A Film a Week - My Darling Family / Ma famille chérie

 previously published on Cineuropa

Families can be complicated to navigate, and this is usually best observed at gatherings. One such situation is at the centre of Isild Le Besco’s new film My Darling Family, which has just premiered out of competition at the 77th Locarno Film Festival. One initial positive thing going for it could be the fact that Le Besco probably knows a thing or two about the topic of large, chaotic families, since she grew up as part of an artistic clan, while one negative aspect, apart from it being overlooked for selection in one of the competitive sections, could be the fact that the same film, with similar actors and crew, was announced for 2022 under the title Connemara.

The aforementioned region of Ireland is also the location where the majority of the plot of My Darling Family unfolds. Our protagonist and focal point is Estelle (the magnificent Élodie Bouchez), who runs away from her abusive husband Antonio (Stefano Cassetti) and comes to the reunion earlier than planned with her three children in tow. Her mother (Marisa Berenson), referred to only as the Queen, probably because of her opera-diva background, is less than thrilled to see them early and seems uninterested in the children, being intrigued only by her youngest son’s return after 20 years.

The other siblings and half-siblings have their quirks and tempers, too. Janet (Jeanne Balibar) is bossy, Manon (played by the helmer herself) is a moody artist, Jean-Luc (Élie Semoun) has to pass myriad tests to be seen as a part of the family, since he is the Queen’s son from a previous relationship, while Marc’s (Axel Granberger) return causes an additional stir. He comes with a special request from the late father, and it has something to do with the tragedy involving their late sister. Memories, emotions, resentment and secrets resurface in a chaotic, unpredictable turn of events.

My Darling Family could be seen as a mix of tropes that are plucked both from movies about family gatherings and from more sombre reunion pieces, also known as “Big Chill clones”, but the messiness of the characters and relations makes it seem organic, almost like a piece of docu-fiction or auto-fiction work. The messiness, however, also extends to the craft aspects of the film, such as the narrative in the script co-written by the filmmaker and Steven Mitz (with the help of Raphaëlle Desplachin and a number of others), Le Besco’s own directing and the jumpy editing supervised by the filmmaker herself and carried out by a small army of people. It seems like Isild Le Besco’s wish was to try her hand at as many aspects of filmmaking as possible, also including songwriting together with composer Rafko Mekić (whose acoustic mix of piano and guitar usually complements the general sentiment), in order to retain control over the material.

Luckily, she has assembled a great ensemble cast, with Bouchez as a star able to infect the rest of the cast members with her power, heart and soul, and Berenson as a scene-stealer, since she plays the “meatiest” character of them all, while the filmmaker’s acting effort in the role of Manon should also be commended. The presence of Sam Spruell and Geoffrey Carey in bit roles that actually serve only to deliver an occasional pearl of wisdom also helps a little, but not enough to elevate the film to the ranks of an exceptional family-gathering movie. Although Isild Le Besco is not an amateur or a hobbyist in filmmaking, My Darling Family still plays out as a sort of vanity project.

A Film a Week - The Truth / La vérité

previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Hirokazu Kore-eda is without a doubt the leading name of contemporary Japanese cinema and one of the finest filmmakers on the global level. Last year's triumph in Cannes with "Shoplifters" could be seen as the crown of his auteur career so far, so he decided to take a leap forward, into the unknown with his first film made outside of Japan and Japanese context. "The Truth2, realized through French-Japanese co-production was selected to open this year's edition of Venice.

Both of the decisions, the filmmaker's one to make a new film (in a foreign country and in the language he does not speak, for that matter) in a quick succession, and the festival's one to give it such an honourable spot in the programme feel a bit rushed. "The Truth" is still a debut of sorts, and it shows, it is far more French than Japanese in the terms of the story, cast and crew, so the director had to face some substantial contextual trouble, it is far from the standards Koreeda set himself with brilliant works such as "Like Father Like Son" and "Shoplifters". Let us just say that the transition was not so smooth...

Like it is the case with the most of Koreeda's films, the principal topic here is familial dysfunction, but, unlike his grounded, down-to-Earth Japanese films, the family here is quite bourgeois and devoid of the proper, real-world problems. It is lead by the matriarch Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve), a diva-type of actress whose career is slowly coming to an end due to her age. Her newest project is the memoir book she is about to publish and promote, while at the same time she is about to co-star in a ridiculous science fiction melodrama movie with a young and aspiring actress who might just take the "best actress" throne Fabienne sees belonging to herself only.

That is the reason for the visit from her screenwriter daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche) whose task is both to read and amend the memoir and to support her mother in preparations for her part, her American husband Hank (Ethan Hawke) who battles the alcohol addiction and their daughter Charlotte. A lot of old animosities and family secrets are about to come to light over the course of several days or maybe a couple of weeks. And the ones regarding the late person named Sarah and her role as Fabienne's "frenemy" rival and Lumir's maternal figure might be the most dangerous ones.

Unlike Kore-eda's Japanese films, originality is not exactly the name of the game here, since this plot summary looks pretty much like any standard-issue French bourgeois family drama. Sure, family secrets and dealing with them kinda runs through all of his opus, but the setting, the approach and everything else feels like something from another world. That world is obviously a bit strange to Kore-eda, so he insists on things he has probably seen in a number of French films, like gatherings, house visits and shared meals, attempts at humour that are more charming than actually funny (except when he goes meta at several moments) and a dash of melodrama.

The dialogue feels clunky most of the time and translated (which actually is, Léa Le Dimna gets the screenwriting credit for adaptation) all the time. Kore-eda's approach to directing is a bit too discreet, so it blurs his actual intentions with this film. His own editing, which is neither dynamic nor meditative in pace does not help either. The film certainly has its moments of great fun, but most of them are revolving around the movie Fabienne is shooting, and we do not get enough of them. Visually, "The Truth" is more than satisfying film, mostly due to cinematography by Eric Gautier who shoots the whole thing in natural-appearing colours and from interesting angles.

One could argue "The Truth" is, at first place, the actors' film. It is not the case, and the actors here are not the ones to take the blame. Simply put, the characters here are typical, more stereotypical than archetypical and, apart from Catherine Deneuve who can play parts like this one even while sleeping, most of the cast has nothing substantial to do. Certainly, it is fun to watch the veteran French actress having her diva show, but it is a shame that Juliette Binoche is relegated to the thankless role of the mousy daughter, while Ethan Hawke recycles his "an American in Paris" role from Richard Linklater / Julie Delpy films.

All things considered, "The Truth" plays out and feels like yet another French film, quite an average one. It seems like Hirokazu Kore-eda got lost in translation with it and there is no deeper truth to it.

A Film a Week - Cold Skin / La piel fria

North Atlantic, 1914. As the Great War is about to begin with its bloodshed, a young weather scientist is taking his post on an inhabited island for the period of one year. Since his predecessor is nowhere to be found, and the only other human on the island is a lighthouse technician named Gruner (Ray Stevenson, glimpsed in Thor films) gone (slightly) mad, it seems it is going to be a long year with not so much work to keep him busy and with his collection of books and his log as the only company. What our civilized nameless hero played by David Oakes (of TV series The Borgias fame) does not know yet, is that the island is infested with amphibian humanoid creatures swarming at night and attacking both him and Gruner. Two men must form an alliance in order to survive, but it is more complicated than it seems.

Written by Jesús Olmo (known for 28 Weeks Later...) and Eron Sheean and based on Albert Sanchéz Pinol’s Spanish-language novel of the same name, Cold Skin is a modestly budgeted Spanish-French co-production filmed in English with intentions of global appeal. The film was directed by one of the later-stages members of New French Extreme Cinema movement, Xavier Gens who made his name with his debut Frontier(s) in 2007. only to fall into the pattern of international mediocre genre filmmaking with computer game adaptation Hitman (2007), post-apocalyptic jump scare-fest The Divide (2011) and yet another exorcism-themed movie The Crucifixion (2017). With Cold Skin, Gens was more lucky than skillful to come at the same time as Guillermo Del Torro’s The Shape of Water and, sharing the topic of romance between humans and amphibians, to serve as its companion piece.

The trouble is that the film goes nowhere fast just as soon as the two men team up to shoot the creatures from the top of the lighthouse. They are both one-dimensional characters, with our hero being somewhat humane and scientifically curious regarding the creatures and Gruner being a misanthropic madman, speaking of himself in third person and having openly genocidal tendencies while keeping one female creature as his pet and sex slave. The endless shoot-outs night after night with always the same type of dynamics between two of them wears out its welcome pretty quickly, while the plot developments towards the end of the film do not help much.

The most intriguing part of the film, the creatures, are not being explored in any way even if the writers and the director have one specimen on disposal throughout the film. That female named Aneris and played by underused Aura Garrido might be the most interesting and complex character in the film, but is demoted to the point of conflict between the two “frenemies” and even the duality of romance and sexual exploitation serves only to make their personalities more apart from one another.

The context of WWI stays completely unused for other purposes than to show us an array of equipment and weaponry from that period of time, so the story could theoretically have taken place anytime between Columbus and early Cold War. There is a metaphor of colonization and exploitation somewhere (the same type of questions “are they humans or are they animals” were popping out in the racial theories from that period of time), with the WWI being the last colonial war, but here it is a long shot.

Visually, however, the film looks nice, with compelling special effects and intelligent creature design. Cold Skin also profits from location shooting on the black rocks of Lanzarote and Iceland and the cinematography by Daniel Aranyó and production design by Gil Parrondo belong to a better piece of filmmaking than this one.

A Film a Week - Double Lover / L'amant double

Remember those “sexy” mystery thrillers based on cheap psychoanalysis and, generally speaking, bogus psychology riddled with the clichés of genitalia symbols serving as their foundations? They might have emerged in the late 70’s, reached their peak in the 80’s and continued to drag through the 90’s, finally moving to the new natural habitat on cable TV and video platforms in the new millennium. They were usually cheap and trashy, but still fun enough to give them a chance. And if they were done with skill and zest, like those directed by Brian de Palma, they could be watched repeatedly both as guilty pleasures and as exercise in style.

It is a bit of a surprise that the French director François Ozon, known for his knack both for mystery thrillers and fearlessness to tackle the topics of sexuality while remaining light-hearted in tone, had not taken such a project before. And with Double Lover, a loose adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ pulp novel Lives of the Twins, he goes all in, playing with mirrors, off-kilter framing, split images and architecture porn in a manner that could be described as frigid chic. Ozon approaches the depths of camp, but keeps the film above the surface, while keeping the whole thing just the right nuance of weird.

The film opens with an unnecessary shot of a young woman getting her hair cut short probably because opening it with the following shot of a stretched vagina for the gynecological exam transforming into a vertically-set eye would be a bit too much. We are introduced to the same young woman named Chloé and played by the titular star of Ozon’s Young and Beautiful, Marine Vacth, complaining about abdominal pain. Since the reason for that cannot be found anywhere in her body, it is ruled psychosomatic, so Chloé is being advised to try going to psychotherapy with Dr Paul Meyer (Belgian actor Jérémie Renier, seen often in Dardenne brothers films). After a number of sessions, her pain is deemed cured, she falls for her therapist, he falls for his patient and they move in together.

But one day, coming back from her work as a part-time guard at modern art museum, she sees him with another woman outside his former office. Back home, she finds his old passport with another surname and old photos of two identical-looking children. He denies everything, from being there to not being the only child, so she begins her own investigation by getting an appointment there under a false name. The new therapist in Paul’s old office introduces himself as Louis (also Renier), Paul’s twin brother. However, his methods are a bit different: he berates and borderline rapes his patients, but Chloé falls for him too, while her mind dives deeper and deeper into chaos.

As we know, she is not the most reliable narrator in the world, so everything that ensues – love triangle and even threesome with the twins, reversion of roles in sex in a particular scene with a strap-on, nightmares, the return of the abdominal pain, pregnancy, her cat, Louis’ cat, “crazy cat lady” neighbour, secrets of the past... – can take part both in reality and in dreams. Who is gaslighting whom? Is Louis real or just a figure of imagination? If so, whose – hers or Paul's? All we know is that there is more than we are able to see on screen in carefully arranged scenes followed by Philippe Rombi’s brilliant score cues.

The silliness of the source material maybe calls for a filmmaker who would make it downright bizarre fest, like Almodovar, but Ozon follows some other cues. The plot closely resembles Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and Ozon is also not afraid to play with body horror, so here is the first hint. Then, there are traces of Hitchcock via de Palma like in much of Ozon’s work in the mystery and thriller field, here spiced up with Rosemary’s Baby-era Polanski and dream / nightmare logic of David Lynch. With intelligent casting (Jaqueline Bisset’s double role is a bonus) and directing the actors away from their usual types (Renier’s proletarian appeal is being transformed into something more sophisticated, still on the line of machismo and in the case of Louis, with a note of psychoticism) and past their limitations (that goes for Vacth, a former model), Double Lover simply works because it does not take itself too seriously. It might be superficial, but it is fun and well done one.

A Film a Week - Ismaël's Ghosts / Les fantomes d'Ismaël

It is not hard to recognize a film by Arnaud Desplechin as it is set in his own universe full of recurring motives: first names like Ismaël, Ivan, Faunia and even Esther (here as a pseudonym), last names Vuillard and Dedalus, themes of diplomacy and espionage in the background, character motivation via broken family relations and loved-unloved son antics, manic pixie dream girls and mystery women popping out, locations of post-Soviet Tajikistan, different post-communist Eastern European capitols and Desplechin’s hometown of Roubaix. The trouble with Ismaël’s Ghosts is that the whole thing does not add up even with the structure of the film within a story about the title character (played by Desplechin regular Matthieu Amalric) trying to make one.

Ismaël Vuillard is a filmmaker in personal and professional crisis, trying to wrap up the film that honors his brother Ivan (almost unrecognisably short-haired Louis Garrel), a diplomat that he presents as an unintentional rockstar spy while battling the titular ghosts. One of them is his real-life brother, as we learn a regular Quai d’Orsay official in Ethiopia, and the other is his wife Carlota, the daughter of his friend and mentor Henri Bloom (László Szabó), a woman he married when she was very young who disappeared two decades ago. Troubled, chain-smoking, heavy-drinking, pill-popping Ismaël is now in a relationship with intelligent, down to Earth astrophysicist and our occasional narrator Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg), but it does not help him with his nightmares. The sudden appearance of Carlota (played by delightful Marion Cotillard) trying to get her spouse back derails his life completely so he goes full 8½ in his dead great-aunt’s house in his hometown while his producer friend Zwy (legendary Hyppolite Girardot) is chasing him and his actress Faunia (Alba Rohrwacher) haunts him in his dreams...

It does not make much sense, does it? However, the reason Ismaël’s Ghosts was selected to open last year’s Cannes could not be clearer: with such stellar cast (in French context as well as global), it is really red carpet-friendly. The cast is probably the strongest reason that such a mess of ideas, recycled and under-developed, that pretends to be a film is still watchable, even in the re-edited, 20 minutes longer and tighter theatrical cut. (The festival version eluded me. Not sure if it is a bad thing, though.) And I thought that Michael Haneke’s Happy End was a bit off in the sense of blending the filmmaker’s earlier work together...

Still, Desplechin did whatever he was doing here with commendable style. The dialogue has overly melodramatic tones throughout, but does not feel over-written. The score composed of original and source material is superb. And all those dollies, zooms, double exposures and rear projections simulate mystery and add a layer of drama very well and show that Desplechin’s ideas on the technical level are concise even when the ones on the narrative level are not. And even there one can find some enjoyable bits and pieces.

In the end, maybe it is all autobiographical. Maybe he had to make this film to drive out his own ghosts. Certainly, it demands a re-watch, but I am not sure if it deserves it.

A Film a Week - Heal the Living / Réparer les vivants

The opening of the film is a celebration of life in its purest form. A number of teens cycle and skateboard to get together in the dead hours of night, and then they take a road-trip to ocean where they enjoy some early-morning surfing. However, the title Heal the Living reminds us that something sinister is about to happen, and so it does when a dream-like shot of the road slowly converting into the ocean ends in a crash. One of the teens, Simon (newcomer Gabin Verdet), was careless enough not to have his seatbelt buckled so he ends up brain-dead on a life support.

Soon enough his parents (Emmanuelle Seigner and a rapper Kool Shen) will have to face the harsh truth about their son being essentially dead, laid out by head neurologist (Boulli Lanners), and a dilemma suggested by organ donation consultant Thomas (Tahar Rahim). The moment might not be right, it rarely is, but Simon is an ideal candidate for donation: young, healthy and unfortunate enough to have no chance of coming back to life. Simultaneously, a musician named Claire (Canadian actress and Xavier Dolan’s muse Anne Dorval) suffers from a heart condition and can die any moment so she moves into an apartment across the street from the hospital and tries to say goodbye to her college-age sons (Finnegan Oldfield and Théo Cholbi), as well as to her former lover (Alice Taglioni).

The two stories in two towns are connected by Simon’s heart and a number of medical personnel, including transplantation specialists, middle-men from a national service, doctors and nurses from Simon’s and Claire’s narrative. It seems as a template for a “hyperlink” melodrama in the style of Crash or some early Inarritu-style “life is death and death is life” New Age truism or even an episode of a doctor soap-opera, but the intentions of the director Katell Quillévéré (Suzanne) could not be more different. Adapting the book by Maylis De Kerangal together with her co-writer, veteran Gilles Taurand (responsible for, among others, Lea Seydoux vehicle Sister), Quillévéré aims to show how a heart transplantation can be a complex process on both levels, physical (it involves a number of highly trained staff, each of them being their own person with their own troubles, and two complicated procedures, here shown in naturalistic fashion) and metaphysical (a life being transferred from person to person, a dead person keeps living through the organs donated to another, unknown person).

It works on both levels thanks to commitment to details and measured approach to emotionally charged material that keeps it from slipping into over the top sentimentality. The details including the daily routine of the doctors, where they sleep during the long hospital hours and what they watch or listen to relax, a nurse new to the job (Monia Chokri of A Taste of Ink) fantasizing about a hot randez-vous in her alone time in elevator and the piano concerto, just to name some, might be taken directly from the book, but Quillévéré handles them with care and discretion. Every person in the film seems deeply human and humane, even though the characters seem to be more sketched than deep.

Quillévéré gets a lot of help here from her regular collaborators editor Thomas Marchand and DoP Tom Harari, making Heal the Living smooth and lyrical experience (especially in the flashback scenes about Simon courting his girlfriend Juliet that are full of life like any young love is), while the piano-heavy score by Alexandre Desplat is sometimes overwhelming and even a bit over the top.

A Film a Week - The Red Turtle / La tortue rouge

Since its premiere in Un Certain Regard selection of last year’s Cannes Film Festival, The Red Turtle has reached universal critical acclaim, lots of awards and an Oscar nomination for the best animated feature. It is a rare example of a film that is perfectly translatable from one cultural context to another and that is resonating the same with children and grown-ups among the audience, being at the same time completely universal and highly original work of art. There is no need to copy an existing, Disney-style formula. The Red Turtle simply works from the beginning to the very end.

Directed by Michael Dudok de Wit (known for his Oscar-winning animated short Father and Daughter), co-written by the director and French veteran Pascal Ferran and produced by Wild Bunch and Ghibli, The Red Turtle hand-picks the best traits of European (namely, French and Belgian) and Japanese animation tradition. Technically, it is pure old-school, 2D, hand-drawn and simply beautiful. There is no dialogue (the most characters say is “Hey”) and the narrative is very simple, but the feeling is lyrical and emotional, thanks to wonderful drawings and sometimes too obvious harmony choices in the score by Laurent Perez Del Mar, and the underlining point is both eco-friendly, radically humane and somewhat existentialist.

The basic story revolves around a Robinson Crusoe-like outcast on a tropical island and his search for shelter, water, food and the means of escape. His first two attempts to leave the island on a raft made of bamboo wood are thwarted by an unknown force of nature. For the the third time, the force preventing him to leave reveals itself in the form of a gigantic titular reptile.

Later that night, the turtle follows him to the shore and he smacks it with a piece of wood, apparently killing it. His feeling of guilt emerges after the turtle transforms into a beautiful, readheaded woman... Two of them get to know each other, fall in love, form a family and stay on the island for better or worse even when their child leaves.

The idea behind is the story of responsibility to the nature and the acceptance of life in whichever form it comes. The lack of dialogue (and even narration) may seem like a cheap trick to secure both global marketability and artsy chic, but it is not the case here, because the focus is on emotions, contemplating on the matters of nature and life and finding inner peace within ourselves and our surroundings.

The simple narrative is completelly suitable for children, but the problem occurs with its deliberate pace and emotional complexity that can prove to be too much for that type of audience. Still, the beauty of the animation and vivid playing with magical realism are gripping. Considerable educational value regarding the humanism and eco-conciousness in the film’s core is also a plus, which makes The Red Turtle a beautiful experience to be shared between the grown-ups and their children.

The film takes us into its world with its emotional strenght and leaves us breathless. Even the lapses of logic and occasionally heavy-handed symbolism is not that much of a problem. The Red Turtle is the film not seen before, animated or otherwise.

A Film a Week - Slack Bay / Ma Loute

What happened to Bruno Dumont, once the filmmaker behind the serious, cold, observant, almost misery porn-like art house films like Humanity, The Life of Jesus, Flanders, Hadewijch, Hors Satan and Camille Claudel 1915? Maybe he has found his artistic “true self” helming the amusing, absurdist murder mystery / child’s crime comedy mini-series Li’l Quinquin to which Slack Bay is connected in style, theme and location. Maybe it is just a phase that would culminate with the musical about Joan of Ark as a child called Jeannette that premiered in this year’s Cannes Directors Fortnight selection.

Slack Bay is a rare animal in modern, explanatory filmmaking: a mystery that completely reveals itself half an hour into the film, a comedy that is not all that funny (if it is funny at all), a love story that is not romantic, a farce about class and status in the manner of Monty Python absurdism meets the silent films of the era (the story is set in Belle epoque, before the World War I) and French physical comedy that relies heavily on gags and sound design full of squeaking, creaking and crackling noises. Let us just say it is not for everyone and it takes time to be absorbed.

First, we have three narrative lines in the story. The “mystery” one is carried by an obese police investigator Machin (Didier Després) and his skinny, ginger-haired buddy / lackey Malfoux (Cyril Rigaux). They wear matching Laurel and Hardy uniforms and are investigating the case of several tourists gone missing from beaches of the titular bay on French northern coast.

Then we have the family of inbred aristocrats van Peteghems that seem to have trouble to tie their own shoes that have a ridiculous summer house on the top of the hill overlooking the bay. The father André (Fabrice Luchini) is a hunchback marveling at the beauty of the nature and the progress of the modern, industrialized world. His cousin/wife Isabelle (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) is hardly able to stand on her feet, but keen to yell at the poor servant girl and at the children. There is also the “funny” uncle Christian (Jean-Luc Vincent) prone to getting lost in various places and talking the deep-sounding nonsense in both English and French. And the operatic aunt Aude (Juliette Binoche) is a real piece of work, like Florence Foster Jenkins even less aware of the lack of a talent and with some strange religious ideas. The kids seem uninterested in anything but running wild on the beaches. And, in the end, there is Billie (a newcomer Raph), André’s gender-bending niece who exchanges the whigs, trousers and dresses so often so it is a mystery is it a girl that occasionally dresses as a boy or the other way round.

Finally, the Bruforts, family of “have-nots” also lives in the bay. They are mussel-gatherers led by the patriarch nicknamed Eternal (non-professional Thierry Lavieville) with a lot of mischievous kids in matching bluish rags whose names sound like random nicknames. Eternal who got his name for saving over a hundred people from drowning and his eldest son, the titular (in the original French title) Ma Loute (Thierry’s son Brandon), provide the services of crossing the bay for tourists. Sometimes they carry them in their own arms, sometimes they use a boat, sometimes they kill them to provide supper for the whole family. Often angry Ma Loute will fall hard for Billie in the fashion of forbidden romances...

The problem with Slack Bay is the fact that it goes nowhere fast. It is clear that Dumont is more interested in his characters than in a story of any kind, so the film looks like a series of one-note sketches stretching for too long. The real bummer with all that is that even the characters are not being developed, but exist as the same broad stereotypes and cartoons from the very beginning. Even the most normal and humane ones do, like Billie and Ma Loute whose attempt of romance, conceived as the emotional core of the film.

Which leads us to another major issue: Slack Bay has no center or anchor of any kind. The audience gets to know the villain in the investigation just under the investigators’ noses and can presume the unsuccessful outcome of it all. The love story is so basic and does not generate any kind of conflict between two self-absorbed families. Aristocratic morons, state buffoons and the angry peasants who hate the former two so much they would literally eat them serve well as a metaphor of class warfare going wild and as a potent punchline, but it is still not enough to wrap the whole film around it.

Still, there are some pleasures to be found in Slack Bay. First and foremost, French A-list actors play complete idiots with gusto and bravado, and that is fun to watch. Dumont also scores some broad laughs with his peculiar sense of humour. And the cinematographer Guillaume Deffontaines is nothing short of a miracle worker for occasionally turning the muddy swamp landscape into an insanely photogenic one, highlighting the contrast between the nature and the humans it supports.

Slack Bay is a well-done, glorified trash movie and it is obviously Dumont’s deliberate decision. Does it work? It is hard to say, some of the time, yes, but all the time, not really.

A Film a Week - Raw / Grave

People vomiting. People fainting. People leaving the theatre, not being able to handle the film. At the festival, of all places. For a horror film genre niche, that is a kind of advertisement and it usually implies either excessive gore (what would be more excessive regarding gore in the time of ISIS videos floating freely on the internet, it is hard to tell) or taking on a taboo. More often than not, a film cannot rise to the standards of the hype it is creating, but Raw is not just another unimaginative, lazy and underwhelming genre piece. On the contrary, it is a rare gem: a completely successful parable of coming of age and sexual awakening of its female protagonist through nothing less shocking than cannibalism.

Justine (played by a relatively unknown Garance Marillier) comes from a family of militant vegetarians and is about to start her studies at the prestigious vet school in French countryside, which is also a family tradition. It is her first week at the college and she is about to be exposed to brutal, military-style hazing rituals that include driving the freshmen to an abandoned school facility, a mandatory practice of addressing senior students as “elders” or “the great ones”, to obey their commands and allow to be covered in blood and paint. Although Justine’s sister Alexia (Swiss actress Ella Rumpf) is an “elder”, a campus goth, sex goddess and an “alpha”, but even she cannot or would not save her from the initiation ritual: eating a raw rabbit kidney.

A strong allergic reaction is just a start of Justine’s trouble. Tasting the raw meat will leave her craving for more, and just plain chicken will not cut the deal. Nobody is safe, not even her gay roommate Adrien (Rabah Nait Outfella). In her fantasy, he is attractive enough to turn into a juicy steak.

The opening scene of a traffic accident shot from afar in the way that leaves us uncertain who is to blame, is starting to make sense now, and the relationship between sisters is kind of mentor-like but not idyllic as it would be expected. Contrary to the vamp Alexia, virginal Justine is not handling that well the change of her body and psyche. Be prepared for a stream of nasty little details like bikini waxing gone wrong, fingers cut off, bloody bites and self-mutilation. Just to be sure where we are, animals do not fare that well either, so there will be dead dogs, constipated cows and horses operated by somewhat primitive instruments.

Aided by the cinematographer Ruben Impens whose unpleasant close-ups are altering with static, beautifully composed wide takes in cold bluish palette, aided by Ben Wheatley’s composer Jim Williams inspiring score and music choices, and her perfectly casted acting ensemble (with the army of extras), Julia Ducournau pays attention to every detail in this deliberately paced, perfectly rhythmic and very intense multi-layered film. Clearly, it is all about female sexual awakening and carnal pleasures, but also there is an angle about family, school and medicine not being able to understand nor to explain the mysteries of a body in the changing process. There is a lot of sex and meat to devour, there are brutality and sibling rivalry, but the humour is no less important : one of the most memorable scenes includes a pissing contest between the sisters. Ducournau never loses control until the clean-cut ending.

Julia Ducournau is a first-timer which almost comes as a surprise after having watched the film. Of course, Raw is so frank, raw and insightful about a woman’s body and mind that it seems logical it was made by a female director. But the level of skill, the scope of perspective, the number of layers and juggling with all of them would rarely fit the description of a young, first-time director. Ducournau takes her clues from the masters, so we can see the echoes of Polanski’s Repulsion, Zulawski’s psychology of characters, De Palma’s obsession with female adolescence and repressions (Carrie, aswell as Sisters) and Cronenberg’s body horror taken to another level of gore, but she remains true to herself, original and fresh. Raw has all the indications that we can expect big from Julia Ducournau.

A Film a Week - The Aquatic Effect / L'effet aquatique

What have we learned from The Aquatic Effect (L’effet aquatique), the latest and the last film by the French-educated Icelandic director Solveig Anspach who died of breast cancer almost a full year before the film was released? That swimming pool people are quirky. That Iceland is quirky. That love is quirky. And that amnesia can serve as a fresh start if the whole relationship was based on a lie, which is also quirky. I have no problem with quirkiness per se, but when it is being combined with overwhelming randomness in the terms of plot... It can be tricky.

It all starts with Samir (Samir Guesmi) buying his palm-decorated bathing shorts, which leads him to buying a season ticket for the local swimming pool, which leads him to falling in love at first sight with the lifeguard / swimming instructor Agathe (Florence Loiret Caille), which leads him to making her believe he cannot swim, so he could take classes with her in order to seduce her. Once when the truth is out, (and nobody likes lies, mkay?) she is so cross with him that she flies all the way to Iceland to a lifeguard convention.

And he follows her there, so the silly stream of events continues: he steals the identity of an Israeli representative so he can attend the conference. Under pressure to invent something really quickly, he comes up with, as he says, “together project” of building pools between Israel and Palestine so people can relax. He becomes an instant star, but Agathe is still unimpressed. And it turns out that Samir and Agathe both know the conference host Anna (Didda Jónsdóttir), which is funny because they are from the same French town and they didn’t know each other before, and that leads to both of them staying with her, bringing their awkward chemistry with them, which leads to Samir being accidentally electrocuted and contracting aforementioned amnesia...

Yeah, love is strange, and, according to Anspach and her co-writer/director Jean-Luc Gaget, so is pretty much everything else in life. There are several subplots involving quirky characters: French, Icelandic and the ones in the pool safety business, just to underline it. Somewhere in the background we can see a debate going on about cultural differences between two countries, with free body culture opposed to puritanism and fois-gras as a symbol of food industry opposed to sustainable eco-friendly farming, but it almost never reaches the spotlight.

On top of that, all three main characters are familiar to the viewers from Solveig Anspach’s previous films, Back Soon (2008) and Queen of Montreuil (2012), but now they are being put in a different context. Even their occupations and careers are different: Anna used to be a pot dealer and Agathe was a film director in previous instalments. I guess Solveig Anspach just likes to play with the idea of fluidity in life.

And, frankly, it is borderline ridiculous, but still, The Aquatic Effect is a pleasant journey. Grounded by the solid performances of the actors, in which Samir Guesmi’s clumsy confusion and Florence Loiret Caille’s nervousness is balanced by Didda Jónsdóttir’s act of cool, it kinda works. Also, the “photography porn” of the amazing Icelandic nature and crystal clear underwater shots can only help. In the end, it is hard to say if the overall result is good, since the film is not even trying to make sense, but it is fun and it is warm.

A Film a Week - Things to Come / L'avenir

It is fair to say that Isabelle Huppert is one of the best living actresses in the world and 2016 was her year. She had not one, but two impeccable roles in critically acclaimed films. Paul Verhoeven’s Elle got her Golden Globe and Oscar nomination, but her work in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come is as good. It is a masterclass in acting. And too bad Things to Come is not a better film.

Still, most of the film critics simply loved it, praising its sense of time passing, all the right questions asked, subtlety and gentle touches, which all cemented the status of Mia Hansen-Løve (Eden) as the golden girl of new French cinema. Maybe it is just my problem with Hansen-Løve and her story-telling consisting mostly of everyday, mundane events almost without any kind of accents that would highlight the importance. Or it is just the lack of dramatic structure, except the flat storyline, that rubbed me the wrong way. And considering subtlety, can a film be too subtle for its own good?

On paper, it sounds interesting, though. Our protagonist is a middle aged philosophy teacher and textbook editor Nathalie, played by Huppert with her trademark mix of expressiveness, distance and sense of humour. And we get to see her in the year her comfortable, somewhat bourgeois life takes a turn in a series of bad luck moments. She has to deal with her demanding mother (veteran Edith Scob) almost on daily basis, first her depression and then her death. With all the changes and the imperative of simplification, her editorial work is also at stake and Nathalie is a bit of a dinosaur for not accepting to dumb down the philosophy so it could be more attractive to the masses. On top of that, her husband’s (Andre Marcon) midlife crisis results in him moving out with his new girlfriend, but on a more positive side, her favourite student Fabien (Roman Kolinka) gets back to her life.

The only good thing Hansen-Løve does is refusing to take the story in the trendy offbeat-artsy direction. The “passion” Nathalie and Fabien share is for philosophy and wisdom, their relationship is respectfull and strictly cerebral. The age difference between them is evident in their conversations about books they read, radicalism and action, and that is one of the highlights of the film.

The problem is that, on any other level, Things to Come packs absolutely no punch and that is a deliberate decision. We have a great actress playing a woman whose life comes crashing around her, but we get no sense of it. Her existence or even her lifestyle is never an issue. She feels sorry she will never come to her husband’s summer house on the seaside. She feels stuck with her mother’s cat. She suddenly got some freedom she doesn’t know what to do with, and that is all of her trouble. She is not even sure if she wants “someone” in her life. It feels like a walk in the park but we know it is not all that simple. We are waiting for something to happen, to converge to something, for things to come somewhere, but...

There are some nice touches, though. Camera-work is great, feeling fluid and drifting to nice little details. The selection of books shown or talked about is great. Name-dropping from Žižek (whom Nathalie describes as “fishy”) to Unabomber is astonishing. And Isabelle Huppert is brilliant as always, she is enjoying playing her character and we are enjoying watching her doing so. But is it enough? Things to Come pretty much comes to nothing.

A Film a Week - Nocturama

There is a point in the fact that the script for Nocturama, a Bertrand Bonello’s study of a seemingly unmotivated youth terrorist attack in Paris, was written some five years ago, before Charlie Hebdo and Batlacan events. There is even some kind of “nouvelle vague” quality implied by how it works in sync with contemporary France. For years if not decades, there was a strange feeling of impending violence and doom in the air. The society was and still is frozen in its old ways, the new generations are either in the state of political apathy or heavily radicalized by nationalist, religious or anarchistic ideas. The cars were burning in the Banlieu (the suburbs of Paris) almost every year since the 90’s and nobody asked why. The things needed to change, and the change is usually for the worse.

Before revealing it all in the cathartic ending of the film, Bonello is also more interested in “how” than he is in “why”. In the first half, we see youngsters doing seemingly mundane stuff during the day, riding the metro, picking up some stuff, checking into a hotel room or having a job interview in the Ministry of Interior building. Only the time, periodically given on the screen, gives us a sense of urgency and a thought that their actions might be connected.

There is no internal communication in a standard way of phone calls and text messages, but everything is masterfully co-ordinated. The targets are not at all random: a Ministry building, an empty floor of a skyscraper in the business district, several cars and a statue of Joan of Arc that burns evoking the ordeal of the aforementioned saint. On top of that, a bigshot banker gets the bullet in his home. The motivation behind the attacks remains unclear, since there is only one conversation on the topic, in a flashback scene, for that matter, and the bottom line is that our “perfect” democracy, like any other civilization, has a built-in mechanism of self-destruction by producing enemies and being defined by them.

Once the attacks are carried, the group gets together in a department store one of members works at as a security guard. The idea is to hole up there until the air clears sometime tomorrow. Needless to say, the plan is utterly stupid, they stood a better chance everyone for themselves in the street. So, spoiler ahead, there will be no tomorrow for them, and they kinda know it since they are more interested in partying and music than in news showing the consequences of their deeds.

But at least we have some time to meet them and try to figure out why such diverse gallery of young people just did something unthinkable. Two of the guys are missing already, one of them being the “brains” behind the operation. The rest of the crew played by young French actors known from the festival circuit is too unique to try to put them under one label. Some are white, some are of North African descent. Only one of them is a disillusioned member of the upper classes, while the others are either middle-class or straight from the poverty row. Only one of them is religious, while the others are not. No one is especially political. Some are scared, the others are trying to play it cool. The place they are hiding is something they fought against, but also a place of their fascination.

Most of the critics will draw parallels with Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (thematically, since the style is different, with quick cuts and repeating the key moments of violence in quick succession from different angles) with obvious clues from Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers. The references won’t stop just yet, since there is a drop or two of French comedy of manners a la Jacques Taty, “student movies” like Assayas’ Something in the Air, and the department store is the very place of the Kylie Minogue sequence in Leos Carax’ Holly Motors.

But with all the music clues, this portrait of desperate youth would be a perfect European companion piece to Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, which is in its poetic documentarism still a better film than Nocturama. The problem is that Bonello wants to show the understanding for his subjects and their deeds and, at the same time, to remain objective towards them. It is a noble effort, but pointless because of the simple fact that in that way he made terrorism look cool, and beyond that, like a justifiable, sometimes the only method of stating the dissatisfaction with society.

A Film a Week - April and the Extraordinary World / Avril et le monde truqué

A Film a Week is a weekly column on this blog, run on Sunday for our English-language readers and friends, presenting usually local or European festival films to a wider audience. Every review is directly written and not translated.

April and the Extraordinary World is really something, well, extraordinary. It is an animated feature, a delightful and wild adventure in a crazy, steam punk-themed world based on Jacques Tardi’s graphic novel, directed by Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci and beautifully voiced by pleiad of French actors, including Marion Cotillard, Marc-Andre Grondin and Jean Rochefort. It is unmistakable Tardi’s work, but other influences can also be found, like Tintin, Miyazaki’s work and even live-action science fiction classics like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Let’s start with the world. Imagine that Franco-Prussian war never occurred because Emperor Napoleon III got killed in a scientific experiment, and his son Napoleon IV signed the peace treaty that kept the French Empire and consolidated its place at the center of Europe. That would mean that the 2^nd Industrial Revolution that brought us combustion engine and electricity would be postponed and the world would be stuck with steam engines only. But over the span of several decades, the resources like coal and wood became scarce, which led to the energy wars with the League of America for the Canadian forest, poverty and a gray and dusty world. It seams that the only good thing is that there are two Eiffel Towers.

The year is 1931, and the government is hunting the scientists to help with the research. That is, the ones who are not disappearing on their own since the accident. Since the greatest minds are nowhere to be found, the government is left with the mediocre ones. Inspector Pizoni wants to change it by capturing Prosper, nicknamed Pops, his son Paul and daughter-in-law Annette who have been working in secret on the potion of immortality. When Paul and Annette get killed in the chase, their daughter April is left alone in the world, aside the talking cat Darwin, a clear side-effect of the immortality experiments.

Ten years later, April is living in hiding and working on the potion trying to save Darwin’s life. She is still the target of Pizoni who wants to get Pops through her. But the accidental meeting with a thief-turned-police informant Julius sets the new adventure in motion that will the characters and the viewers beyond their wildest dreams. Think of the invention of electricity, robot-rats, steam punk planes, moving houses, intelligent mutated lizards and whatnot.

Every scene has at least one brilliant punchline, a witty comedic turn or a piece of imaginative steam punk technology. Even though the structure is somewhat off, with the introduction being a bit too long and the ending that feels rushed, and the plot doesn’t make too much sense (no more or less than a standard issue animated adventure), but those small gems like bicycle-powered zeppelins, long distance cable cars, the head of the Emperor’s statue converted into living quarters, switches hidden in globe model, re-imagination of steam-powered cars, radio and television are enough to make April and the Extraordinary World a great experience. It’s larger than life story about sustainability, hopes for a better future, beautifully voiced and elegantly hand-drawn with simple lines, it feels so retro and so new at the same time.

A Film a Week - The Traveller / Le Voyageur

Note: A Film a Week is a weekly column on this blog, run on Sunday for our English-language readers and friends, presenting usually local or European festival films to a wider audience. Every review is directly written and not translated.
Note #2: This review has been developed through the NisiMasa workshop on this year's edition of Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. It has been originally published on Nisimazine and Cineuropa.

A life devoid of travelling can be frustrating, especially for those who are stuck in one place that they don’t particularly like, or which they even despise. But once that dire existence of doing the same things day after day is changed for the better, the sudden surge of new experiences can prove to be too much to handle. This is the theme of Hadi Ghandour's The Traveller [+], which world-premiered in the Tallinn Black Nights First Feature Competition.

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Adnan (Rodrigue Sleiman from Halal Love (and Sex) [+]) is a travel agent who can sweet-talk and impress customers with his broad knowledge of sights from around the world, but he has never left his home country of Lebanon himself. His luck is about to change, however, when his boss sends him on a business trip to Paris. 

But the vibrant metropolis proves to be too much for the first-time traveller. The conference he is attending is confusing and overwhelming, shown in a montage with ever-increasing speed. Things are no better at his temporary Parisian home: he gets in the middle of a generational clash between his cousin Insaf (Aïda Sabra), a traditionally minded divorcee who has never adjusted to life abroad, and her daughter, Layla (a confident Donia Eden), a completely integrated, modern Parisienne. The fact that his boss is pushing him to close a deal and his wife Souad (Romy Melhem) is feeling insecure about him being in Paris doesn’t help, either. The only pleasant and friendly moments are the ones he shares with restaurant owner Jean (Sebastian Bertrand), born in Lebanon but raised in Paris by his adoptive parents, and dreaming of the country he has never seen. But if he ever went there, he would probably be just as lost as Adnan is in Paris. Insaf knows both worlds and tries to make the best of them, but she has never found true happiness in Paris, and Layla is the only one who feels comfortable in her own skin.

Writer-director Ghandour is no stranger to multiple identities: born in Jordan to Lebanese parents, and having grown up in Belgium, this London Film School graduate living in Paris tackles the issues of migration, integration and the clash of cultures. Films that bet all their chips on these broad themes generally tend to lose their characters halfway through, but this is not the case here. Adnan is not only on a journey towards his dreams, nor to Paris; he is on a life journey, during which he will learn new things about himself.

The city of Paris as an additional character was not picked by accident: the symbolism of the place is strong, especially for the Lebanese people, for both historical and cultural reasons. It is portrayed as a big, chaotic, modern metropolis, but without using images of well-known tourist hotspots. In contrast with the early scenes in Lebanon, which are shot with a static camera, the ones set in Paris feature more noticeable camera movements.

Confidently acted and shot in natural colours, this is a solid debut, albeit with its faults, such as the sometimes oversimplified characterisation and its 100-minute running time, which proves to be a tad excessive. But the author certainly has something to say and has articulated it in a satisfying manner.