{"id":35105,"date":"2016-10-13T18:33:39","date_gmt":"2016-10-13T23:33:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=35105"},"modified":"2016-10-13T18:33:39","modified_gmt":"2016-10-13T23:33:39","slug":"long-live-french-cinema-at-viff-a-guest-post-by-kelley-conway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2016\/10\/13\/long-live-french-cinema-at-viff-a-guest-post-by-kelley-conway\/","title":{"rendered":"Long live French cinema at VIFF: A guest post by Kelley Conway"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"chocolat\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Chocolat<\/strong> (2016).<\/em><\/p>\n

Kelley Conway, one of our colleagues here at UW–Madison, is an expert on French film;\u00a0we talked about her latest book, a study of Agn\u00e8s Varda, here<\/a>. We invited her to contribute to our blog, and here’s the result. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

David and Kristin introduced me to the pleasures of Vancouver and its superb festival, VIFF<\/a>. Hats off to Alan Franey and the other programmers who created a strong and varied lineup of films. I saw excellent works from Romania (Sieranevada<\/em>), Poland (The Last Family<\/em>), Canada (Maliglutit<\/em>), and Iran (The Salesman<\/em>), but here I will address some of the strongest selections from France.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Shopping till she drops<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"pers-shopper-400\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now and then, the French make films that marry the conventions of art cinema and popular genres. Fran\u00e7ois Ozon\u2019s postmodern pastiche 8 Women <\/em>evokes both the musical and the thriller. Claire Denis\u2019s art-horror hybrid Trouble Every Day<\/em> is contemplative and painterly, but also bloody and scary. Olivier Assayas continues the tradition by combining the traits of art cinema and Gothic horror in Personal Shopper<\/em>, his second film featuring Kristen Stewart as a loyal assistant to a famous woman. While The Clouds of Sils Maria<\/em> (2014) turns on the intense, shifting relationship between Stewart and an aging theater actress (Juliette Binoche), Personal Shopper<\/em> is about a grieving young woman with little emotional connection to her celebrity boss (Nora von Waldst\u00e4tten).<\/p>\n

By day, Maureen (Stewart) makes the rounds of Chanel and Cartier, shopping for her employer; by night, she attempts to communicate with her recently departed twin, Lewis. The film\u2019s links to the Gothic are established early on, when Maureen spends the night in a big, drafty house, awaiting a sign from her brother. Shutters bang, wind blows, and spectral figures attack. The supernatural is juxtaposed with the everyday; like so many twentysomethings, Maureen works in a job she hates in order to pay her rent.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, she\u2019s really good at this job. Wearing jeans and sneakers, she strides into exclusive boutiques, expertly chooses belts, bags, and baubles worth thousands, and transports them across Paris, skillfully navigating traffic on her scooter. At one point, she makes a quick trip\u00a0to London to pick up a few dresses. Maureen tracks her employer\u2019s movements via celebrity journalism on the internet and notes with satisfaction when the fashion maven wears the items she has chosen. But this is as close as Maureen gets to the rarefied world of high fashion; she is explicitly forbidden from trying on the beautiful things she covets. When she eventually breaks this rule, she must contend with the consequences.<\/p>\n

Personal Shopper<\/em> divided critics; the film\u2019s Cannes premiere apparently elicited both hisses and a standing ovation. Stewart\u2019s tendency to mumble here can indeed irritate. But the film\u2019s conclusion offers a satisfying mix of suspenseful communication with the dead and art-house ambiguity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rape, violent videogames, and other breaches of Parisian decorum<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"ll3-400\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Like Personal Shopper<\/em>, Elle<\/em> (Paul Verhoeven) plays with genre conventions. The film opens with a black screen and the offscreen sounds of moaning that could signify pleasure or pain. It\u2019s pain, as it turns out: Mich\u00e8le (Isabelle Huppert) is being raped on her living room floor by a masked intruder. Later, she calmly cleans up broken glass and soaks in the bathtub. When a circle of blood emerges from between her legs, staining the bubbles, she sweeps it away. She tells her close friends about the rape, invests in pepper spray and an ax, and takes a shooting lesson.<\/p>\n

Are we in for a rape-revenge film? Or perhaps a poignant drama about a woman who finds the strength to rebuild her life after a traumatic event? Not exactly. The film references rape revenge and melodrama, only to veer away from these traditions toward an uneasy pairing of satiric comedy and thriller. The film is filled with events typical of a French film about middle aged Parisians in a bourgeois milieu: well dressed people get together for dinner in excellent restaurants, the successful completion of a project at work is celebrated with an elegant party; Mich\u00e8le loses her mother to a stroke, but gains a grandchild.<\/p>\n

But Mich\u00e8le also runs a company that makes violent and misogynistic video games, is hated by her employees, and mocks her admittedly ridiculous mother and son in public. The film\u2019s revelation of a traumatic event in Mich\u00e8le\u2019s childhood might have been used to motivate her cynicism, but traditional narrative causality is not on\u00a0here. Peoples\u2019 reactions to events in Elle<\/em> are always somehow \u201coff.\u201d The film\u2019s upbeat conclusion is particularly confounding: key characters appear to have changed for the better, but we don\u2019t know why.<\/p>\n

Is the film an allegorical treatment of the toxic relationships between men and women? Perhaps. Mich\u00e8le exhibits behavior often attributed to men. In a reversal of Laura Mulvey\u2019s classic analysis of voyeurism, she spies on a neighbor she finds attractive, holding binoculars in one hand and masturbating with the other. She mechanically performs sexual acts without even pretending to be interested in her partner. She sexually humiliates an employee and sleeps with a friend\u2019s husband because she \u201cfelt like getting laid.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elle<\/em> hangs tenuously by its manicured fingernails to European art cinema. The film was directed by Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, better known for his Hollywood films Robocop<\/em> (1987), Total Recall<\/em> (1990), and Basic Instinct<\/em> (1992) than for his work in Europe. Elle<\/em> is a hybrid of Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down<\/em> (1989) and The Piano Teacher<\/em> (2001), borrowing Almodovar\u2019s rape victim fascinated with her rapist and Haneke\u2019s masochistic ice queen, also played by Huppert. Elle<\/em> will intrigue and amuse some viewers and disgust others.<\/p>\n

The film has been submitted to the Academy as France\u2019s entry for Best Foreign Film. Huppert herself has never been nominated for an Oscar and she certainly deserved a \u201cbest actress\u201d award for any number of the films she has made with Godard, Chabrol, Haneke, and Denis. This may be her year: her intriguing cipher in Elle<\/em> and her subtle performance as a philosophy teacher in Mia\u00a0Hansen-L\u00f8ve\u2019s Things to Come<\/em> (2016), also playing at VIFF, both merit recognition.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Race under the big top<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"choc-high-angle-400\"<\/a><\/p>\n

French superstar Omar Sy stars in Chocolat<\/em> (released as Monsieur Chocolat<\/em>), a Gaumont biopic about Rafael Padilla. Padilla was an Afro-Cuban who escaped abject poverty to become a famous clown in Belle \u00c9poque\u00a0Paris. The film recounts the early period of Padilla\u2019s career in a provincial circus, where he masquerades as a cannibal. The clown George Footit, played by James Thierr\u00e9e (a grandson of Charlie Chaplin), sees his potential and they form a duo. Discovered by impresario Joseph Oller, they become \u201cFootit and Chocolat,\u201d and perform nightly at the Nouveau Cirque in Paris.<\/p>\n

The film’s rags-to-riches tale condenses and alters the multiple phases of Padilla\u2019s career; he actually enjoyed solo success in Paris before he met Footit. Still, the film\u00a0succeeds at revealing the clown\u2019s comic talent and physical grace. Padilla is initially na\u00efve and good-natured, like the auguste<\/em> clown character he plays in his act with Footit, but his rage grows at having to play the perpetual fool. He abandons the act and tries to mount a career in the theater playing Othello, but ends up back in a provincial circus, broke and sick.<\/p>\n

\"intouchables-250\"<\/a>At first glance, the plot of Chocolat<\/em> resembles that of Zouzou<\/em> (Marc All\u00e9gret, 1934), another all-too-rare French film featuring a black protagonist. In Zouzou<\/em>, Josephine Baker plays a laundress who becomes queen of the music-hall, but loses the man she loves (Jean Gabin) to her blonde best friend. Chocolat<\/em> is more self-conscious about its racial politics and, in a way, can be seen as a riposte to the controversy around Sy\u2019s earlier hit, Intouchables<\/em> (Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, 2011). In Intouchables<\/em>, a wealthy, white, disabled man (Fran\u00e7ois Cluzet) hires as his aid a young, black man (Sy) from the banlieue<\/em>; friendship, humor, and mutual respect ensue. Intouchables<\/em> was phenomenally successful at the box office, nearly overtaking the top-grossing French film of all time, Bienvenue chez les Ch\u2019tis<\/em> (2008). But it had a complicated critical reception. (See the codicil.)<\/p>\n

Mainstream French critics saw Intouchables<\/em> as a fun buddy film, but others denigrated the film for its \u201ctelevisual\u201d look and its simplistic class politics. But after a Variety<\/em> critic denounced the film for its \u201cUncle Tom-ism,\u201d the French rallied around the film, presenting a more unified stance in favor of Intouchables<\/em> as a welcome step in the move toward racial equality on the screen. Chocolat<\/em>, for its part, underscores more overtly the racism Padilla experiences. The plot invents an episode in which he is arrested and tortured for not having his identity papers, and it shows his mortification at the sight of Africans performing their exoticism for the pleasure of Parisians at the Colonial Exhibition. Chocolat<\/em> is well worth seeing for its lively portrait of Belle \u00c9poque\u00a0popular entertainment and for its role in the ongoing debates about French cinema\u2019s representation of race and its place in the blockbuster economy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Simple, strongest<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Son of Joseph<\/em> might be the only comedy made this year that pays homage to Bresson, Caravaggio, and the nativity story. In this austere yet witty film, brooding teenager Vincent (Victor Ezenfis) seeks the identity of his father. His single mother Marie (Natacha R\u00e9gnier), a compassionate nurse, has kept this knowledge from him, and with good reason. Oscar (Mathieu Almaric) is a philandering and pretentious publisher who cannot even remember the names of his three legitimate children, much less acknowledge Vincent.<\/p>\n

At a book launch party (in which Parisian intellectual pretension is deliciously skewered), Vincent spies on Oscar. Later, Vincent is hiding under a divan when the louche publisher beds his secretary. Vincent\u00a0eventually finds a surrogate father in Oscar’s kindly brother\u00a0Joseph, played by a Fabrizio Rongione, a favorite of Eug\u00e8ne Green and co-producers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Like many of the adolescents in the Dardenne universe, Vincent is an angry kid: he shoplifts, watches as other boys prepare to torture a caged rat, and shuts out his mother. But he returns the tool he stole, rejects animal abuse, and reconnects with his mother.<\/p>\n

American-born French director Eug\u00e8ne Green, director of La Sapienza<\/em> (2014) and The Portuguese Nun<\/em> (2009), brings to The<\/em> Son of Joseph<\/em> his characteristic compositional precision, an appreciation for Baroque art and music, and a distinctive way of filming conversations.<\/p>\n

\"joseph-1-400\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"joseph-2-400\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Green is clearly not interested in standard psychological realism or the mumbling delivery and the improvisation we see in some American indie films. Instead, he strives for the understated and precise acting we see in the work of Bresson or Akerman. Green\u2019s actors deliver dialogue, whether arch or sincere, with perfect diction, often while looking directly into the camera. Green also opts for sparse, often symmetrical, compositions, and he usually dispenses with camera movement. Each shot renders the character’s line of dialogue in toto. \u201cSimple things are, for me, strongest,\u201d he said in 2015.<\/p>\n

The static shots and direct address are never boring. One never tires of Green\u2019s actors and Paris looks stunning here. Interiors are sparsely decorated and beautifully lit; exteriors typically consist of characters strolling through the Palais Royale or the Luxembourg Gardens. Moreover, Green insists upon the power of art: Caravaggio\u2019s Sacrifice of Isaac<\/em> and Georges de la Tour’s Joseph the Carpenter<\/em>\u00a0figure prominently here, as does an extraordinary singing performance in a church.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s rigorous design does not prevent it from exuding hope and a touching sincerity. The concluding scene on the beach in Normandy retains the film\u2019s minimalist design and rewards viewers who remember Au hasard, Balthazar<\/em>, but also suggests the formation of a new family and the redeeming power of love.<\/p>\n

\n

Upcoming\u00a0U.S. releases:\u00a0Sony Pictures Classics has slated\u00a0Elle<\/em>\u00a0for 11 November. Kino Lorber will release The Son of Joseph<\/em> on 12 January, while\u00a0Personal Shopper<\/em>\u00a0(IFC Films) is scheduled for 10 March. \u00a0Chocolat<\/em> does not yet have a U.S. distributor.<\/p>\n

Charlie Michael traces the critical response<\/a> to Intouchables<\/em> in\u00a0\u201cInterpreting Intouchables<\/em>: Competing Transnationalisms in Contemporary \u2028French Cinema,\u201d SubStance<\/em> 133, Vol. 43, no. 1 (2014), 123-137.<\/p>\n

Eug\u00e8ne Green’s remarks about simple things comes from\u00a0his Film Comment<\/em> interview<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0La Sapienza. <\/em>David has written entries on\u00a0Green\u2019s compass-point editing\u00a0here<\/a> and here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"joseph-600\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Son of Joseph<\/strong> (Eug\u00e8ne Green, 2016).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chocolat (2016). Kelley Conway, one of our colleagues here at UW–Madison, is an expert on French film;\u00a0we talked about her latest book, a study of Agn\u00e8s Varda, here. We invited her to contribute to our blog, and here’s the result. \u00a0 David and Kristin introduced me to the pleasures of Vancouver and its superb festival, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225,1,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-directors-green","category-film-comments","category-national-cinemas-france"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35105"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35139,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35105\/revisions\/35139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}