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.

 

"So Frenchy, so chic, so so, so far..." Barrie Pattison is at the Alliance Francaise FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Vincent Elbaz, Laure Calamy, Iris et les hommes/It's Raining Men

The French Film Festival, the 35^th we are told, is a mixed bag but not quite a dog’s breakfast,  if you are looking for a suitable cliché. Misjudged star vehicles share with accomplished professionalism and at least one spectacular blockbuster that can expect to find a place in movie history. 

Caroline Vignal’s Iris et les hommes/It's Raining Men has the Antoinette dans les Cévennes team try to repeat that feel-good success while being cutting edge and confronting at the same time but poor Laure Calamy’s genuine forty something charms have to carry a heavy load.

She comes on as a successful Parisian dentist with a so nice apartment, husband Vincent Elbaz and a couple of teenage daughters, however all is not well at bed time. Another mum at the daughter’s school alerts her to the Tinder site where married people, who want to play about, can hook up. Cell ‘phone jokes with Laure trying to photograph her butt or select from the awful head shots her dental nurse Suzanne De Baecque has made of her. The Metro carriage ride, where Laure imagines the fellow passengers speaking the texts her listing attracts works better than her getting erotic messages while she has a patient in the chair. The film can’t manage to keep these routines coming.

The bulk is her encounters with a variety of takers, meant to be funny – nervous Sylvain Katan proves a problem, Laurent Poitrenaux & Ismaël Sy Savané & Nicolas Godart make suitable partners but she didn’t pick up on the coded information from bondage enthusiast Alexandre Steiger and opts out as he’s fitting her leather gag. We get dental work timed to the “Man & a Woman” theme and, to tell us Laure is having a good time, they break out in a choreographed “It’s Raining Men” number with pedestrians joining in. That worked better first time round in the Bridget Jones movie.

Discussion of the polyamorous life style is would-be daring but we still end up hearing about the only game in town. Coming close on Drive-away Dolls embracing its own kinky morality, this is all on the sedate side. There’s a hint of the risks involved for Laure’s comfortable domestic life, in the way friends react to her new liberated personality and the humiliation to which she subjects her reserved daughter, but this is disturbingly marginal. We’ve done better in Sophie Marceau land.

What we get is really like a glossy sixties sex comedy, except the leads replace Doris Day and Rock Hudson, it’s Paris locations and not Hollywood sound stage, instead of gleaming Eastmancolor we have the current dim digital imaging and people do actually take their clothes off. I got bored with the prototype sixty years back and I got bored with this one.

 

John Malkovich, Fanny Ardant,
Complètement cramé/Well Done! /Mr. Blake at Your Service

Gilles Legardinier’s Complètement cramé/Well Done! Mr. Blake at Your Service is a problem. It’s a polished big budget A feature with name stars. … and it totally lacks conviction.

Listening to the opening commentary you suddenly realise that that’s being delivered in assured French by John Malkovich, quite eclipsing Erich Von Stroheim, Jean Seberg and the other Hollywood names who set up their tents there down the years. Malkovich is a British (!) businessman of the year, who embarrasses associate Al Ginter by not turning up to collect his award. Our hero treasures the memory of the chateau where he proposed to his one true love and the mother of his grown daughter. He jets off for a visitor stay he has booked there. However, things are not well in the so picturesque French countryside. Widowed chatelaine Fanny Ardent is not making a go of it and pins her hopes on striking it big on mail-in lottery coupons. Housekeeper Émilie Dequenne is taking guest bookings and advertising for staff to deal with them. Confusion lands John anonymous in the spot of butler, on a périod d’essaie trial.

Everyone has problems. Final demands litter Fanny’s desk. Emilie is hiding from a failed liaison with a Michelin-star chef and talking to her cat. Maid Eugénie Anselin is sleeping in the stables rather than tell her family the awful truth. Chess-playing gardener Philippe Bas, who takes a shot at John when he thinks he’s a burglar, pines for Émilie and has a curious relationship with the estate’s hedgehogs. He treats the videophone he and John repair as a confessionel.

It’s actually quite touching when they all sit down together to one of Émilie’s epicure meals, that we never get a good look at. John’s interventions have improved all their lives. I can’t help making an adverse comparison with the much funnier The Devil and Miss Jones, where their incognito rich guy Charles Coburn screws up all his attempts to help.

Then John falls off a ladder … and there’s a surreal robbery.

The revelation comes at the end when they run up a Xmas tree on the lawn and we realise that what we are watching is a ritzy version of one of those feel-good pieces that TV engulfs us with in the holiday season each year. By March its shortcomings are too obvious. The fact that the whole thing has been re-voiced in studio interior-sound French, though they all lip synch. impeccably, undermines any ambitions. 

 

Vincent Macaigne, Cecile De France, Bonnard: Pierre & Marthe

Art bio films – particularly the French examples - try to look like glossy paper coffee table books.  Martin Provost's Bonnard: Pierre & Marthe runs to some great images styled after post-impressionist art. An abandoned almond tree blooms and of course they get to devour a tempting roast fowl in the open air, even if the meal does end in a tantrum and the female leads shouting, up to their waists in the river, that contributes some of the film’s most appealing scenic elements. 

 

The times being what they are we concentrate on an overlooked female muse, think Isabelle Adjani as Camille Claudel or Christa Théret in Renoir. Prévost has been here before with his Seraphine. This one centers in an imposing performance from Cecile de France in big hats - skinny dipping, ageing decades, surviving the doctor’s prediction of her demise, getting to do a threesome with Vincent Macaigne’s Pierre Bonnard & Stacy Martin (Vox Lux) before she finds her own artistic vision. The always imposing De France gets our attention, if not all that much sympathy.

Macaigne’s Pierre Bonnard has more to work with making the artist a buffoonish juvenile who at least generates our curiosity – will he do the right thing? The plot asserts, with his involvement with fetching Martin, who figures as one of the film’s most striking images – the spectre in the bridal gown. The always admirable Anouk Grinberg gets some attention too. Otherwise it’s a parade of indistinct performers name dropping as characters are rowed to the leafy Bonnard home - Claude Monet, Maurice Ravel, José María Sert, Edouard Vuillard, Diaghilev, the cubists, les nabis. Idyllic rural life challenges the stimulation of the city. Though the film gives us close-ups of brush work and canvases shape in front of us, we learn perilously little about painting or the controversies of art. We do get to be reminded of the twentieth century with a glimpse of a developing photo or an authentic looking Edison cylinder to hint that there’s more going on.

This one manages to muster the shortcomings of its cycle in the usual unsatisfying manner, despite all the talent on show.

Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Ella Rumpf,
Le théorème de Marguerite/Marguerite's Theorem

I was beginning to think so Frenchy, so chic, so so so far. My luck however changed with Anna Novion’s Le théorème de Marguerite/Marguerite's Theorem. This one gets attention for its novelty even if we can find some familiar entertainment formulas lurking below the surface.

Severe twenty something Grad Student Ella Rumpf is on a fellowship at Paris’ prestigious École Normale Supérieure, tasked with solving the centuries-old math problem Szemerédi's theorem, under the unshaven supervision of Jean-Pierre Darroussin. Nice to know he’s still about. She feels threatened when Darroussin takes on another student, who turns out to be hunky Julien Frison. We know what to expect. After an original antagonism they’re going to work out their differences and she’s going to take off her glasses. However, when Rumpf is in the lecture theatre expounding her progress to date, Frison points out a fault in her calculations which invalidates all her work. Shattered, she flees the hall and abandons her project despite Darroussin’s objections, meaning she will have to refund the hefty sum advanced for her fellowship.

At this point it looks as if we are going to get a more interesting film about someone, who has been sheltered within the academic cocoon, having to face the reality of outside life. Rumpf gets thrown out of a cosmetics sales seminar for pointing out the flaw in the survey they are supposed to administer, with black girl Sonia Bonny already a walk-out after Rumpf demolished the training. Rumpf uses her cash in hand to buy into Bonny’s flat share and they start clubbing together after the day job selling sneakers at Ultimate Sport. However, Bonny uses the rent money to bankroll a dance course and it looks like Chinese landlord Xiaoxing Maurice Cheng will have them out on the street, until Rumpf proposes using her last three hundred and fifty francs to join the back room mahjong game she noticed, prompting her to study the game on her iPhone. Applying her maths know-how, she cleans up and Cheng sets her up as a pro gambler, solving her finance problems. We’ve been here with Robert Luketic’s 21 or even Donald O’Conor in Are You With It? Come to think of it, all this blackboard stuff (no computers and overhead projectors here) recalls the spacemen dazzling the academics in the versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

At this point, the film fleshes out the characters with Rumpf’s clumsy pick up of club patron Idir Azougli, background with her single-parent school teacher mother Clotilde Courau, Darroussin’s defence of pure mathematics, pointing out the research, that disclosed the world was round, changed human history, though we suspect his interest in Rumpf is to advance his own academic career, and the re-appearance of Frison, whose varsity brass band trombone is soon left outside Rumpf’s bedroom - about the time they start painting the flat walls black to do calculations.

Comes the major Lausanne conference, where Darroussin was to present their findings and Rumpf bowls up with the revelation of her turning the pyramid diagram upside down. Academics gather in the hall where the blackboard slides away to reveal another one underneath and she finally puts the square symbol at the end of her calculations to all round applause - nice ending where all the characters come good.

Novion, is an ex film student (Thesis “Anguish, Guilt and Despair in Bergman's oeuvre"), who is a couple of features into a career where she’s worked regularly with Darroussin. She creates a lively, populated ambience and gets strong performances. Newcomer Bonny in particular registers as a complex, sensual character. Novion even manages a couple of showy pieces of filmcraft – bafflement is Rupf’s face dissolving through the chalk board calculations to a white screen or the running figure left distant in the final scene, as the camera follows Frison.

 

Can’t help wondering how many more intriguing films like this play in European neighbourhood cinemas without us hearing about them.