Down Under’s 37th French Film Festival, courtesy of Palace cinemas, begins in a week or so. Multiple sessions around the country of 38 films spread across 37 days. To date I’ve only been able to see a few and they’re a mixed bag. But they’re also an entrée sufficient to whet the appetite for more.
Once Upon a Time Michel Legrand / Il était une fois Michel Legrand (2024)
The words on the dressing-room door, “Maestro Michel Legrand”, might have provided director David Hertzog Dessites with the title for his wonderful warts-’n’-all documentary about the legendary French music maker who died in 2019 at the age of 86. Instead, Dessites has opted for the “once upon a time” fairy-tale allusion that refers us both to the magic that Legrand bestowed on the world and his sense of himself as a child, encountering life with a wide-eyed wonder. For him, the film insists, the workplace was simply a playground that unleashed his adventurous spirit (and, occasionally, his temper).
The glorious final sequence merges three aspects of his life: his moving final concert in the Pierre Boulez Auditorium at the Philharmonie de Paris in December 2018 (a couple of months before his death); a stirring montage of him in performance at various points in his career, both at the piano and wielding the baton; and a compelling interview with him shortly before he died.
“I believe that one is born an adult or a child,” he tells Dessites, “and one doesn’t change.” Legrand clearly knows that his time is running out – his encounter with a mysterious life-threatening illness earlier in the year has prepared him for the end – and he’s not holding back. “I’ve been marked by all that matters to a child and I have forgotten all that is of no interest to a child… Destiny guides us, emboldens us, makes us lazy, lets us fly, keeps us grounded. But, in the end, we are possessed by mysterious forces that lead us where they will, and we can only follow.”
The impressionistic portrait of Legrand that precedes all this casts him as a man in love with life, the open-armed gesture of embrace that brings his performances to a close signifying a childlike joy at what he’s doing and expressing his gratitude to the musicians and the audience who’ve been sharing it with him. Director Danièle Thompson says of his collaborations with Jacques Demy, “They are films touched by grace.” It could be a description just as aptly applied to Legrand himself.
He performs with a smile never far away, except when things go wrong in rehearsal. When that happens, we see him speaking his mind, but those who suffer his wrath don’t bear a grudge, seemingly unanimous in their recognition that “he had a wonderful way of saying sorry”, and forgiving of a man they regard as a genius.
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| Michel Legrand |
Shot over a period of two years, Dessites’ film smartly appraises Legrand’s many achievements as a composer, performer, and collaborator. Numerous filmmakers and fellow musicians enthuse about what he brought to their work, and, combined with an abundance of interviews with Legrand over the years, all of this allows a revealing glimpse of the man behind the music (although there’s scarcely anything about his life away from his work).
Legrand’s pleasure in what he does is winning: his pride in the way he’s always been able to surprise filmmakers with the scores he’s brought to them; his lack of interest in the accolades that have accompanied his achievements. “Hollywood has honoured you with three Oscars. How has this changed your life?” asks an eager reporter at a press conference in the US, evidently expecting gush. “Not at all,” Legrand fires back without hesitation. And you believe him.
Thoroughly researched and brilliantly assembled, Once Upon a Time Michel Legrand is a key festival highlight, an absolute treat for anyone in interested in Legrand, 20th-century music, or French cinema.
The Party’s Over! / Classe Moyenne (2024)
Antony Cordier’s fourth feature certainly doesn’t pull its punches. In the pitch-black comedy, the class war is full-on, it’s being waged between two families and the battleground is a luxurious estate in the south of France.
The Trousselards are filthy rich. Lawyer Philippe (Laurent Lafitte) is the obnoxious patriarch; Laurence (Élodie Bouchez) is his past-it actress wife; and their spoilt-brat daughter, Garance (Noée Abita), has brought Mehdi (Sami Outabali), her law graduate fiancée from the other side of the tracks, to meet her parents at their holiday home.
The Azizis work for the Trousselards and try to do the right thing by them. Father Tony (Ramzy Bedia), apologising to teenage daughter Marylou (Mahia Zrouki), leaves in the midst of her birthday dinner to fix some blocked water pipes in his employers’ villa. Like his supportive wife, Nadine (Laure Calamy), he knows to keep his discontent under wraps. But the Trousselards aren’t easy to please.
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| Ramzy Bedia, Mahia Zrouki, Laure Calamy The Party's Over |
And when things go wrong and the simmering tensions burst through the surface order, the two families find themselves drawn deeper and deeper into dangerous waters, exacerbated by all the male chest-beating, female duplicity and unspoken racial tensions. Mehdi offers to serve as the go-between to try to ease the escalating agitation, but nobody seems willing to compromise.
Cordier’s approach is almost anthropological as his film tracks move and counter-move in the conflict. The Trousselards might be loathsome from the start, but once the Azizis’ long-suffering toleration of their employers’ condescension explodes into open antagonism, nobody can be trusted to do the right thing. They’re all products of their places in the social hierarchy. Even Mehdi’s motives become increasingly murky. And, at the end, only the picturesque, sun-drenched setting remains as it was when the film began.
The Party’s Over! was originally released in France as Classe Moyenne, which translates literally as “Middle Class”, or “Bourgeoisie”. The English-language title provides a neat enough ironic pun, declaring that something’s coming to an end, that the “good times” are over, but it only seems appropriate after you’ve seen the film. Beforehand, it might be announcing a belated sequel to a Blake Edwards film with Peter Sellers.
Class Reunion / T’as pas changé
Laurent Lafitte, who plays the reprehensible Philippe Trousselard in The Party’s Over! is at it again in Jérôme Commandeur’s lacklustre comedy, Class Reunion (originally, T’as pas changé, which literally translates as "You Haven't Changed".
His Hervé is one of a trio of now middle-aged men who were at school together 30-or-so years ago at Clemenceau High, where they fancied themselves as “the school stars”. The other two are the seriously depressed Jordy (played by Commandeur), whom we initially meet contemplating suicide, and Maxime (François Damien), an arrogant jerk of the first order, and they’re brought together again, along with other classmates – including Vanessa Paradis as lost soul Anne – by the death of a schoolmate.
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| Vanessa Paradis and Jérôme Commandeur, Class Reunion |
Alas, aside from a couple of funny moments – including a blackly comic funeral scene farewelling the not-so-dear departed to the tune of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” – Class Reunion falls flat. And the lack of compromise that gives The Party’s Over! its oomph is in sharp contrast to the tedious reassurance proffered here.
Set alongside the present-day reunion, the flashback scenes indicate that, initially at least, little has changed over the years (as the French title indicates): these characters led wretched lives back then and have continued doing so ever since. But then their reunion waves a magic wand and, hey presto!, home truths are faced, fences are mended, sins are forgiven, and everybody goes home happy. Except perhaps the audience.
The French Job / Les règles de l'art (2024)
Something of a companion-piece to Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, a wry tale about disaffected masculinity and an art theft gone wrong, Dominique Baumard’s extremely enjoyable The French Job (like The Mastermind) draws its inspiration from a real-life case. In 2010, five paintings were stolen from Le Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris’s 4th arrondissement, a crime that Baumard and his writing collaborator Benjamin Charbit use creatively for their openly fictional purposes.
Three perpetrators are introduced at the start – Jo, “The Artist”, aka “the climber” (Steve Tientcheu), Eric, “The Dealer” (Sofiane Zermani), and Yoni, “The Appraiser” (Melvil Poupaud) – the plot eventually drawing them together according to their various assigned roles in the heist. But an accomplished unit they are not.
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| Melvil Poupaud and Sofiane Zermani in The French Job |
Each has specific skills: Jo goes about burglarising the gallery with impressive efficiency, making the job look very much like a walk in the park, although it could all have gone wrong so easily; Eric is a fast-talking, chain-vaping con artist, so clearly an untrustworthy operator that it’s astonishing that he ever gets to do business with anyone; and Yoni, is a luxury-watch repairer whose hesitant ways make him eminently corruptible and who quickly finds himself in out of his depth. Only his down-to-earth wife (Julia Piaton) seems to have any grasp of life in the real world, Yoni and Eric caught up in wild schemes that eventually (and in a supreme irony) reduce Jo to something of an innocent bystander.
Baumard directs with witty economy and the performances are all spot-on. Poupaud is brilliantly funny as the forever flummoxed Yoni, his discomfort palpable as he becomes Eric’s dupe, Zermani gets Eric’s con-man babble exactly right, and the film is a comic delight.
While the English-language title might initially suggest something in the order of The French Connection, it quickly becomes clear that, as with The Mastermind, irony rules here. The French title, Les règles de l'art, makes a neat pun of its own, idiomatically referring to doing things by the book. Which is definitely not the case with this lot.
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