French cinema
Tom Birchenough
This is a departure in every sense for François Ozon. The prolific French director has established himself as a master of ludic style in past dramas played out by predominantly female casts, the exceptions, among them his sad black-and-white period romance Frantz from two years ago, largely proving the rule. In By the Grace of God – its French title, Grâce à Dieu, is drawn directly from the story and freighted with a macabre irony revealed in a late scene – he achieves something very different: male roles dominate in a film that follows documentary lines in its investigation of a real-life Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It isn’t provable whether adultery is more accepted in French bourgeois life than in that of other countries, but French films often suggest it’s nothing to get in a lather about. Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction, in which three of the four main fortysomething characters are having affairs, presents infidelity as rote behavior more calmly than would most British or American films, puritanism being not fully extinguished. Assayas doesn’t avoid raising the moral standard – he just doesn’t let it flap excessively.The film isn’t focused on adultery, however, but on the issue of digitisation's Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Proxima is a very special, very beautiful space movie, one of those that are more concerned with the bread-and-butter reality of getting people into space – practically, emotionally, psychologically – than with the starry shenanigans themselves. Think The Right Stuff, the Eighties classic charting the dawn of America's space programme, only this time with a female astronaut battling both sexism and the emotional ties of motherhood on the way to the launchpad. Written and directed by France's Alice Winocour and with Eva Green giving an Oscar-worthy performance in the lead, this Read more ...
Owen Richards
The Shock of the Future is for anyone who's watched a music biopic and thought "that's not how it works!" Directed and co-written by Marc Collin of Nouvelle Vague fame, it's perhaps the most realisitic film about recording music ever made. But as anyone who's ever been in the studio will tell you, the legends are much more exciting than the reality.Alma Jodorwsky plays Ana, an aspiring synth wave sensation. She spends her day (which takes up the entire length of the film) in a friend's flat that she's sitting, along with his huge collection of synthesisers, keyboards and recording equipment. Read more ...
Owen Richards
There were some early warning signs that A Faithful Man might be another box-ticking French romcom. The poster of two women kissing one man, his bemused look in the middle. The lethargic narration referencing childhood and the mysteries of the female mind. Here we go again. But director, writer and star Louis Garrel (pictured above left) subverts expectations just enough to make this French fancy stand out from the pack.Abel (Garrel) is caught off guard by his girlfriend Marianne (Laetitia Casta, pictured below right) when she announces she’s pregnant. For you see, it’s not his. It’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
French director Agnès Varda looks back over a cinematic career of seven decades in this a richly moving film farewell, finished not long before her death at the end of March, aged 90. It’s structured around a series of masterclasses in which she takes audiences through her work, joined in conversation by some of her collaborators (plentiful screen clips present many more). Varda defines the three words important to her in making films as “inspiration, creation, sharing”, and Varda by Agnès is testament to her special talent in that last category.It’s a selective survey, from her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Anyone who saw Félix Maritaud playing the angry activist Max in Robin Campillo’s Paris ACT UP drama 120 BPM will certainly remember him (main picture). He came to the film as a non-professional, from an arts student background, and builds on that performance to deliver a visceral central role in Sauvage, the feature debut of another French director, Camille Vidal-Naquet. It’s a remarkable achievement for both, a harsh study of life on the street in which Maritaud plays a homeless 22-year-old hustler, Léo – though we don’t hear him called that once in the film, fluidity of names being part of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Robert Guediguian has spoken of the influence of Chekhov on The House by the Sea (Le Villa), and the shadow of the Russian dramatist, particularly The Cherry Orchard, can certainly be felt in the French director’s latest film, his 20th in a career that stretches back now some four decades. It’s there in ways that are thematic and structural equally, from its sense that a particular environment, a precious place that has defined the lives of the film’s protagonists in the past, is changing, to an unstudied story development defined by the loosely theatrical, almost “fly-on-the-wall” way in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I met Agnès Varda, who died today aged 90, just once, for the interview that’s reproduced below. It was in Paris in January 2018, shortly before the Belgian-born filmmaker was to become the oldest Oscar nominee in history, for the wonderful documentary Faces, Places. The encounter felt like a lucky break – blessed exposure to an icon and one of the most grounded and delightful inspirations one could imagine.On paper, the event was of the sort that journalists loathe, a ‘round table’ that, due to Varda’s popularity, grew by the second until there were perhaps 30 interviewers surrounding the Read more ...
mark.kidel
Abdellatif Kechiche, the Tunisian-French director, is perhaps best known for the lengthy and explicit sex scenes in La vie d’Adèle (Blue is the Warmest Colour). His latest film opens, slam in your face, with a sequence of passionate love-making: well-shot, edited and played by the actors, but almost as raw as porn. We watch, along with Amin (Shaïn Boumédine), the film’s main character, who peers, fascinated through a gap in the blinds.This voyeuristic moment resonates with the filmmaker’s own almost obsessive need to expose without subtlety the details of sexual activity. A kind of voyeurism Read more ...
Tom Baily
This is a love that begins sweetly, turns terrible, and is told with unflinching directness. Directed by Catherine Corsini, An Impossible Love is based on a novel by Christine Angot (known in France, and increasingly elsewhere, for her powerful autobiographical fiction), which is in turn based on Angot’s own troubling early life and family experiences. If the film is too direct – an anti-melodrama melodrama – it is only because it is honest and treats emotional extremes with great fidelity.It all begins with romance, as Rachel (Virginie Efira) – working class, Jewish and beautiful – meets the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Laurent Cantet’s The Workshop (L’Atelier) is something of a puzzle. There’s a fair deal that recalls his marvellous 2009 Palme d’Or winner The Class, including a young, unprofessional cast playing with considerable accomplishment, but the magic isn’t quite the same. And the film’s interest in a social issue, how the young and disaffected come to be engaged with far-right politics, remains an adjunct to a story that becomes finally more involved with itself.As in The Class, Cantet (together with his co-writer for both films, Robin Campillo) has developed his story around a strong sense of Read more ...