Screengrab contributor Bryan Whitefield reports from the Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual Rendezvous with French Cinema program.
While this year's crop of films couldn't boast about anything as high profile as last year's opening night film La Vie En Rose, which featured the eventually Oscar-winning performance by Marion Cotillard as French icon Edith Piaf, this popular annual series presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center did include several notable films for cineastes and admirers of all things French.
French New Wave director Claude LeLouch (A Man and A Woman) opened this year's series with his latest film Roman de Gare, a thriller about a popular novelist whose life and fiction become intermingled. Another New Wave veteran, Claude Miller, screened his latest film, A Secret, which focuses on the French-Jewish community during World War II. This is one of two films that feature Mathieu Amalric, the star of Julian Schnabel's much-acclaimed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The other, Nicolas Klotz's Heartbeat Detector/La Question Humaine, could be tagged as a French Michael Clayton with Amalric as an in-house psychologist for a giant chemical company who uncovers some serious big-business skeletons.
Perhaps the most easily digestible film in the series is Cédric Klapisch's Paris which features an ensemble cast led by the consistently excellent Romain Duris and Juliette Binoche. The film certainly has its flaws, and does rely on a multi-line narrative, a screenwriting tool that feels a little too easy at this point, but also gives a view of the city and its many landmarks that feels like a feature-length postcard of Paris itself, sure to invoke memories for those who have been there and further romanticizing it for those who have not.
The shining star of this year's series for me is also likely to be a hate-it-or-love-it film for many — Christophe Honoré's modern musical Love Songs, essentially about a girl-girl-guy threesome. Honoré, no stranger to controversy or mixed reviews, began his career with Ma Mere, a film about mother-son incest generally seen as either a first glimpse of genius or a loathsome pile of shit. His second film, last year's Dans Paris, was met with similar raves and reviles. Love Songs, written by Honoré from a shared personal experience with French songwriter Alex Beaupain, actually uses its beautiful little songs as a narrative trick that allows the characters to stand outside reality and express emotions that would have been lost in a more straight-forward drama. The filmmaking has a stylized yet in-the-moment feeling that evokes the best of the French New Wave. The gifted cast, including Louis Garrel, Ludovine Sagnier, Clotilde Hesme and Chiara Mastroianni, allows the songs to fold into the overall action, a big part of why so much of this film works as well as it does. My giving a "musical" a chance is pretty unusual, but this film's inventive storytelling and strong performances won me over immediately and it's certain to be on my year-end list.