Monday 16 March 2020

The Alliance Francaise French Film Festival - Sydney's supercinephile Barrie Pattison comes up with recommendations and warnings.


It’s that time of the year again as Palace fill up their venues with big ticket frog film and I spend too much on ten passes muttering darkly when a choice turns out to be something I would have known better about if all the reviews weren’t Portuguese.

They hit the ground running when  Nakache & Toledano (Les UntouchablesSamba C'est La Vie) score a personal best with Hors normes  an account of French unregistered last resort shelters for autistic kids, facing overcrowding, underfunding and constant stress. Vincent Cassel, the most menacing Frenchman ever, heads up the carers giving a totally winning lead performance and generously sharing top billing with Reda Kateb, previously noted mainly as the lead in a Django Reinhardt biography.

Cassel is the center of a number of linked plots - a self-harming boy is allocated to a new trainee who they berate for being late when he gives the excuse that the Metro line was disrupted, only to find that one of their other kids had indulged his fixation with the emergency stop button causing the chaos. Helene Vincent (La vie est un long fleuve tranquil)  as the boy’s desperate mother keeps baking pineapple cake for Vincent when she’s not discussing turning on the gas. His Jewish associates find appealing “Shidduh” blind dates whom he upsets even when they take away his constantly ringing mobile. Kateb’s interest picks up when he sees one. A Jewish fellow worker is put out when Cassel takes an interest in the black aunt of one of the kids.  The company’s accountant is in despair and demands one thing - that Vince stops saying “We’ll find a way.” 

The piece is full of convincingly spontaneous interaction scenes like the competition between the two shelters where the staff play for french fries won by spelling out the organisations they know from their initials. One of the participant eats the stakes. However, it can snap into full feature production value drama mode as when the trainee screws up, off phoning the therapist he’s taken an interest in, only to find the hotel microwave crashing onto the street beside him and his charge run off - his path indicated by the caterer whose creme brulés the kid had spoiled earlier, starting a hectic chase and a merciless dressing down. This happens as the Government Inspectors are considering closing his La Voie des Justes down with Vince spreading out the photos of their charges who will face unthinkable confinements if they fold.

The uniform excellence of the performances makes the real autistic kids indistinguishable from the Comédie Française recruits. Throw in the Turbulences ballet finale and a nice last gag.

Hors normes has got to finish first in the disadvantaged kids movie stakes. Think  Delannoy’s  Chiens perdus sans collier, Cassavetes’A Child Is Waiting, the Farrellys’ The Ringer or Javier Fesser’s Spanish Campeones/Champions. In a conventional hospital they even “Get the mat” for a drill we saw in back in1967 with Warrendale. Intriguingly these films become more hopeful as the list progresses.

Films about the group are a largely French phenomenon - people who chose to spend their time together over the years. You can see them starting in items like Duvivier’s  1931 Cinq Gentlemen Maudits/ Moon Over Morocco  or 1936 La Belle équipe, already different to celebrated Howard Hawks comrade movies like Ceiling Zero, Only Angels Have Wings or Red Line 7000. Claude Sautet does one of those in Classe tous risques (1960) before he makes the ultimate group movie Vincent, François, Paul et les autres in 1974and they’ve been trying to get it right ever sinceActor Guillaume Cantet joined in with his also all-star Les Petit Mouchoirs (2010) which I didn’t altogether buy.

Well M. Cantet and his celebrity cast are back again with Nous finirons ensemble which picks up the first film’s characters ten years later. François Cluzet is cleaning up his neglected coastal chalet when the gang arrive unexpectedly to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. Turns out there’s bad blood between him and Gilles Lellouche after their last meeting.  A few have produced children who sit about texting bored with the whole thing. Benoît Magimel has left Pascale Arbillot and brought a boyfriend. Laurent Lafitte finds himself as sidekick on Lellouche’s payroll  while “bad Mary Poppins” Tatiana Gousseff  pushes a pram in the background of their interaction. Marion Cotillard, hair-blonded, manages to get attention with every appearance.

Turns out that Cluzet has split with wife Valérie Bonneton (following a disaster in that Trocadero affair) and is turning the place over to her, losing “Ma femme, ma maison et mes potes.” He has the comfort of new squeeze Clémentine Baert. After a bit of raised voice dialogue they all move down the road reconciled but uneasy. When Bonneton shows up there’s the usual friction but neighbor Jose Garcia shows an interest in her, changing the dynamic.

This is a very long movie (134 min. ) and it looks as if it will outstay its welcome even with nice touches like the baby fingering Lellouche’s face, a surprising dialogue about cancer or the ensemble doing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” and the outing to the strobe light disco but a boating disaster (didn’t we see that in Palm Beach last year?) snaps all the threads back together with a superior action scene where Joël Dupuch comes into his own.

A film like this needs all the charm the participants can muster and some of the best talent in French movies delivers with plenty to spare. They even manage a Jean Dujardin walk-on. It’s interesting to see how the performers and indeed the director have matured over a decade.

Michel Hazanavicius is having a rough trot Following his humungous success with L’Artiste he hasn’t set a foot right. His serious remake of the Zinnemann The Search bombed and no one was all that enchanted with his Godard mon amour either, so it would have been nice to enthuse about his new Le Prince oublié/The Lost Prince.

The film is an ambitious undertaking with lavish fantasy settings and effects, a great cast and an interesting idea. Unfortunately, it doesn’t jell into the kind of Wizard of Oz hit they obviously hoped for.

Single parent Omar Sy (nice to see him speaking perfect English in the new Call of the Wild) finds that, as his daughter Sarah Gaye becomes a teenager, he is marginalised in her life and in the bedtime stories he used to tell her, where he appeared as The Prince who rescues her from candy land perils by waving red swim flippers. His place is taken by Néotis Ronzon the so blonde boy in her school class. The gold crown over Omar’s door crashes and Ronzon shows up on the shooting stage where the fantasies are fabricated with his cap sliced into a coronet.

Unrecognisable François Damiens' El Farto the black-wearing heavy in the dreams, guides Omar on a doomed attempt to kidnap the new prince and cast him into the pit of oblivion with the fast fading Oubliés, see-through toy characters who once inhabited the girl’s dreams. Neighbor (she always carries round her door in the limbo setting) the winning Bérénice Bejo provides some comfort and when Gaye runs off to the misrepresented birthday party they have to band together with the new prince to save the day.

Despite Sy’s indestructible charm, some of his actions are embarrassing as much for the audience as the characters. The design aspect has its moments. The knitted elephant is a winner but there are off putting deja vus - the walking inflatable with the goldfish inside like Japanime Kimi to, nami ni noretara/Ride YourWave and the ending repeating the last of the Toy Story films.

Considerably further down the scale of ambition we get Mélanie Auffret’s  Roxane, a misjudged try for Ealing-style local charm which lacks the film skill to execute its comic vision.

Poultry farmer Guillaume de Tonquédec reads “Cyrano de Bergerac” with his pet hen Roxane, to his free range fowls. He tells us they really like the balcony scene. However, at the farmers’ meeting the wholesaler says that he’s going to cancel all the contracts except thousand hen operator Michel Jonasz whose economies of scale make it commercially viable to take his eggs all the distance to the super markets.

De Tonquédec  hits on the notion of putting his readings on the net in the hope of building “buzz” to dramatise his plight. Wife Léa Drucker is already showing the hen shed to a young farmer and his pregnant wife who plan to dismantle it and set it up on their property.

To class up his work De Tonquédec’ recruits English B&B lady Kate Duchêne, who used to teach French literature, to coach him in diction and background reading - Moliere, Guitry’s “Debureau”. His brother in law wants to get with the program and offers chook porn.

The film wants us to like everyone but it’s not sufficiently involving for that. They can’t establish any connection between the classic texts and the on screen situation and amiable de Tonquédec isn’t imposing enough to get impact from his performances in the picturesque Bretagne countryside.

On Sprocketed Sources blog I’ve already enthused about Hirondelles de Kabul and Zombi Child and maybe less so Mystère de Henri Pick and Roubaix une lumière. Seeing Demy’s Peau d’ane at twenty year intervals just increases its nostalgia value even if the new stereo digital transfer does make the second generation film for the effects more obvious.


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