At the weekend our local cinema ran a short season of French films as part of the annual French Arts and Film Festival. We managed to get to a few of them.<\/p>\n
Les Emotifs Anonyme<\/strong> is an amusing comedy directed by Jean-Pierre Am\u00e9ris. \u00a0Ang\u00e9lique belongs to a mutual aid group for people who are very awkward in personnel relationships. She is also an anonymous master chocalatier, selling her chocolates through the shop of M. Mercier. After his death she joins, as sales-women, a failing chocolate factory run by Jan Ren\u00e9 van der Hugde, who is equally awkward, and is being helped in private sessions by a psychologist. The course the film takes is unsurprising. The secret chocolatier returns to save the business and the couple muster the composure to get married.<\/p>\n The lead roles are played by Isabelle Carr\u00e9 and Beno\u00eet Poelvoorde. We saw Poelvoorde a couple of years ago in Anne Fontaine\u2019s film Coco avant Chanel<\/strong>, playing Etienne Balsan.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Korkoro<\/strong>, which means liberty in Romany, is a film about the killing of the Romany by the Nazi regime and its allies in Europe in World War 2, a less well documented event than the Jewish holocaust. The film follows the sojourn of a family of gypsies arriving in a French village. The mayor and the schoolteacher are sympathetic, and it turns out they are working with the R\u00e9sistance, but many other villagers are hostile, and the local militia chief uses his position to steal their horses. Interned in a camp, they are released after the mayor sells them his father\u2019s house for 10 francs. But unable to settle, they leave, are picked up for not registering in another location and deported, a caption tells us, to Auschwitz. Mlle Lundy the schoolteacher is captured, tortured and deported \u00a0for falsifying papers. The role is based on the life of a member of the R\u00e9sistance, Yvette Lundy, who survived and was released on liberation.<\/p>\n The imagery of persecution is familiar: barbed wire, dawn raids, people warehoused in long single story huts, people transported in the backs of trucks, lines of people waiting passively for instructions, control through paperwork, and the platform provided by militarisation for brutality and theft. The Romany way of life is captured in the caravans, the horses, traditional skills and methods of earning a living and superstitions. But also what might be called a fatal indiscipline. They cannot live a sedentary life even in the most hazardous of circumstances. The first image of the film is of barbed wire, which appears to be vibrating to the guitar music on the soundtrack.<\/p>\n Made in 2010, the film also serves as a commentary on the policy adopted by last French administration to deport the Romany. The director of the film is Tony Gatlif. It was originally intended to be a documentary, but became a film because of the lack of supporting documentation. The story is based on an anecdote Gatlif came across during his research.<\/p>\n Le P\u00e8re de mes Enfants <\/strong>concerns film producer Gr\u00e8goire Canvel, whose production company, Moon Films,\u00a0 is failing. In the first half of the film we follow him around as, constantly on the phone, he tries to keep his company afloat amid huge debts. Midway through the film he puts a gun to his head.<\/p>\n The second half of the film follows his wife and three daughters. His wife Sylvia tries to find a way to finish the films that are underway. His elder daughter Cl\u00e9mence overhears a conversation in a cafe and learns she also has a brother. She contacts the mother but finds the son is away and is estranged from his father. Gr\u00e8goire has been funding the boy’s childhood, despite all the difficulties with his finances.<\/p>\n Several possible storylines are set-up but not followed, almost as if the film were flagging up a direction in order not to take it, as a way of signalling its real concerns.\u00a0 Cl\u00e9mence visits the family of the unknown brother, called Moune, but he is not present, and nothing further comes of it. Sylvia\u2019s efforts to save the films in production come to nothing. Russian financing for the expensive Swedish production that is threatening the company turns out to be fantasy. The head of the film laboratory is sympathetic but has his own obligations to his company and must insist on payment. At the end, the film company is in liquidation, and the family leaves Paris, without the time to visit the cemetery.<\/p>\n I found the whole film completely absorbing. Most of the first half is set in the cramped offices of the film production company in Paris and the family\u2019s home in the country. The streets of Paris looking like something from Truffaut or Godard. The family spend a weekend in Ravenna, visiting the basilica di Sant’Apollinaire at Classe, just outside the town, where Gr\u00e8goire explains the mosaics to his daughters. Earlier he had explained the ruins of a Knights Templar chapel close to their home. Afterwards, the children swim in the milky waters of a stream.\u00a0 There is a short scene near the end where the family is having supper with Gr\u00e8goire\u2019s friend Serge. The lights in the street go out, plunging everything in darkness. They stumble around in the dark, before lighting candles, and then decide to go out into the street to look at the stars. It\u2019s only a few moments of darkness before all the lights come back on.<\/p>\n The story is based on the life of film producer Humbert Balsan, the founder of Orgnon Films, who hanged himself in his office in 2005. Balsan produced the director Mia Hansen-L\u00f8ve\u2019s first film.<\/p>\n Les Femmes du 6e Etage<\/strong> is another light comedy, directed by Philippe Le Guay. Set in 1962 largely in the household of M Joubert, the head of the family stock broking firm, it sets up the opposition between the brittle monotony of the bourgeoisie downstairs and the Spanish maids living on the top floor. M Joubert finds in the maids an escape from his own life. When his wife falsely accuses him of an affair with a recently divorced vamp, he accepts the accusation, allowing him to move into the attic; the first time in his life he has had a room of his own. He falls in love with his maid Maria, and three years on, divorced, he drives down to Spain to be with her.<\/p>\n Joubert, the dull middle aged professional man, is played by Fabrice Luchini. Last year we saw him in La Fille de Monaco<\/strong>, another Anne Fontaine film, where he plays a very similar role, a middle aged professional man falling foolishly in love with the ambitious young local TV weather girl. The other three films we saw last year were a Claude Lelouch film called\u00a0Roman \u00e0 Gare<\/strong> and two comedies, one called\u00a0L’Arnacoeur <\/strong>and the other\u00a0MicMacs \u00e0 Tire-larigot.\u00a0<\/strong>Micmacs is a film about a group of outsiders pitted against two arms manufacturers and was directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. L’Arnacoeur is directed by Pascal Chaumeil and stars Roman Duris as a man who runs a business which breaks up relationships, but only where the women is unhappy. Julie Ferrier is excellent in both. The best film of the three is the Lelouch, starring Dominique Pinon. His character is the ghost writer for a best-selling novelist played by Fanny Ardant, but we aren’t sure of anything until the\u00a0denouement.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At the weekend our local cinema ran a short season of French films as part of the annual French Arts and Film Festival. We managed to get to a few of them. Les Emotifs Anonyme is an amusing comedy directed by Jean-Pierre Am\u00e9ris. \u00a0Ang\u00e9lique belongs to a mutual aid group for people who are very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[62,57],"class_list":["post-251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","tag-france","tag-world-war-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fivedegreesnorth.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fivedegreesnorth.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fivedegreesnorth.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fivedegreesnorth.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fivedegreesnorth.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=251"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.fivedegreesnorth.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":651,"href":"https:\/\/www.fivedegreesnorth.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions\/651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fivedegreesnorth.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fivedegreesnorth.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fivedegreesnorth.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}