At the French Film Festival and screening elsewhere - David Hare recommends AUTUMN IS COMING (François Ozon, 2025)

The screen above shows supporting actress Josiane Balasko, left with lead Hélène Vincent driving off to forage for mushrooms in François Ozon's latest noir comedy/drama from last year Quand vient l'automne (Autumn is coming).

In the second screen Hélène, here given such splendid close ups from Ozon in all her 82 year old glory, now cooking the mushrooms for dinner (screen below) to feed her obnoxious daughter, a spectacularly vile Millennial parody by the fabulous Ludivine Sagnier. 

Last screen is a sassy (and sexy) Malik Ziddy as Helene's son-in-law. 

After a deeply personal and powerful debut back thirty odd years with his earlier "transgressive" features - Les Amants Criminels, Gouttes d'Eau sur Pierres Brulantes, Swimming Pool, Sous le Sable - and more, I felt in the last decade or so Ozon was losing his edge, as though the treatments, he was giving to his screenplays were simply flattening out into "moral" equivocation.

Quand Vient L'Automne is a wildly triumphant return to form, and mood and the sheer variety of his players with their highly individual playing styles admirably conjures a micro world of real people reacting variously in extreme circumstances.

At the French Film Film Festival - Tom Ryan reviews the 'Quietly compelling, exquisitely gentle, ...perfectly judged' - OUT OF LOVE (Nathan Ambrosioni, 2025)

Unexpected events can change people’s lives. For Jeanne (Camille Cottin) in Nathan Ambrosioni’s superb Out of Love – the original title, Les enfants vont bien literally translates as “The Children are Alright” – it’s the arrival on her suburban Paris doorstep of her sister Suzanne (Juliette Armanet) with her nine-year-old son, Gaspard (Manoã Varvat), and his little sister, Margaux (Nina Birman). 

Anybody who’s ever found themselves fortunate enough to take on parenting obligations will recognise Jeanne’s sense of panic when Suzanne disappears overnight, leaving her children behind. Jeanne is single and child-free by choice. Both sisters’ lives have been scarred by loss and each is, in her own way, still grieving about it. 

Beautifully shot by Victor Sequin and tenderly enfolded by Alexandre de La Baume’s unobtrusive score, the 26-year-old Ambrosioni’s emotionally potent family drama transforms Jeanne’s uneasy attempts to adjust to the changes thrust upon her into a journey of self-discovery. At the same time, it empathetically evokes the children’s confusion at what’s happened to them and the frightening fear of forever-abandonment that has fuelled so many fairytales over the years and has now found them cast adrift in the world. 

For Jeanne, the crisis becomes both personal and professional. Nicole (Monia Chokri), her former partner, shows her by example that it’s possible to deal with the needs of the children she’s been forced to take under her wing. And so, juggling her work as an insurance claims assessor with the demands of mothering these two lost souls, as well as with trying to make sense of her sister’s disappearance, Jeanne gradually comes to recognise parts of herself that she never knew were there.

Out of Love’s visual style tells us about the sisters’ lives even before we’re properly introduced to either of them. The restlessness of the opening scenes – as Suzanne drives the children to Jeanne’s – is in sharp contrast to the orderliness that characterises the initial sequences in Jeanne’s home. But then, as Jeanne comes face-to-face with her unexpected event, the stillness with which she had surrounded herself is not only disrupted but comes to seem like it’s been a prison all along. Nothing in the film is simple, every scene charged with a sense that things could change again in an instant. 

Ambrosioni’s approach throughout is measured and compassionate, rigorously drained of melodrama and neatly balancing Jeanne’s needs against the children’s confusion and distress. And the film’s glorious final sequence offers no easy solutions for any of the characters, setting imagery evoking lost childhoods against Gaspard and Margaux’s essential decency and resilience and guiding us towards an appreciation of how Jeanne’s commitments speak of a well-earned sense of renewal.

Quietly compelling, exquisitely gentle, delicately nuanced and graced by superb performances all round, this is a perfectly judged film.

At the French Film Festival 2026 - Tom Ryan looks over ONCE UPON A TIME MICHEL LEGRAND (David Hertzog Dessites, 2024), THE PARTY'S OVER (Antony Cordier, 2024), CLASS REUNION (Jérôme Commandeur, 2025) and THE FRENCH JOB (Dominique Baumard, 2024)

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

At the 2026 French Film Festival - Tom Ryan looks over ONCE UPON A TIME MICHEL LEGRAND (David Hertzog Dessites, 2024), THE PARTY'S OVER (Antony Cordier, 2024), CLASS REUNION (Jérôme Commandeur, 2025) and THE FRENCH JOB (Dominique Baumard, 2024)

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

 

French Film Festival + The Current Cinema - Janice Tong's 🎥 Filmic Postcard loves THE THREE MUSKETEERS PT 1 & PT 2, (Martin Bourboulon, France 2023)

Les Trois Mousquetaires : D’artagnan | The Three Musketeers Part I: D'artagnan (2023) France | Germany | Spain | Belgium, 

Les Trois Mousquetaires : Milady | The Three Musketeers Part II: Milady (2023) France | Germany | Spain | Belgium, 

 

 Mélanie Thierry (R) and Marina Foïs (L) in Party of Fools

I have always looked forward to the French Film Festival, having attended this festival religiously over the past 25 years and I have developed somewhat high expectations. Some big names this year too, such as Catherine Breillat, Last Summer (2023) with Léa Drucker; Arnaud des Pallières, Party of Fools (2023) with Mélanie Thierry and Marina Foïs; Stéphane Brizé, Out of Season (2023) with Guillaume Canet and Alba Rohrwacher, and Joachim Lafosse, A Silence (2023) with Daniel Auteuil and Emmanuelle Devos, to name but a few. But for whatever reason, these perfectly-made films fell short of stealing my heart, however they tugged or unwittingly I wished to be led. 

Out of Season

Perhaps with one exception, Sidonie in Japan (2023) by director Élise Girard. I am only newly acquainted with Girard during Covid lock-down but have come to love all the films I’ve seen of hers; and this one, I’m pleased to report, has the same whimsical quality as her other films did. Isabelle Huppert was in fine form, though it was the German actor, August Diehl, as her husband’s ghostly apparition, who made the film – and made me want to immediately re-watch Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019) upon exiting the cinema. 

^{Sidonie in Japan: does this shot remind you of another?}

 

So, I must admit that I was completely taken by surprise when the very gesture of captivation I was seeking, came from not one, but two blockbusters, Martin Bourboulon’s two-part epic, The Three Musketeers: D’artagnan and Milady. 

 

From the very opening sequences, D'artagnan had me in a state of swoon. I was completely swept away by the movement, costumes, drama, its larger than life characters (yes, including the silly, naive and hang-dog look of François Civil’s D’artagnan, his lank hair and grubby face notwithstanding), and charmed by its engaging though predictable storyline, but most of all, I found myself carried away by the spirit of this brotherhood of musketeers – their motto ‘one for all and all for one; united we stand and divided we fall’ stirred up something in me that was fiery and passionate. It was so easy to fall in love with Alexandre Dumas’ tale from 1844, the distance of time did nothing to dull its grandeur, it was as if these characters were real, and their plight and fight were unfolding in front of my eyes at that very moment in the darkened cinema.

 

From there, a collection of cinematographic fragments filled the screen: the first view of a white stallion graced the rolling hills; then later, a dappled grey mare, all muscles and veins in another scene; the way sunlight streams into the palace interiors in the films’ extraordinary mise en scène; or that particular shade of crimson of Cardinal de Richelieu’s cloak; the way Louis Garrel (as King Louis XIII) wore his attire – handsome in a rock ‘n’ roll kinda way; the ambivalent sexual orientation of Porthos (Pio Marmaï); to the kohl-lined eyes and stubbled cheeks of Romain Duris (Aramis) sporting a hat full of feathers that, unlike the straighter long feathers of his fellow musketeers, his resembled those of a cockerel’s tail with a bright orange plume and lower down a flash of ultramarine blue; and at last, to my favourite vignette, that of Vincent Cassel’s (Athos) long locks, whether tied back in a knot, or hung about his face, wavy and loosely dishevelled – his hair gave him an air of solemnity and aristocracy. I love that Cassel likes to associate his characters with an animal; and for him, Athos is an old wolf, full of battle scars, timeworn and rugged, his mind and body bares the weight of his tormented past, and as he’s older than his fellow musketeers; he draws on this experience in combat, rather than rely on performance alone. These kinds of subtleties put our actors into the pantheon of Frenchman with their long history of sensuality: that men can be as rugged as they come, but be incredibly sensual at the same time; just like Alain Delon before them. 

 

Vincent Cassel

Some trivia: Cassel’s father, Jean-Pierre, brought Vincent along to Richard Lester’s shoot of The Three Musketeers back in 1973, in which he played Louis XIII. Notable actors of their generation, Michael York, Oliver Reed, as well the scale of production left a mark on the little boy. (Jean-Pierre Cassel also played D’Artagnan in Abel Gance’s rather silly comedy Cyrano and D’Artagnan (1964)). I counted no less than 32 feature film adaptations of this narrative since 1903, and this is not including any animated films. The last directed in France was shot in 2005, and before that 1961, so Martin Bourboulon’s version seems long overdue. 

 

The esprit of the musketeers is so entrenched into our psyche that they are cited as part of our everyday folklore; they appear to us not only in physical locations like their ‘hideout’ on rue de Nevers in Paris; but also ubiquitous in stories about brotherhood. One of my favourite British crime drama series, Endeavour, in Season 2 Episode 4, Neverland, (2014) had characters sporting the tattoo ‘A41’, signifying the motto ‘All for one’. In another television show, a very fine German/Danish co-production, Tod von Freunden | Beneath the Surface (2021) a direct reference to the musketeer’s brotherhood of ‘All for one, and one for all’ amongst a tight-knit group of childhood friends.

 

Even if you are not familiar with the history of the musketeers, who were in fact, a military branch of the Maison du Roi; Dumas’ story is universal – loyalty, brotherhood, love, religion, rebellion, vengeance, deceit, politics, allegiance, righting wrongs, codes of honour. I won’t spoil all the plot twists to retell any details here, except to say that Bourboulon did not remain entirely faithful to the book as he took on liberties to graft a number of historically accurate incidents into the plotline.

 

Just like the glorious epic of Shōgun (2024), the ten-part television mini-series that is currently showing on Disney+, the director and producers have taken great care in bringing authenticity to the screen; and for the Musketeers this included the way a mount is ridden, for example, Cassel in an interview said “Athos is a true noble. He has to sit in his saddle accordingly, hands low.” Whilst it’s ok to flirt with the code of a western in the beautiful costuming by Thierry Delettre; but to take care to not cross the line, (remember the details of the feathers, or the decision to dress Athos in dark colours which included a scarf to give the appearance of hair on his chest, a hint of sexiness on this old grey wolf). The production design by Stéphane Taillasson won the 2024 César Award for his category. In fact, no budget was spared; Musketeers reputedly cost €72M to make, whilst Shōgunballooned out to $250M USD. 

 

^{The crimson cloak, sunlight and incredible production design}

But I think The Three Musketeers (and Shōgun’s) relatability hinges on the very fine-casting of its characters and the impeccable casting of the film’s female heroines: the female characters are more complexly drawn, and in this way, they were able to bring about an ebb and flow to the swashbuckling rhythms of their counterparts. Eva Green as the multifaceted tragic heroine Milady de Winter provided just the right amount of darkness and intrigue to the innocent and good-hearted Constance Bonacieux, D’artagnan’s love-interest, played by the fresh-faced Lyna Khoudri (Khoudri has already a wonderful repertoire of heroines to draw from, Papicha (2019), Haute Couture(2021) and Secret Name (2021)); and finally, the inimitable Vicky Krieps as Queen Anne d'Autriche, who on the surface is stoic and stately, but secretly in love with the Duke of Buckingham and willing to risk her own livelihood because of this love. What I found most touching in all of this, is the musketeers’ sensibilities; their instinct to withdraw after saving their Queen in order to give her the privacy needed with her lover; and they did this without it being a betrayal to the King, whom they are loyal subjects to; that everyone, even the Queen is entitled to their intimacies and private life. 

 

^{Beautiful and captivating Eva Green as Milady de Winter: villainess or l’amour?}

The Alliance Française French Film Festival was shown in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart and Perth in March to April this year. The Three Musketeers films are now playing commercial seasons at Palace cinemas around Australia.

FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL (3) - Barrie Pattison rounds up after being "force fed French film for a month"

It’s pretty good you know – a month of new French films, twelve hours a day on eight screens. Even in Paris you won’t get the year’s output grouped in this way and of course you won’t get English subtitles. (They actually used to do those for tourists for a while in seventies). My European contacts don’t recognise a lot of the films, which is good news/bad news. My opinion gets undue prominence however.  When the only other reviews are in Dutch, there’s no research to steal.

Still on a high from part one, I homed in on Les Trois Mousquetaires /The Three Musketeers - Part II: Milady which comes as something of a letdown, though it’s clearly from the same hands. We only occasionally get those soaring historical panoramas, like the shot widening to show the lines of men and equipment advancing on La Rochelle or unfamiliar action movie images - horsemen reflected in the receding surf they gallop through. They manage to end one piece of swashbuckling with a chook pecking the ground.

This one is supposed to switch attention to Milady de Winter/Eva Green slipping off her outer garments and allying with D’Artagnan. The last we saw of her, she had just killed two men sent into the burning Chateau to take her. However, King Louis Garrel and wife Vicky Krieps have become marginal and the new intrigue is less involving than the Queen’s necklace, with Eric Ruf’s Comédie Française Cardinal Richelieu spelling it out when he tells Krieps that his function is to protect the Royals from all enemies – even her. “The protestants and Catholics both want war. Only the king wants peace”. Ruf dominates the intrigue, unconvincingly recruiting Milady and issuing the pardon that D’Artagnan, who he has threatened with retribution for his effrontery, will flourish in the trial climax.

Add Romain Duris’ Aramis and Pio Marmaï’s Porthos, who finally get some screen time to justify their star presence, notably in the ride to avenge Duris’ nun sister Camille Rutherford’s honor after her begging Marmaï to stop Duris killing the father of her unborn child. The soldier proves only interested in marrying rich. When Duris challenges the man to a duel, Marmaï wins his bet on the trip’s outcome.

The subplot of Aramis’ Protestant brother crucified in the surf (like the Scorsese Silence‘s Christians) does provide the great set piece of the rescue under the guns of the fortress, stayed by the (there had to be one) black Musketeer. The four riding off leaving the doomed associate still suspended on the timbers matches the viciousness evident the instruction to dispose of Vincent Schmit “Feed Abbé Rougon to the dogs.”

On the other hand, the set piece assault on La Rochelle is a letdown, with its improbable outcome and fakey model ships going up in smoke. Even more unconvincing is our heroes in the shubbery over-hearing Richelieu’s hiring Green’s regularly resurrected Milady - “Killing me once wasn’t enough.” This leaves Civil’s manic quest for the abducted Khoudry, (“The only one innocent in this whole affair”) with its twist and genuinely alarming finale, as the production’s insubstantial centre.

They do manage to do the British segments in not too clearly recorded English, a plus – I guess. Once again the bones of strategy poke through the narrative, when we realise that they are following the format of TV “limited series” with an inconclusive ending open to a part three.

The makers like the same bits I do, jamming them into the advertising – firing the pistol and then tossing and catching it for use as a club, along with rousing sentiments, Marc Barbé'/De Treville’s “Musketeers are soldiers destined to die. I will take you where men die.” In my experience of the military, the best my officer ever managed was “Remember to pick up your brass, men.”

Une année difficile / A Difficult Year, from the Olivier Nakache, Éric Toledano team who did Intouchables (also on show), was an ambitious French comedy with issues, where the elements don’t cohere, despite engaging leads and strong production values.

The opening montage of succeeding French Prime ministers announcing a difficult year on TV is a nice piece of sub-John Stewart and the Black Friday Sales stampede is a considerable set piece which raises hopes. The rioting bargain hunters cascading under the lifting store shutter door get mixed in with over-consumption protesters, among whom we spot Noémie Merlant. She almost gets through this one without taking her clothes off. Pio Marmaï is fending off other shoppers wanting a 75 inch TV to re-sell to internet purchaser bearded Jonathan Cohen. However, when he gets to Cohen’s flat the bailiffs have emptied it to meet his debts. The anti-consumer lot later compliment him on his decluttering.

Pio’s living in the airport. He has a good thing going with customs, where he retrieves objects confiscated from passengers and flogs them. With Cohen, he takes advantage of the pay what you want (nothing) at the La Ruche Drop-In center, where we get the pitch about global warming. Comedy about their activist pseudonyms. Pio is enthusiastic about group hugs with Noémie, which Jonathon wants to join but the plain woman has her eye on him – it’s a delicate piece of juggling to keep this from being distasteful.

There’s the court where the judge is not convinced their debts should be forgiven – again. Pio’s wife sees through his gift of the confiscated perfume already unwrapped (he says it’s to remind him of her smell) and we get the big bank demo, where among the smoke the duo slip off their protester outfits to hammer on the doors in suits, claiming to be victim bank officials needing to meet an associate in the room where financial histories are stored, in order to modify their own with Tippex. The investigators soon treat them with derision. Meanwhile advisor Mathieu Almaric is being bounced by casino security for trying to get back to the one arm bandits after the computer shows his banned ID.

Anti-consumer leader Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet (La prinesse de Montpensier) has the duo’s measure and drops incriminating footage into an AV presentation showing fake blood pouring down stairs, the bank protest and their traffic blockade scam. The pair are thrown out. However - this is trying too hard for feel good - Pio has seen the error of his ways and facilitates the runway demo under the giant nose cone of the turning plane. Pairings off and happy end.

 

Presentation is superior and the eco material and skilled comics register but mixing them defeats the makers.

Léa Domenach’s Bernadette / The President's Wife recalls Dick, the Vice President Cheney movie, where they explained that it was so hard to get at the truth but they tried “We really did.” Making a film about the wife of French President Jacques Chirac, they have to satisfy survivors and their legal teams, informed critics, paying customers and the admirers of living legend (forget Johnny Come Lately Tom Cruise) Catharine Deneuve. By and large, writer-director Léa Domenach, on her first theatrical feature, and her people have negotiated that minefield quite creditably.

Husband Jacques Chirac/Michel Vuillermoz’e has wife Catharine/Bernadette step back, when he’s taking inauguration bows from the Elysée Palace window. “You’ll fall.” She finds that her daughter (Sara Giraudeau), who she placed in the team as advisor, has taken the place at his side. Even their chauffeur Lionel Abelanski gets preferred seating. The excuse is that she is seen as cold and distant by the French public, as P.R. Consultant Denis Podalydès (particularly good) shows her with his pie chart presentation – dim comedy with her correcting the flunky on how to address her.

Podalydès is given the task of upgrading her image with her running for mayor from her Corrèze home district as the jumping-off point. She has the chauffeur drink the local vintage samples pressed on her – cut to the traffic cops making him blow in the bag. He of course later goes public at the worst moment. Catharine carries her election, though the high-speed rail link she promised never arrives.

Karl Lagerfeld show up, indignant that she keeps on wearing that cotton candy colour suit, saying people will think he’s not dressing her properly and we see her suitably bemused in his fur lined number. Complications when Chirac is found with an Italian Tootsie when the Princess Di crash hits the press.

Bernadette/Catharine brings out an autobiography, with her fidgety husband having a “Taissez vous” note passed her when her press conference is going so well. She likewise disposes of “treacherous” Laurent Stocker’s Nicolas Sarkozy with the threatening dedication with which she autographs his copy. The alliance they later make, as the Chirac administration looks like submerging in financial scandals and divisions appearing in the French Right Wing, will mean more to the home audience than it does here.

The non-comedy material is an uneasy fit, with anorexic other daughter Maud Wyler feeling exploited when she figures in press coverage – even if she gets a hospital named after her.

Deneuve is right on top off all this, fronting her Comédie Française support cast’s expert collection of grotesques – Vuillermoz shown shaving naked. Throw in a few nice touches like framing events with her priest’s celebrity photo lined confessional sessions and having the choir, that makes a final appearance, sing the captions.

Stéphane (Mademoiselle Chambon) Brizé’s Hors-saison / Out of Season is a romance long on atmosphere. Movie star Guillaume Canet has just quit a stage engagement four weeks into the run, upsetting all involved (represented by the film’s personnel doing indignant phone voices) and decides to work off his burn-out in a winter off-season coastal spa hotel, not worried about putting his dirty shoes on the spotless white bedding – montage of the selfies the staff take with him. Between massages, playing at opening the automatic doors, walks on the rugged coast line and reading the scripts his agent has sent (he selects the one with the least pages), his ennui gets a firm hold.

However, and well into the film, his one time tootsie Alba Rohrwacher shows up, now living locally, married with a child. Will they or won’t they? A French movie with a couple of name stars – of course they will. She starts slipping away from her boring husband and her piano teaching for their nostalgic get-togethers and he puts off his departure. At this point the film takes an abrupt turn with a reduced aperture interview of a woman retirement home resident about discovering her sexuality, which gradually fills the image, and our leads go to the diner where a pair of bird callers are the entertainment, doing a preening rooster when they get to Canet. A tame sex scene and then he’s on his way.

Action is accompanied by the player piano which we occasionally see as insets. The green tinge turns the child’s red hair brown, undermining a plot point. 

I like Rohrwacher better doing her grotesque characters, making her face a Brigitte Helm mask, which inspires intriguing conjectures about what is going on behind it. The story we get here would be more acceptable between the soft covers of a paper back romance novel. 

Thomas Bidegain, who wrote several of  Jacques Audiard's best films, directs Soudain seuls /Suddenly which comes with the attraction of a pair of class performers making a convincing professional couple on a Puerto Eden yachting holiday. Gilles Lelouche has chosen (for reasons not adequately examined) an island dot off the coast of Madagascar to explore. “There won’t be room for your big feet” partner Melanie Thierry prompts. While they take the dinghy ashore and examine the abandoned whaling station, a storm comes up and when that’s gone, their ship is no longer visible.

Time to run up a shelter from the station remains with timbers arranged in SOS pattern on the slopes and for a bit of mutual recrimination. They make out and there’s a moment of truth when they realise survival means slaughtering lovable Manchot penguins for food. Then winter sets in and the penguins are gone. A couple of striking high shots underline their isolation. Their shelter can’t withstand the winter gales and after a futile attempt to attract a rescue ship, Giles struggles back for some grisly surgery replacing a skin flap and cauterising the wound. Melanie decides that she must cross the island on her own – not helped when her backpack skids down the ice out of sight. The non-verbal solo section makes the best part of the film.

The leads are good and the mounting plausible but it still lacks conviction or involvement, ending up being a none too impressive extension of the High Barbaree, Burke & Wills, The Grey line. Let’s face it, watching movie stars falling victim to the elements is not an attention grabber.

After that Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol’s Nina et le secret du hérisson /Nina & the Secret of the Hedgehog was a welcome change of pace. A cartoon feature from the makers of the admired 2010 A Cat in Paris had promise and the unfamiliar sub-Gaugin style gets attention.

A nice opening shows the unemployed worker scoop a hedgehog out of harm’s way and back home this inspires him to create (black and white segment in the style of the early sound animators) a cartoon hedgehog character which will push its way out of the page to comment action with the voice of the late Guillaume Bats.

Back story is the closure of the factory, whose owner has been jailed on suspicion of salting away the money which should have been used to pay the staff, their strike graffiti still daubed on the derelict buildings. The one-time foreman is now scab caretaker, using a mean black dog to patrol the forest surrounded grounds. Nina, the workman’s daughter, voiced by Loan Longchamp, becomes convinced that the trésor caché is on the premises. She signals to her friend Mehdi (Keanu Peyran) the boy in the flat above, by bouncing a rubber ball off her ceiling under his floorboards, that she wants his help and smitten he goes along. His big brother’s advice on how to deal with girls doesn’t seem to be much help. While the neighbour, who is supposed to be watching TV with Nina (and her cat (which is one of the film’s best inventions) dozes, the kids raid the factory, almost getting caught.

The plotting and pacing are scaled to the child market and big people are likely to find it a bit thin, particularly in this era of sophisticated animation. We get jokes like the hedgehog earning employ with an acupuncturist. Audrey Tautou & Guillaume Canet provide adult voices. The sharp-eyed may enjoy detail like the simplified Night of the Hunter poster. 

By way of contrast consider L'été dernier / Last Summer, which I’d already seen at last year’s Melbourne Film Festival. With her back again after a decade, this looks a vintage offering from Catharine Breillat, poster lady for transgressive film. We get elegant lawyer Léa Drucker briefing a teen age girl rape victim on the rough spots she faces with legal action. This suggests the creator of 36 Fillette and Bluebeard is going to deliver a smart, in character social drama. However, before long we find we’re in for a retread of Phaedra via a Danish 2019 Trine Dynhome movie Queen of Hearts.

We learn about childless Drucker, victim of a youthful misadventure, now in a super respectable marriage with Olivier Rabourdin, that runs to an explicit make out scene. However, Rabourdin’s teenage son by his first marriage, Samuel Kircher, is having brushes with the law.

Léa warns him to shape up or else and that goes implausibly well, with Sam swimming with the adopted Asian girls on a picnic and doubling Léa on his motor scooter away from the boring gathering (OK extended traveling shot) to the livelier surroundings of a local boîte. It’s not long before the two get into a sustained double close-up lip lock and a bit of “No, we shouldn’t.” They represent the contrast of the Pill Generation and the Aids Generation. Developments like sister Clotilde Coreau catching the guilty couple or Kircher’s illicit Dictaphone recordings, don’t go anywhere interesting.

The marriage survives and Léa’s back in the sack with Rabourdin, when the doorbell rings and Kircher is downstairs drunk...

Neither the cast or the handling are able to generate conviction and this one has to be rated a disappointment. 

It has elements in common with the even more serious A Silence telling us about child porn among the Walloon privileged, derived we are told from real events.

Since he began in 2001, director Joachim Lafosse has made ten features, most of which never reached me. I only saw L'économie du couple because it was a Beatrice Béjo movie starting at a convenient time one night in Paris. None of them look like an easy watch. His 2008 Élève libre anticipated the current release in dealing with grooming and dominance. Leads A-Listers Daniel Auteuil and Emmanuelle Devos have track records that encourage trust in their judgment however.

He plays a prominent Belgian lawyer who has just had a success in a high profile case which means a journalist pack are on twenty four hour stake out in front of his luxury home, complete with its swimming pool and tennis court. However, again there’s trouble with his teen age son Matthieu Galoux smoking weed and getting thrown out of schools, despite extensive home coaching.

We kind of admire Dan for the way he stands up to the reporters and a shadowy police investigation and supports his clients. Galoux’ teacher tells him they respect his dad’s defiance. However, Auteuil’s sister won’t speak to him and he’s furtive with his computer usage. Most of the filming reflects the point of view of wife Devos on whom the grim truth, which she already suspects, is brought home with interrogations, a raid and confiscation of hard drives. The film asserts with the introduction unfamiliar elements of the destructive effect of Auteuil’s conduct on his family.

However, it’s the enablers who face the film’s severest condemnation, echoing the Weinstein case. In the finale sustained close up, Devos is isolated. 

A lot of the filming is done in moving cars from the passenger or back seat, more adept than the Godard days. It’s yet another shrouded in darkness piece. Only when a light is struck do we get to see Auteuil’s now gaunt features. This one is argument rather than entertainment. That’s going to dominate any assessment of it.

Also purposeful but a much better film is Jeanne Herry’s Je verrai toujours vos visages/All Your Faces, not something I would have normally sought out, a fiction feature exploring the French Restorative Justice Program, where victims and perpetrators face one another under the organiser team’s supervision. This comes without the convicts participating being offered any prospect of remission. I saw it as something of a duty after a friend became involved in one of these programs, working up my curiosity, not to say sympathy – and the film’s trailer prompts that it has a celebrity cast. Herry is Miou-Miou’s daughter.

The film making was straightforward and comes with special pleading reservations. There is however a moment of truth early on, when convicted armed robber Dali Benssalah (Athena) singles out bank teller victim Leïla Bekhti (who gets better every film) after her account of her shut-in’s agoraphobia, afraid she might meet the armed bandit who forced her to stay face down under her desk with the dust and a rubber band, which stay burned into her memory. Benssalah tells her that assailants would slink off, in fear of the victims, who could create a scene or identify them. He was a gang leader, who insisted he carry the only loaded weapon on a job and had contempt for victims who would put their children at risk rather than give up pin numbers. Both start a plausible adjustment. It’s a grabber.

This is contextualised effectively – the doubts of the case workers, who stress that they are neither lawyers or cops, in conversations spaced by home-cooked delicacies they bring to the meetings. If you didn’t recognise Élodie Bouchez, Jean-Pierre Darroussin and the rest you’d believe they were corrections professionals rounded up to showcase the actors. The drab prison setting, suggested by a few simple establishing shots, along with bits of business like smoking break conversations or rejecting the ritual passing of the speaking stick, add conviction. Re-enactments are limited to a wide shot of a house where a curtain is pulled back at night or a close-up of a bolt being drawn. Curiously race is only fleetingly referred to with the robber whose mask and reflective glasses didn't show even his skin colour.

The performances, notably the monologue where the camera creeps closer to Miou-Miou, are exceptional. Gilles Lellouche, a victim who seems more bullying than the criminals, does a formidable, sympathetic turn. The impression that experienced actors are performing actual case transcriptions derives from the writer-director’s access to psychiatrist’s journals. In the film, as apparently in casework, rapists are the most difficult to confront. They save Adèle Exarchopoulos’ meeting with half-brother molestor Raphaël Quenard for an ending where the twin traps of depressing plausibility or simple-minded happy ending face the makers. They pull that one off too.

Je verrai toujours vos visages is a very European film, heir to the best work of André Cayatte or Costa Gavras and totally outclassing the daytime movies coming from the U.S. which dip into this territory. I was impressed

As always, despite pouring time (and money) into this event, I could have missed high points. With all seasons, there’s no way of telling how much the picture of the activity the event represents is coloured by the taste of the organisers or the mechanism that supplies them.  Being force fed French film for a month does leave a distorted impression but what the heck?