The Well Digger's Daughter (Thursday, July 12, 2012) (63)

Perhaps best known for Claude Berri's two 1986 adaptations of his novels, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, Marcel Pagnol remains one of the most important romantic writers and filmmakers of the pre-War era in France. Described by Jean Renoir as "an author of genius," Pagnol mostly wrote about early-mid-twentieth century rural France and all the colorful, modest and immodest people who live there.

Daniel Auteuil, who played Ugolin, the stubborn farmer in Jean de Florette, makes his writing and directoral debut with an adaptation of Pagnol's The Well Digger's Daughter, a light story that seems to fall in perfect like with the films of Berri, not to mention the lighter fare of Renoir or Pagnol himself.

Pascal Amoretti (Auteuil) is a very proud well digger in southern France. His devoted daughter, Patricia (the absolutely gorgeous Astrid Berges-Frisbey), takes care of him and his passel of young kids now that the mother is dead. Due to some quick economic figuring, Patricia had been partly raised in Paris by a rich lady and only came back south recently. Because of her brief flirtation with bourgeoisdom, she tilts her head a bit too far up and has a slightly fancy air about her.

She meets Jacques Mazel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), the son of the local grocery store owner and a dandy and a total snob. He woos her and she gives in quickly -- and they have a quick fling in the hay loft. He is then sent off to War (WWI) suddenly and is unable to tell her he loves her, etc. She becomes doubly sad, not just losing her boyfriend, but also because she gets pregnant from their tumble.

Pascal and her go to the Mazel house to ask for help, but they turn them away, seeing them as gold diggers. When news arrives that Jacques has died in battle, Pascal sets himself to raising his grandson with pride in his family and a bitterness for others.

There is a lot of discussion here about classism, sinful pride and snobbery and how it comes in all shapes and sizes from all directions. At first the Amorettis are treated badly by the Mazel's for being poor, but then Pascal responds by treating them with contempt for being out of touch. Jacques and Patricia's relationship, though brief, is filled with each one trying to gain upper-hand through money, body or psychology.

This film plays mostly as a charming chamber piece, light and funny at times and melodramatic at others. It is a very good movie with a seemingly timeless story, although it is not really brilliant and feels ultimately small and sometimes too shallow. Still, it's enjoyable and done in a very clean, naturalistic way.

Stars: 3 of 4

Polisse (Monday, May 28, 2012) (50)

Movies and TV shows about cops make it clear that police work is really hard. Totally unrelated to that is the fact that kids are really cute. If you could somehow combine these two elements (kids and cops) you'd have a movie about how hard it is for cops to help kids (particularly those who are being molested and raped). Well, there is such a movie and it's writer/director/actress Maiwenn's Polisse.

This cinema-verité-style look into the Parisian police's Child Protection Unit (that also deals with the white slavery part of Vice) feels very much like a number of cop shows we've seen for years on TV (Homocide, The Wire, the "law" part of Law & Order) and doesn't have any more through-line plot than six episodes of any of those shows strung together one after the other.

The structure of the film basically has a child or parent visit the police station to introduce a case and meet with some members of the CPU team (there are about eight officers in the unit, a very diverse group of men and women). We then see how the team takes down the perpetrator or organization that's doing whatever it's doing to the innocents. Each of these sequences ends with the group of cops going out to blow off steam as a group, in bars and clubs or at the homes of one another.

They each battle small demons of their own (one is anorexic, one is getting a divorce, one is already divorced, although she regrets it, two are interested in dating, despite the fact that one of them is pregnant with her husband's baby) and seem to take the interactions with the kids very personally and hard. Maiwenn herself plays a photojournalist who is documenting the team for an art project... and trying to stay objective as she falls in love with one of the cops.

There are some wonderful moments of comedy (dark comedy, but funny) and tragedy, supported by some really wonderful acting. Karin Viard plays Nadine, one of the senior members of the team, is particularly good, although she's helped by her character being the most deeply developed. Frederic Pierrot plays Baloo, the leader of the group, and does it beautifully. Still, the film feels much more like a list of situations than a single particular story. There no connection from one episode to the next and kids who we get to know briefly and seemingly deeply vanish once their situation is solved.

Clearly this is a commentary on cinematic plot structure and a way of getting the audience to identify more with the cops. Maiwenn is specifically putting us in the position of the cops who can't totally remain connected to any individual kid because they will be gone soon and a new case will come up. The main problem with this is the the cops do seem to connect deeply to the kids, forcing us to connect in a rather forced situational way. Kids being cute make us immediately love them -- they're total proxy emotion devices. That the cops in the film connect to them is not really the same thing as when we connect to them. In principle they're connecting to the human being, while we're connecting to the idea of a "kid in trouble". This dissimilarity in our relationships to the children only goes to shed light on a major flaw in the film.

I am predisposed to hate movies about "kids in trouble" because they're cheap and emotionally insincere. This, however, is a good movie with some great stuff in it. I wish it had more structure to help guide our connections and feelings in a more purposeful way. What we get is really just a substitute for deep relationships that makes everything annoyingly superficial.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Intouchables (Tuesday, May 15, 2012) (49)

Toward the end of last year, I kept hearing about a French movie called The Intouchables (which, as far as I understood means "The Untouchables"... I don't understand the weird semi-translation... because of the De Plama movie? What about the two Crash movies?) that was setting all sorts of box office records in Europe. Today it is the highest-grossing film not in English of all time. This has to be a brilliant and amazing film, right?! Well, no so much.

The Intouchables, directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano (from their script), is based on a true story (a concept that always makes me gag for its worthlessness) and is filled with all sorts of post-neoliberal racism and bizarrely blind classism. I would hope that white people who go to see this movie feel really proud of themselves for witnessing the assistance of a single African immigrant, who lives in the housing projects. Clearly such magnanimity is the key to moving our world forward in a peaceful and beautiful way where all children are loved regardless of their color... just like The Help.

Philippe (Francois Cluzet) is a billionaire living in an amazing house in Paris (it seems to be on Ile St. Louis... or maybe that's just where it should be). He is a quadriplegic and has a gigantic staff of helpers and attendants who look after him at all times. One morning, he and one of his assistants are interviewing new caretakers who will wash, dress and chauffeur him around all the time. In walks Driss (Omar Sy) a tall and dark black man who is clearly not taking the interview process seriously, but simply is looking for a signature on his unemployment form (in France you have to prove that you're applying for jobs and not getting them before you can get your unemployment benefit). 

He proceeds to give incredibly rude and unprofessional answers to basic questions, and hits on Philippe's hot assistant (Audrey Fleurot). This has the opposite result than he was hoping, of course, and Philippe hires him, seeing his unpolished and direct style as a welcome change from the sycophantic treatment he gets from most people in the world. Naturally, Philippe and Driss become best friends, each one helping the other see the world in a different light and each one showing the other that friendship can be filled with real emotions and real connections. 

Also, naturally, there's lots of stuff about Driss being a hoodrat who has never heard opera music, only listens to Earth, Wind & Fire (Really? A contemporary black dude who only listens to '70s funk/disco? Not Jay-Z?) and is the world's best dancer. We are aghast that Philippe's friends react to Driss in such a callous, superficial way ("because he's black," we whisper) -- even though his behavior really is mostly  unpredictable and sometimes offensive. 

But then there's a scene when, for Philippe's birthday, everyone gets dressed in black tie for a concert and Driss looks amazing (insert house-slave stereotype here) and that aforementioned hot assistant says that he looks "just like Obama". Let's be absolutely crystal clear: Omar Sy looks NOTHING like Barack Obama, aside from the fact that both of them have skin that's not lily white. This is not played as a comment designed to make us see Philippe's world as unchangeable and eternally racist; this is a scene to show us that a black man in a suit is an object of sexual desire (again, house-slave theme) and the assistant's comment is supposed to be what we are all thinking -- that is if we were all living in 1952 Mississippi. ("They all look alike to me."l

The third act is a total structural mess, with Driss being sent away to his aunt in the projects for some bizarre and unexplainable reason, and then being brought back for equally unclear motivations. We understand that Philippe and Driss are two halves of a pair and that they complete one another like a black and white cookie (look to the cookie!). And then we all sit back in our seats an groan because it's such a hackneyed idea (when it's not being totally offensive). Meanwhile, Philippe does nothing to help Driss' family or anyone not inside the walls of his urban chateau -- because Marxism is a terrible thing and that would be punishing Philippe for working hard... or something. 

This is such a silly trifle of a film, and so offensively post-racial it's shocking anyone has said anything mildly kind about it. It should be looked at with contempt. Sure, there are some brief, sweet moments between the two guys... and Sy is a really fantastic dancer, if you can put your "magical negro dance number" glasses on the top of your head... but it's overall message, that we should all get along better -- but only on the terms of the white guy and the billionaires -- is deeply disgusting. 

Stars: 1 of 4

Goodbye First Love (Sunday, April 22, 2012) (42)

There's something about Mia Hansen-Love's films that just don't work and don't connect for me. Her last film, The Father of My Children, never really came together and seemed like a good movie with a bad script and an unpolished concept. It's clear that Hansen-Love is a talented director (although I can't say yet that she's more than just merely "talented"), but I would say that she's a mediocre screenwriter and that her films suffer from garbagey melodrama that connects more to banal ideas of "romance" than to any real-world in which her stories take place.

Such is the problem with her new film, Goodbye First Love. It's the story of a high school girl, Camille (played by the fetching Lola Créton), who has a deep love for her teen boyfriend, Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky). He's a few years older than she is and when he forgoes college for a shapeless trip to South America (the French love Ché!), the two lose touch. She takes this very hard and tries to kill herself (natch) and then comes out of the hospital without the lust for life she previously had.

She then goes to architecture school and begins to work for her professor, Lorenz (Magne-Havard Brekke), who she also starts to sleep with, date and move in with. He's an older Norwegian man with an ex-wife and kid in Berlin who loves Camille's sensibility and reserve. Meanwhile, she struggles with her never-ending love for Sullivan and the constant wanting what she can't have.

I guess this isn't really the kind of movie I would ever relate to. I don't go in for sentimentality much and never really understand stories like this. For me, the concept of "first loves" is trite in the deepest possible way, and something that is more forced on us by gossip magazines and "girl culture" than by anything particularly psychological or human. What the hell is so special about Sullivan for Camille? He seems like a typically nice, distant and youthful boyfriend and their connection is much more suggested (by the fact that she can't ever get over him) than shown to us. When she ends up with Lorenz (as gross and cliche as it is to fuck your professor... seriously), it's maddening that she can't just be happy with him, but longs for Sullivan.

Herein lies an interesting dilemma for me. If film viewing is really an experience of identification and alignment with certain characters, it's impossible for me to connect to this film because I'm supposed to identify with Camille, but I can't because I think she's a fastidious moron. Meanwhile, I understand that many people (most people) would totally align with her because of how they're wired emotionally.

This leads to a bigger problem about the film, buried in the script, which is that Hansen-Love really doesn't do much to link us to Camille other than giving the briefest of outlines of her character. We only see the biggest moving parts of her persona, namely that she's 17 at some point and madly in love with a boy. This shorthand functions as the only information we get about her. For many this is enough to totally understand everything she feels at all moments. For others, like me, this seems under-written and under-developed.

Hansen-Love is truly a good director and is able to show a pretty movie with a nice use of technical factors. She is, however tripped up by her reliance on middlebrow scripts that don't show her skills as well as possible. I hope she continues to grow and make better films in the future.

Stars: 2 of 4

Free Men (Thursday, March 22, 2012) (31)

Free Men, co-written by Ismael Ferroukhi and Alain-Michel Blanc and directed by Ferroukhi, deals with a hidden-in-recent-history moment of World War II-era Paris when North African Muslims helped and fought along with the Resistance. Most interestingly, the story is presented in a very human and naturalistic style -- similar to preWWII-era French cinema (think something like Renoir's The Crime of M. Lange or Carné's Port of Shadows).

As the film opens, Paris has already fallen to the Nazis and we see the familiar tapestry of policemen, with SS and Vichy officers elbowing to get power. In a mosque in Paris, the imam, Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit (Michel Lonsdale), has a mini empire where he leads his faithful, but also protects several Jews, many of whom also come from Algeria and Morocco. Into this garden comes Younes (the fabulous Tahar Rahim), a petty criminal and black marketeer who is looking to get away from the heat of police after a few sloppy jobs. He falls in love with the people in this corner of Paris, particularly a singer of Arabic ballads (who happens to be Jewish) and a woman, Leila (Lubna Azabal), who happens to be a communist agitator.

This is not a fancy movie with elaborate formal qualities or complicated plot twists. It is a nice and straightforward film about a moment in time, where the history of Nazis and Vichy bureaucrats, Germans and French, Muslims and Jews, Arabs and Whites, French and North Africans came into direct contact. It has the loving, humanist tenor of a Renoir work, deeply believing in the goodness of people to fix bad situations through working together. This is a clever decision. It's not a flashy action flick, which it could have been, but is a more gentle, elegant story.

Rahim, who formally lead A Prophet, Audiard's masterpiece from 2010, is fantastic here again. He's confident without being arrogant, young but not immature. He's such a joy to see on screen, brightening up any shot with his movie-star magnetism. Lonsdale is, of course, great -- just as he's been for the past 40-some years. Azabel, who has a few more pictures coming up soon, is intelligent and beautiful -- an interesting Arab answer to Betty Bacall or Ingrid Bergman (though she's more like Bacall in To Have and Have Not here than Bergman in Casablanca).

I'm surprised we're not taught more about the role of North Africans in the Resistance movement in history class. This film is illuminating, but also warm and well made.

Stars: 3 of 4

17 Girls (Saturday, March 3, 2012) (22)

The first think to know about Delphine and Muriel Coulin's film 17 Girls is that it's technically really great. Muriel worked for a time as an assistant camera tech on Kieslowski's French films and she knows how to shoot stuff and make it look really nice. The second thing to know about the film is that the lead actress, Louise Grinberg (OMG -- possibly a Jew?!!?), is one of the most gorgeous women ever on on the planet. The third thing to know about the film is that those first two things don't really matter, because it's such a silly story that it comes off as over-the-top and ridiculous, making it hard to relate to and a bit forgettable.

The film follows a clique of five girls who, when their leader, Camille (Grinberg), gets knocked up and then another girl seems to get knocked up, all decided they should all get pregnant and live in some later-day hippie commune, or something (apparently with no daddies around). Considering this group is so cool, other girls in the school also follow their lead and get pregnant.... until there are 17 of them.

Because it's French there is a commentary on post-War Modernist culture and the end of the industrial dream in former industrial coastal France (the film takes place in Lorient in Brittany). There's a lot of discussions with teachers and parents about how political an action this is (apparently it is loosely based on a story like this that happened in Glauchester, Mass a few years ago). The girls also discuss these things, though they seem to be grasping at straws more than any significant ontological and philosophical discussion.

There is a really nice mix of static and moving shots throughout the film. The last shot is particularly nostalgic and evocative as it tracks down a beach from the inland side of the dunes shooting people on the sand slightly out of focus. The story, however, is a rather silly and ties up in a cheap way.

The script is really the weakest part of the film -- which is saying a lot considering most of the girls are played by non-actors from the region. I think there's a nugget of a good idea here, but it doesn't develop in an interesting way. Either the third act should have been re-written or the whole thing should have been an existentialist short with an elliptical ending. What we get looks nice, but doesn't really feel like much.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Fairy (Thursday, February 23, 2012) (15)

In their last film, L'Iceberg, Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy created a wonderful film based on dance, movement and physical comedy. It is a film reminiscent of the best of Jacques Tati, but a bit more gonzo, a bit off. In their newest film, The Fairy, they bring the same brightness and exuberance back for another tale of love and janky magic.

Dom (Abel) is a night clerk in a hotel in Le Havre, France. One night, as he's working, a woman shows up (Gordon) saying her name is Fiona and that she is a fairy who can give him three wishes. A bit surprised, Dom asks for a motor scooter as his first wish and unlimited gas as his second wish. Before he can come up with his third wish, the two begin making out and have sex.

It seems Fiona is the worst fairy ever, as her idea for unlimited gas for the scooter is to buy an oil container at the port that Dom can re-fill his small tank out of. She doesn't seem to have any really strong magic skills (though she does make one man fly) and her powers are mostly based on misdirection and cunning (like when she steals an outfit and shoes to wear on a date with Dom). As frequently happens, she gets pregnant and gives birth in a few minutes, and Dom and her have to care for their baby and avoid the people who get more and more frustrated with their clumsy, goofy behavior around the port city.

For me physical comedy is a really difficult thing. When done well (by masters like Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd or Tati) it is some of the most wonderful stuff on film; when done badly it's painful and forgettable. Gordon and Abel are new masters of physical comedy and add their own hilarious and off-beat twist to the gags. Certainly part of what makes them so appealing is that they're both individually rather strange looking (she's a bit like a more voluptuous Tilda Swinton, he looks like a drag queen out of makeup) and they play a lot with this.

They also run around Le Havre, which is a bit like a movie being set in Jersey City or downtown Miami (not the beachy part), it's ugly and is a failed Modernist concrete hellscape. They're laughing at the averageness of this world, and the idea that such a simpleton as Dom would want a scooter as one of his three wishes (when another man asks to be able to fly).

This is one of the most fun films I've seen in a long time. It's weird and hilarious, silly and wonderful.

Starts: 3.5 of 4

Declaration of War (Friday, February 3, 2012) (6)

It's long been an easy thing for people to say that some new young film talent in France is "the next Godard" or "has the feeling of early Truffaut," so when hearing such a thing about Valérie Donzelli and her film Declaration of War, I basically ignored it. And yet, the film really does have the feeling of the first generation of New Wave fare in the first part of the 1960s.

There's something about the brightness and joy of the experience of watching the film, the post-modern taking of film conventions and magnifying them, that's totally reminiscent of such films. Just like how Godard and Truffaut were cinephiles who enjoyed the game of making movies and inserting hundreds of allusions and jokes in them, it's clear that Donzelli is a very keen movie watcher and a talented artist.

Billed as being "based on a true story," the film was co-written by Donzelli and her frequent collaborator Jérémie Elkaim (who also co-starred in her last film, Queen of Hearts - available on DVD and worth watching) and would seem to be their own story of love and pain. The film opens with Juliette (Donzelli) taking her young son to the hospital where he gets an MRI. We then see a flashback to her in a club several years earlier where she met Romeo (Elkaim) (silly or not, the name joke is straight out of Godard). The two have a passionate affair that ends in her getting pregnant and them getting married.

All of a sudden, these two thirty-somethings have to be grownups and take care of serious stuff, whether they like it or not. At some point their young baby starts behaving strangely, and after a series of frantic doctor visits, it seems he has a brain tumor. They must grow up even more in a short amount of time and see what all this stress does for their relationship.

Donzelli has an interesting on-screen persona (I say this based only on the two films of hers that I've seen). She's basically a French Zooey Deschanel, light and bubbly, not against singing or crying for no particular reason; a cool chick you feel like you might know or might want to know. (Granted, many people hate Deschanel, and they might hate Donzelli as well... all I can say to these people is that you're jealous and clearly hate joy.)

Perhaps a more apt comparison, however, in the world of independent film is Miranda July, at least from the point of view of being cute and relatable and technically interesting. In many ways, this film feels like a "what if" sequel to July's The Future (what if Sophie and Jason had stayed together in that film?). This is a story about young people enjoying freedom until it gets serious and then not totally having the tools to deal with reality.

There is a risky and interesting musical number in the film, that really shouldn't work but does. Unlike Queen of Hearts, which is a Jacques Demy-esque musical comedy, this is really a light drama with a single song in it.

Throughout the film, Donzelli punctuates moments with rather daring and interesting filmic devices, such as iris-ins and third-person off-screen narration (again, another ode to Godard, who might have been paying homage to a Dassin or someone like that). It's all very fun and quirky. In one sequence, as the young family is rushing to the train station to catch a train for Marseilles to see a doctor down there, Donzelli and editor Pauline Gaillard give one of the most amazing left-to-right hurry-up sequences I can remember in a long time. It's really beautiful. I really appreciate such bold efforts, if for no other reason than so many movies are so goddamn boring, at least this is an effort at something clever and new.

This is a much more serious, real-world-based story than Donzelli's previous film and I think her style works wonderfully here. I look forward to seeing what she will do next, perhaps a return to sentimental musical fare or maybe a deeper journey into this more serious world of formalist drama.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

My Piece of the Pie (2011) (Saturday, January 21, 2012) (143)

My Piece of the Pie is Cédric Klapisch's latest film about class and power in France. Middle-class mother of three, France (Karin Viard), lives in Dunkirk when her factory is shut down and she loses her job. Depressed that her life is not what she had hoped it would be, she goes to Paris to get trained to be a maid. She is sent to work for Steve (Gilles Lellouche), a French stock broker who has been working in London for a decade. Now back in Paris, he hopes to settle down and get married.

The problem is that he's a pig with women and doesn't understand that money can't buy happiness or love. He treats all women badly in general, be they girlfriends, Russian prostitutes or fashion models who he whisks off for a weekend in Venice. When his young son is dropped off at his apartment by his ex, he finds himself in desperate need of France's child rearing expertise. The two grow closer as they spend more and more time together, as she looks after his son and mothers him as well.

As with other Klapisch films, this has a generally light and happy tone, even silly at times (and yes, as with all of his films, there are two fun dance sequences in it). Viard and Lellouche are both great and totally relate well as maid-boss, mother-son and maybe more. Unlike a film such as Laurent Cantet's beautiful Time Out, another French film dealing with lay-offs and also featuring Viard, the economic criticism and despair over losing a job is not as seamless. Here, the near-romcom of France and Steve seems rather separate from the bitterness France feels toward Steve's work and money spending. The last 20 minutes turn the story dramatically into what I feel is more of a silly melodrama than it needs to be. Still, this is generally good and well made.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Tomboy (2011) (January 16, 2012) (139)

Writer-director Céline Sciamma's previous film, Water Lilies, was a great, simple and beautiful film about teen sexuality and power. In Tomboy, she makes another film that rests on the edge of Western cultural mores about children and sex, this time with younger, pre-sexual kids.

The film opens with a prepubescent child with short hair riding in the car with his/her father. It is not clear if this is a girl or a boy, but he/she looks about 10-years old. The family has just moved to a new apartment in the Paris banlieue. Right after moving in, the child goes outside to walk around and meets a young girl, Lisa. The child says his/her name is Mikael and is then introduced to the other kids as the new boy in the building. Later, in a bath with his younger sister, it becomes clear that Mikael is not who he says he is, but rather is a girl named Laure. Now Laure/Mikael has to pass as a boy, despite her sister finding out about the situation.

This is a very simple film in narrative. There is one falsehood presented early on and it leads to a few situations that are totally uncomfortable for the audience and difficult for Laure. Much of the tension in the film relates to Laure's "secret" coming out and how the viewers generally root for her to pass as a boy. Sciamma beautifully plays with this idea, however, as she puts Laure in positions that bend gender, and make the audience squirm. At one point, Lisa puts makeup on Mikael the way two 10-year-olds might play. For us, this is a very disconcerting moment as it feels like a boy is being forced to look like a girl... though, of course, it's really just a girl getting makeup on her face. At another moment, Laure's mother insists she put on a dress, which feels very much like she's a boy wearing a dress.

This brings up all sorts of interesting stuff about how society prejudges kids with regard to gender and who once we think a kid is a boy or a girl, they are put into categories in our minds. Girls wear pink and play with makeup; boys wear blue and wrestle. (Laure's mother mentions offhandedly that her bedroom was painted blue.) Even when we know Laure is a girl, her wearing a dress still feels uncomfortable. This also leads to questions about our feelings of childhood sexuality and presexuality. It's very easy to just to the conclusion that Laure is a pre-lesbian, but she's really pre-sexual and this experiment has much more to do with being a new kid in the building, wanting to fit in and her feelings about her parents and sister.

There's something about French directors that they direct kids in amazingly and naturally, unlike most English-speaking directors. Sciamma is working mostly with non-actor kids or kids with very little experience and most of the scenes in the film involve kids running around and playing or talking and arguing as kids. Throughout the film, everything feels totally natural and honest. Some scenes could pass as unscripted documentary footage (much of it is probably unscripted). Zoé Héran, who plays Laure/Mikael, is particularly great in this role, though with kids it's always hard to compliment acting because it's not clear how much of a stretch they're making or how aware they are of what they're doing.

This is easily one of the best films of 2011. Much like Lucia Puenzo's fabulous film XXY from a few years back, it examines childhood gender roles in an elegant, non-exploitative fashion. It is straightforward with an uncomplicated plot, it has a beautiful realistic quality and interacts with the audience in very interesting ways that force reflexive analysis and more consideration.

Stars: 4 of 4

I'm Glad My Mother is Alive (2011) (Thursday, January 12, 2012) (137)

I'm Glad My Mother is Alive is the story of Thomas (Vincent Rottiers), a French boy who was put up for adoption when he was five because his young mother wasn't able to deal with him and his half-brother. The story begins when he's a teenager and having difficulty relating to his adoptive parents (who seem like wonderful people). In a fit of rage he goes to find his birth mother and reconnect with her.

We see him again, when he's 20, struggling to keep his life together. He's an auto mechanic and seems to have come to some sort of understanding with his adoptive parents. He goes out looking for his birth mother again, this time as a grown up. When he finds her, he feels some sort of connection to her (and her young son, his half-brother). They become friends, though he never tells his adoptive family about her.

This is generally a good film with an interesting story. There is a constant tension with Thomas as we see him lashing out at people for almost no reason and being on the verge of violence several times. When he meets his birth mother there is an almost immediate sexual tension between them (he's 20, she's in her late 30s), reminiscent of the views we see of her from when he was a child (sensually looking at her breasts and her legs). We don't really know what he's going to do to her or around her. He's a very guarded person, probably due to his need for self-preservation, and it's hard to totally guess what is next from him.

Vincent Rottiers is really great in this role and plays Thomas as a likable, normal-seeming guy with a darkness below the surface. He loves his birth mother, but doesn't know how to interact with her (particularly considering his feelings for her) and is easily wounded. This is a small film, but is generally interesting and well done.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Le Havre (Thursday, October 13, 2011) (91)

This is Aki Kaurismaki's interesting take on European immigration issues. It tells the story of an African boy who is being smuggled from his home country to London, but gets out in Le Havre, France, where he meets a nice, sad Frenchman (Andre Wilms) who takes him in and tries to help him get to London, his ultimate destination. It is a story about uncomfortable juxtapositions, black boy/white man, comedy/drama, old/young. At times is slips into a rather gonzo mannered, absurdist comedy, particularly around the domestic scenes, and at other times it's a send-up of classic French policiers. Overall it's a lovely film and beautifully executed. I'm a bit tired of this kind of story (it's very reminiscent of Philippe Lioret's film Welcome from last year, which dealt with a similar story a hundred miles up the coast in Calais), but this is at least a fresh look at it.

Stars: 3 of 4

Love Crime (Monday, August 22, 2011) (72)

Alain Corneu's Love Crime owes everything that it is to Alfred Hitchcock. It is a noir-murder mystery very much in Hitch's style, down to the blond heroine and brunette villainess. It is, however, nothing close to anything he would have made, because the details that are the hallmark of his films are nowhere to be found here; this is the film Hitch would have made if he had had no imagination.

Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier... God, she's gorgeous) is the hardworking assistant to Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas... who can only make movies in French now) in an international business firm. As the film opens, we see Isa at Christine's house preparing for an upcoming meeting. Christine hits on Isa, who is clearly shocked by the overture, but also interested by it. Just then, Philippe (Patrick Mille) comes in to break up the tension. He's a client of the firm and Christine's lover.

Christine sends Isa to Cairo to present a deal to new clients. Her pitch goes off brilliantly and she celebrates with Philippe (who is there for the presentation) over a fancy dinner and roll in the sheets (French men are sluts). Back at the office, Christine, takes full credit for Isa's success, much to her consternation. Their relationship falls apart from there and culminates with Isa murdering Christine. It's unclear exactly why she does it, and also what her plan is to get away with it.

Whereas Hitch shows the amazing and meticulous detail of murder in a gripping, if mundane, dispassionate, way in Rope or Dial M for Murder, here Corneau takes out all the beauty and interesting minutiae and basically shows us a list of actions. It's an interesting difference that might have a lot to do with camera placement and depth of focus approaches of both directors (and a great lesson on the brilliance of Hitch).

Hitch shoots these expository scenes from far away or with short lenses that expand the frame, sometimes shortening the depth of a shot; Corneau, on the other hand, shoots this long murder and cover-up sequence mostly in close-ups or with longer lenses, isolating Isabelle (not a big problem for me, as I love looking at Sagnier up close) and merely presenting these mundane elements just as mundane elements. It reminds me of the expression that someone "is so interesting you could listen to them read the phone book". Here we have a very boring person just reading a phone book ... and it comes off sounding like a phone book.

The murder itself is weirdly direct and sudden with almost nothing shown to get us to expect it. In an interesting touch, Corneau uses a Pharoah Sanders jazz saxophone score layered over the action, adding a nonchalance to the act. I actually like this and respect the boldness of such a oddly fitting sound from what we are seeing (the conflict of the visual and the aural are wonderful), but it's almost too artistic for the overall tone of the film. It also hard to keep from laughing when you see Sagnier dressed in a white anti-bacterial suit as she does the deed (she really looks like an oompa loompa with a knife... you'll get no commercials).

Corneau uses two visual themes throughout the film, Isa in her bed going to sleep and Isa eating breakfast in her kitchen. They both seem to create a shorthand for showing her as a meticulous person who has a spotless house, who is almost totally isolated from warmth and love, who has few passions in her life but is still not average (as clean as she is shown to be, she might be the worst dish-washer I've ever seen on screen). As with the music choice, I like the strangeness of these scenes and how they break up the flow of action we see. I think they're ultimately unnecessary, or at least there should be fewer of them, but again, I like Corneau's daring to include them.

As much as I like looking at (OK - watching) Sagnier, I have to admit that her performances are wildly inconsistent from one to the next. Here she is actually pretty wonderful as the workaholic woman who clearly cares more about her job than her her physical appearance or dating life. In one scene when Christine comes on to Isa, there is an amazing moment where we see Sagnier's eyes change at the realization that she's being hit on; later we see a similar change in her look when she is given a work assignment. Clearly she is a good actor, perhaps some of the roles she gets are less interesting.

Aside from the overall polished and banal look of the film (why couldn't have been shot like a classic noir?) I really don't like that the narrative here is rather obscure. We never really learn why Isa does what she does. Is it really a crime of passion or is it a complicated way of getting rid of her boss to get promoted? There is almost no look into her psychology - not even through objective correlatives or stylized lighting and mise-en-scene. The murder is almost comically sudden and unprovoked. There are clearly some good elements here, but the overall aroma of the piece is stinky and underdeveloped.

Stars: 1.5 of 4 Stars

Sarah's Key (Sunday, August 7, 2011) (66)

There have been a handful of thematically and intellectually offensive movies about the Holocaust in recent years: Life is Beautiful, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Schindler's List, to name just three. We can now add Sarah's Key to that list. All of these films take the already emotionally charged and boldly "good versus evil" elements of Nazis, death camps and murdered children and trivialize them until we get these cumbersome tales so thick with shallow sadness it is hard to breath.

Sarah's Key is so emotionally superficial and sentimental that it makes us feel angry that someone would have so little sense as to make such a work of dreck. The story is utterly forgettable and recycled and has such an accusatory tone that the meta-film, the concept of how the French respond to the Holocaust inside a Holocaust film, becomes more important than the narrative itself. This is a French film in the style of an American Hollywood film. The symbolism is blatant and hackneyed and historical details are pushed aside for manipulative devices. The film is facile to a fault and disgusting in its tone.

Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas) is an American journalist married to a Frenchman and living in Paris where she writes features for a magazine. She and her husband (and their early-teen daughter) are about to movie into his family's apartment in the Marais and are busy renovating and updating it. Meanwhile Julia begins writing a story about the collaborationist French government's arrest and deportation of French Jews in July 1942, known as the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup. (This is indeed a largely unknown atrocity in the history of the Holocaust, one that is not taught often in American schools, at any rate.)

The deeper she gets into the story, the more she finds out about the fact that her husband's family probably moved into their apartment days after the previous tenants (a Jewish family) were sent to their deaths. She discovers that the daughter of that family, Sarah, might have escaped and survived after the war (well, really she just finds that there are no records of her in the Nazi records, so she assumes she survived - whatever). She goes off in search of the girl, who somehow represents the hope of happiness and freedom she is missing in her marriage (or something like that).

The film is told by bouncing back and forth between the present with KST and the past where Jews are rounded up and sent off to their deaths. Most of the time, however, the moments where we jump from the past to the present or from the present backwards seem absolutely arbitrary and more motivated by script structure than by anything thematic or resonant. Most of the transitions happen when the young Sarah, who is trying to escape the Nazis to go find her younger brother who was locked in a closet in the apartment, is in a particularly precarious position - just in case you thought Nazi roundups were all sunshine and daisies.

This tedious manipulation and banality is so omnipresent in the film, it's hard to even single out a specific moment. At one point, when Julia is telling her journalist colleagues what she is uncovering in her research, one of them says, "When you think that such terrible things happened, it really gives you pause." Gee, thanks. I wasn't aware that an anecdote about thousands of people being rounded up and put into a filthy stadium before being sent off to their deaths was sad and terrible. Thanks for making that clear to me.

I have said in the past that nearly all contemporary French films deal with national guilt over the nation's role in the Holocaust, North Africa or other colonial outposts and here we have yet another example. (I should say that this is not a negative thing, but just an observation. Audiard's A Prophet is loosely about North Africa and colonialism, but is brilliant.) What's unusual here (and not unusual in a good way) is that the story is about an American digging into the story rather than a French person. When Julia's family seems to not be interested in the story of their apartment, she gets angry and judges them for their aloofness.

This feels like director/co-writer Gilles Paquet-Brenner is both a criticizing French society for not being more interested in the history of such a bad event as well as a strange celebration of American tactlessness. Why in the world would a woman shove a painful story down the throats of her family (and then later suggest that she regrets having done it)? When has it ever been acceptable to air dirty family laundry when nobody was asking about it? What's so wrong with people wanting to live naïve lives where they don't dig into the corners of historical events for which they're not guilty? Make no mistake, Julia is an asshole in this story and she is treated like a hero.

Stylistically, Paquet-Brenner treads on the most cliched turf imaginable in film. Just like the "girl in the red dress" in Schindler's List, Sarah's key (a key she used to lock her brother in a hidden closet in their apartment before they were rounded up) becomes some sort of supersymbol that we see over and over again, always with the same superficial effect. Why does it need to be so literal? Don't we understand the pain Sarah and her family feel for their lost brother/son without needing a visual clue to explain it to us? Are we really that stupid that we can't understand the sadness of the murder of a child?

This film is much more of an American-feeling film than a French one. There is no depth to the discussion and seems to move along on a surface level, pulling on heartstrings (like introducing irrelevant other kids, just to kill them off... in case we didn't know that lots of kids died at the hands of the Nazis) rather than anything in our brains (and, yes, the average French movie is smarter than the average American movie... this probably has to do with production volumes as much as anything else).

Somehow Julia's quest, even though it shakes two family's to their foundations (despite nobody in either family ever doing anything offensive), is some sort of righteous experience. It is not, of course. Julia is a sociopath and utterly unaware of the fact that Sarah's story is unremarkable and irrelevant to the lives of contemporary people. Not to say that hidden stories are better, but exposing pain from long ago isn't always worth the trouble (Julia and Paquet-Brenner seem to think it is).

I don't need to be told that the murder of children and innocent people by the Nazis (and their Petainist collaborators) was a bad thing. I learned that lesson a long time ago. This is a case where the truth is so banal that it doesn't really set anyone free, but just makes them frustrated for finding it out - and for finding out in such a trite way.

Stars: 1 of 4

The Sleeping Beauty (Friday, July 8, 2011) (52)

The very first image we see in Catherine Breillat's The Sleeping Beauty is a pair of old scissors that an old witch holds in the air over her head. Immediately our minds dive into the symbolism and connections of scissors and cutting: castration, self-mutilation, domesticity. The scissors here are used to cut a baby girl's umbilical cord (another significant symbol) and at the same time, the old witch puts a curse on the baby, saying she will die when she's 16.

We next see three silly teenage girls frolicking in a river. They seem rather contemporary and foolishly unaware of where they are or what they're doing. Next they show up at the baby's side, and seem to be three good witches, who change the curse by saying the girl will not die but sleep for 100 years when she turns six and that when she wakes up she will be sixteen. While she sleeps she will experience a bunch of interesting dreams.

The opening sequence seems to take place in the late 19th Century, and the girl, Anastasia, seems to be the daughter of a Frenchman and a Russian woman. They are very high class, live in a castle and refer to the young girl as a princess (though it's probably a term of endearment rather than royalty).

We next see Anastasia in her gigantic bed, setting dozens of alarm clocks (mostly from 1950s and pop culturey, like Mickey Mouse clocks) and reading a gigantic dictionary (of course this is a wonderful pun that the Sleeping Beauty is setting alarm clocks). She proudly declares that she enjoys reading the dictionary better than novels because she likes words and their meanings. From this moment, we understand that this film is about a conflict between words literal meanings and their symbolic, relative associations.

One of the words Anastasia reads is "hermaphrodite". She has already declared that she wants to be called Sir Vladimir and now she tells us that she should be considered both male and female, both Anastasia and Vladimir (both Anastasia Romanov and Vladimir Illyich Lenin? Interesting.). This idea is also very important as we see the idea of gender and sexuality move in a very fluid way form here out. At times Anastasia seems to be a girl, and at other times, she shows traits of a boy (particularly from a sexual development point of view).

When she does go to sleep, Anastasia goes on an epic journey into a dreamworld where we meet all sorts of interesting characters. One of her first stops is at the house of a mother and son who seem to live in the 1950s in the woods. There Anastasia falls in love with the boy, Peter, and his sudden departure from home gives her an excuse to move along to the next stop, in an effort to meet up with him again. She goes on to visit a kingdom of midgets (er... little people), an albino child prince and princess, a gypsy (er... Romani) family and a Snow Queen, to name just a few. At each stop she interacts with the people (in a sometimes sexual way), learning new things from each. With each one, the idea of time (either time flying or time being hidden) seems to be a theme.

This film is an amazing deconstruction of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, from a Derrida-ist point of view. The way she took apart and explored the Bluebeard story in her last film, Breillat gets into our understanding of our contemporary sexuality and our understanding of feminism and Freudian thinking by tearing this tale apart and taping it back together.

As either a girl or a boy, Anastasia seems to follow a very traditional Freudian sexual development, where her latency stage is almost exactly when she is "sleeping" (this is a great and rather brilliant literal translation of this theory). Meanwhile, her dreams are chock full of amazing symbolism. There are lots of knives and trains, some candies and a lot of snow.

When she wakes, she is in a contemporary Paris (well, really in a castle somewhere not on a busy street, but close enough so that a Parisian Lothario boy, Johan, can visit her). Some of the characters from her dream re-appear to her, though whether they're really there or some middle dream-reality state is unclear.

She meets the now grown Romani princess, who seems to have aged at the same rate as she has (that is, 10 years in 100), and Johan says he's Peter's grandson. Again, there is a blurry line between reality and dreams, between real and imagined. We see how sex has now become less of a childish curiosity and more of a sensual or violent act. She is a grown woman, filled with real emotions and no longer a vessel for an education.

Breillat is a totally fascinating director and certainly gets me thinking about literary criticism more than just about any other director working today. That she tends to highlight feminist ideas and references contemporary philosophy (as only a French elite could do). Her films are full of material to unpack and investigate.

This is a beautiful film, aside from being thought provoking. It has wonderful and interesting art direction, costumes and photography and you get the sense that everything on screen is meant to be exactly where it is. This amazing attention to detail is part of the reason why I think Breillat is one of the best directors alive.

I strongly recommend this film, but fully admit that after seeing it twice (I had to see it a second time to be sure I understood what I thought I understood), I still have a lot of unanswered questions and there are still a ton of symbolic meanings that I'm sure I'm missing. To me, that's the sign of a great work of art. It's challenging but an amazing thing to explore.

Stars: 4 of 4

Film Socialisme (Saturday, June 11, 2011) (42)

I must begin to say that when i started writing this blog two years ago, I never thought i would be able to review and write about a film by Jean-Luc Godard. This is a real treat for me.. Too bad the film is such a dog. Woof.

Watching Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme is not an enjoyable experience. It's a lot of frenetic cutting, there is footage from all sorts of cameras, including old-style analogue video, digital, celluloid and camera phones. Most of the film is in French, though we also hear English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic and Greek... and almost none of it is subtitled. In fact the subtitling seems to be specifically directed by Godard as well and he really only translates the gist of what is being said, so that long dialogues are reduced to several key nouns and adjectives, sometimes compounded into a linguistic gumbo gobbledygook.

It seems that Godard is making a comment on the nature of film to mislead and control and the bourgeois nature of contemporary cinema. This is so banal it's offensive (to say nothing about the bourgeois irony of making a movie that costs money and saying that people with money are out of touch).

There are three distinct parts to the film that have specific themes and styles. The first, takes place on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean where you see a bunch of Euros going around on holiday from port to port (North Africa, Spain, Egypt, Greece, Ukraine). There is a mix of documentary stuff and a weird narrative story about a rich business owner and people who don't like him. There is very little here that makes sense other than the general idea of "industrial capitalism is bad". Feh.

The second story, the most traditional in structure, is about a family who owns a gas station in France where there is a documentary crew filming them and they are being compelled to close the pumps. They discuss their lives and feelings. The final part is the most abstract where we go from city to city around the Mediterranean and see how they have changed over the years and the relative highs and lows (and revolutions) in each.

I imagine there are some Big Themes throughout the three parts here, but without a crib sheet it was almost totally opaque. Ever since about 1968 (when the student protests in France affected him politically and aesthetically) Godard has made movies that are more and more non-narrative, abstract and difficult to understand. I guess there's some merit to sitting down and trying to understand the meaning here, but it doesn't really interest me. (This is me saying about contemporary art, "so what? I don't get it.") And I guess that is really what this is. It's an art film, and experimental movie. It's not a narrative story. It has more in common with late Makavajev films like Sweet Movie (a boat that has some revolutionary significance) and Gorilla Bathes at Noon, than Breathless. The symbolism is important. The subtitles are important. The frenetic style is important. It's just that none of it is interesting or easy to watch and enjoy.

Stars: 1 of 4

L'Amour Fou (Friday, May 20, 2011) (33)

L'Amour Fou, or "crazy love", is a documentary ostensibly about the relationship and partnership between Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge. It shows how they met in the late 1950s, fell in love and then worked together for the next 40 years. The film was shot after YSL died in 2008 and just as Berge is about to have all of their belongings crated up and sent to auction in 2009.

The problem with the film is that it's a bunch of information about Yves Saint Laurent, Berge, their art collection, their auction and their relationship, but there is no sensible structure, so we don't know what to make of what we see. On the surface this seems like it could be a bio-doc, or a double bio-doc (a bi-bio-doc?) about who YSL and Berge were and how they created the House of Yves Saint Laurent, what it did and what its legacy is. We actually get only a smattering of history, finding out that they met through YSL's mentor, Christian Dior (although it's not clear how Berge knew him), and set up a new couture house later.

Major facts about YSL, like how he popularized (or invented?) pret-a-porter lines and pant-suits, are alluded to in passing, but never really underlined. There are a few interviews with a few women who worked with them, but they're never identified and their recollections are trivial.

Bizarrely we see a lot of footage of art handlers packing up works of art and sending them to New York, then London and then to Paris for the auction of their stuff. There seems to be a fake poignant moment when Berge is watching their stuff be sold for gigantic prices (a total of $484 million ...in the midst of the worst economy in recent memory) and his face is somewhere between sad because he's giving up his stuff and happy because he's making so much money with it. This doesn't really lead to anything and we don't really know enough about his relationship with the art to know how he feels.

I can't say this movie teaches you much about YSL, Berge or the auction of their stuff. It's a prefect example of how documentaries need a script or an outline in order to make sense. This doesn't seem to have either and as a result we bounce from one house to another (it seems that they had three homes together, in Paris, Marrakesh and Normandy), from one time period to another and from one anecdote about collecting art to another. We never learn what motivated YSL in his designs, what motivated Berge to be a fastidious manager, how they worked together while loving one another, why they collected the art they collected and how they came to purchase it all. We sometimes get the suggestion of answers to a lot of these things, but nothing direct or specific.

Stars: 1 of 4

Potiche (Friday, April 1, 2011) (19)

Continuing in his effort to make a film from every genre (including some genres you never knew existed), Francois Ozon's Potiche is a silly and lightly satisfying farce in the most classic French style. The story is pure popcorn nonsense, the writing and directing are rather unremarkable, but overall, this is a good and not great movie.

Suzanne Pujol (Catherine Deneuve) is a woman whose family has owned an umbrella company for a few generations (see: Demy's The Umbrella's of Cherboug) and has married a strong-willed man who is managing the plant now (it takes place in the 1970s). At some point he leaves the helm of the factory for health reasons and she takes over control. To this point she's been an obedient housewife ('potiche' means "trophy wife," en francais) managing a large house. Now she has to make business decisions in the midst of union troubles at the factory.

To help her comes Maurice Babin (Gerard Depardieu), now a Communist member of the national assembly, and formerly a political radical in the '60s. The two had a passionate romance once upon a time and now their close working relationship rekindles some of those flames. Suzanne has to manage her heart, the business and the family and keep her head about her.

The supporting cast here is great, lead by Fabrice Luchini as Suzanne's domineering and foolish husband, Robert, and Jeremie Renier, as the fabulous and possible gay (or just really into the disco scene in a French way) son, Laurent. I know this is a silly thing to say from this point in the middle of his career, but I think that in 50-some years we will look back at Renier's career the way we see Jean-Pierre Leaud's as a man who grew up in front of our eyes, almost literally, through the films he made.

The script, adapted by Ozon, is rather efficient and the story is paced well. The last act gets a bit too silly, I think, as Suzanne decides to stick with her husband and run against Maurice in the national assembly election. There are some funny bits in the film and some draggy bits as well. It's a nice movie, but nothing incredibly special. I think the acting is probably the best thing it has going for it, though that should be what you get when you hire some of the most talented actors in the world, non?

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Of Gods and Men (Friday, March 4, 2011) (11)

I heard amazing things about Of Gods and Men before I saw it (one friend said it is a "masterpiece"), so I had high hopes for it. What I got was a nice movie, with some great acting, but nothing super tremendous, really.

The story is apparently based on true events that occurred in the late 1990s in Algeria. There is a monastery of eight old French Catholic monks (the youngest one in his 50s) who lived in poverty and worked to help the people of a small village in the Atlas mountains. They have a very good relationship with the people, all of whom were Muslim, of course. They all study religious texts, including the Qur'an, read Arabic and communicated daily with the village elders on matters of faith and nuts and bolts issues about the area. Most importantly they run a health clinic, where Brother Luc (Michael Lonsdale) provides basic medical services (and even shoes) for hundreds of people in the area a day.

At some point there is a radical terrorist group ravaging the area and killing people, particularly Europeans who are there for development. When the brothers are asked by government officials to leave the monastery, in hopes of avoiding an international incident of a slaughter of monks, their leader, Brother Christian (Lambert Wilson) decides that it was their mission to stay the course. This creates tension in the group and they all have to look within themselves to see if they wish to stay and continue to help the people or if they are too worried about their lives and the wish to go.

The movie is pretty darn slow - which is typical of a movie about monks, who lead slow lives (see also: Andrei Rublev or Into Great Silence). It's not so much that it's boring, but that not a lot of stuff happens. We see their daily routines, from planting in their gardens and cleaning the floors to working in the health clinic, making food and, of course, praying. There are really only two main interactions with the terrorists, and most of the tension is that we expect the radicals will come at any point and we are waiting for them to show up.

There is a very interesting theological discussion here about whether the brothers should leave the monastery so they can be sure to continue to help others elsewhere or whether they should stick it out and not run, because the people they are serving are not able to run. It's not entirely clear which choice is more holy or if they are selfish or proud choices.

The film looks very nice - and is certainly helped by taking places in a totally beautiful part of the world, on mountain tops with amazing views. Director Xavier Beauvois and cinematographer Caroline Champetier do a wonderful job of making the Algerian countryside look lush, warm and plentiful. The acting is very good throughout, particularly the two leads (Wilson and Lonsdale) and Olivier Rabourdin, who plays Brother Christophe, the youngest monk who probably struggles the most with the decision. There is a lot of good stuff in this movie, but it all feels a bit dull and the aggressors (some generic Muslim terrorists) feel a bit un-scary and banal.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Two in the Wave (2010) (Saturday, February 26, 2011) (186)

Two in the Wave is a very interesting and efficient documentary about the relationship between Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. They were both cinefiles who met at movie theaters of Paris in the late 1940s. They then went on to collaborate and edit Cahiers du Cinema, the supremely important French film magazine. By the end of the 1950s, they both began writing and directing movies, Truffaut first with The 400 Blows in 1959 and Godard a year later with Breathless.

Here director Emmanuel Laurent shows us how they both came from very different backgrounds (Truffaut from a working-class Parisian family and Godard from an upper-middle class Swiss family), how they had different philosophies of work. We then see how they ultimately split after the student protests and strikes of May 1968, when Godard became radicalized and Truffaut, who totally sided with the students and strikers, was more moderate.

Laurent effectively shows how for both of them, their major works were greatly influenced by other directors they had seen before them and by one another. There's a very effective analysis of how both of them loved how Ingmar Bergman shot women and they both used this sympathetic view in later films (and particularly as the final shots in each of their debut works).

There is also a wonderful chapter about how even after their friendship completely dissolved (after Godard sent Truffaut a horrible and insulting letter and Truffaut responded to him) the two both used Jean-Pierre Leaud, the boy star of The 400 Blows, as their go-to star in some of their major works. Leaud was rather torn between the two men who had at one point been father-figures and mentors to him (he was only 14 when he made The 400 Blows). Interestingly, through both of their work, we see Leaud grow from a boy to a man - in Truffaut's work he came back to play Antoine Doinel again as a grown up.

One thing rather weird that Laurent does in the presentation is that he has almost all of the story read in voice over by a narrator with clips of interviews of the men cut in. Meanwhile he also uses a very Godard/Truffaut-type woman (very sexy with very full lips) in transitional moments and has her reading their clippings from the '50s and '60s. She serves no real purpose but turns the film into a very Godard-esque half-fictional, half-non-fictional piece. She seems to come right out of Two or Three Things I Know About Her or something later and even more opaque by Godard. It's a bit of a risk, but I like that it makes the whole exercise a bit more funny and lighter.

I like that this doc is as tight as it is. It's a very clear telling of an important story - possibly the most important creative cinematic relationships of the era.

Stars: 3 of 4