French

The Intouchables: a crowdpleasing odd couple comedy

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The Intouchables is the second most popular movie of all time in France – and it’s easy to see why.  It’s an odd couple comedy that’s a real crowd pleaser.

A very, very rich French aristocrat has become a quadriplegic due to a hang gliding accident and hires a Senegalese good-for-nothing street hood as his caregiver.  The plot, really just a series of set pieces, mines familiar territory as the poor guy learns about living in a mansion (see Down and Out in Beverly Hills) and revitalizes the rich guy’s zest for living.  But it’s really well done and very funny.

The rich guy is played by the great Francois Cluzet (Tell No One), who gives a tremendous performance using only his head and neck.  Omar Sy plays the poor guy and actually edged out The Artist‘s Jean Dujardin for France’s top acting award last year; that’s hard to figure, but Sy is very funny in The Intouchables.  Overall, it’s a very satisfying comedy.

 

Polisse: how protecting children takes a toll

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Polisse is a riveting French police procedural about the child protective services unit in Paris.  Most cop movies are about how the cops solve the crime.  Instead,  Polisse is about the job’s emotional impact on the cops themselves  – when their assignment is rescuing kids from various degrees of abuse.  It’s an uncommonly good film.

Writer-director Maiwenn embedded herself with this police unit for several months.  At the San Francisco International Film Festival screening, she said that, although the film is fictional, everything in the movie happened in real life (except for the love story between Maiwenn’s photographer and Joey Starr’s cop).  Maiwenn also said that, although the real-life cops were rooting for her to do a movie about their most spectacular exploits, she chose to focus on a realistic cross-section of cases to depict the unit’s actual daily experience.

There are about ten cops in the unit, and it’s an excellent ensemble cast.  Joey Starr is the cop who cares too much.  Karin Viard (Paris, Potiche, Time Out) is the seemingly together cop whose family life has been sacrificed.  Marine Fois (seen earlier this year in Four Lovers) is wound way too tight.  Frederic Pierrot (I’ve Loved You So Long, Let It Rain, Sarah’s Key) is the conflict-averse commander trying to keep the lid on his rambunctious unit.

Polisse won the jury prize at Cannes and is on my list of Best Movies of 2012- So Far.

Coming Up on TV: Diabolique

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If you like suspense, you will want to check out Diabolique, to be broadcast by Turner Classic Movies on May 12.  The headmaster of a provincial boarding school is so cruel, even sadistic, that everyone wants him dead, especially his wife and his mistress.  When he goes missing, the police drain the murky pool where the killers dumped the body, and the killers get a big surprise.  Now the suspense from director Henri-Georges Clouzot really starts.

A master of the thriller, Clouzot was nicknamed the French Hitchcock.  In an achingly scary scene from Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, two truck drivers try to get a long truck around a cliff side hairpin curve  – and the truck is filled with nitroglycerin.  If you like Diabolique, you’ll probably also like another domestic murder – this time set in Paris – Quai des Orfevres.

Cinequest – Four Lovers: those French sure are open-minded

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Today and tomorrow, I’m catching up by commenting on two films from last week’s Cinequest 22.

In the thoughtful French film Four Lovers, two happily married couples hit it off socially.  They quickly decide that it’s okay to have sex with each others’ spouses.  It’s not “spouse swapping”.  It’s an arrangement whereby both couples continue to live as couples, but each adds a permitted fling with one of the other couple.

Plenty of explicit sex follows, but this is not primarily an erotic film.  Instead it explores what follows from this arrangement.  What rules need to be agreed upon? Is there jealousy and/or insecurity?  Will anyone go past the fling to fall in love with the new partner? Can one be in love with more than one lover?  Can they keep this from their kids?  How deeply do they need their new lovers?  How will this affect the original marriages?

It’s all complicated.  In fact, I think that watching this movie would be far superior than trying this out in real life.

Spoiler Alert:  After the arrangement ends, the couples return to their original married lives.  Something is missing in their lives, but it’s not the sexual thrill of the affairs.  Instead each grieves the loss of a lover.  Given this loss, all four are unhappy for the first time in the film and perhaps wishing that it had never happened.

DVD of the Week: Sarah’s Key

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Kristin Scott Thomas stars in another French film, this time as a journalist tracking the story of a girl during the WWII roundup of Jews in France.  Her probe of events almost sixty years in the past becomes more and more personal, and profoundly entangles more and more people.  It’s a compelling story, and no actor can portray intensity and doggedness better than Scott Thomas.  Co-stars Niels Arestrup (A Prophet) and Aidan Quinn.

Sarah’s Key: an investigation becomes unexpectedly personal

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Kristin Scott Thomas stars in another French film, this time as a journalist tracking the story of a girl during the WWII roundup of Jews in France.  Her probe of events almost sixty years in the past becomes more and more personal, and profoundly entangles more and more people.  It’s a compelling story, and no actor can portray intensity and doggedness better than Scott Thomas.  Co-stars Niels Arestrup (A Prophet) and Aidan Quinn.

DVD of the Week: Queen to Play

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In the fine French drama Queen to Play, a working class woman discovers a passion for chess in midlife. It’s a film about aspiration. First, she must muster the courage and resourcefulness to learn the game. When it becomes an obsession, she and her family must adjust.

The excellent actress Sandrine Bonnaire (Intimate Strangers) is the perfect choice to play this laconic and controlled character, who reveals her thoughts and emotions to the audience almost only through her eyes. A French-speaking Kevin Kline is also very good as the crusty American widower who teaches her chess.

Other recent DVD picks have been Kill the Irishman,  The Music Never Stopped, Source Code, Potiche and Another Year.

The Names of Love: amusing but forgettable

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The Names of Love is an amusing but forgettable romantic comedy about the attraction of opposites  – a flighty leftwing women who converts conservatives by sleeping with them and an uptight and controlled guy.  Sara Forestier won the Cesar (France’s Oscar) for her portrayal of the most attention deficient character in recent cinema.  Indeed, Forestier is actually convincing as a woman so distractable that she doesn’t notice that she has left her flat and boarded the Paris Metro without wearing any clothes.

DVD of the Week: Potiche

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Potiche, the delightful French farce of feminist self-discovery, is the funniest movie in over a year, and another showcase for Catherine Deneuve (as if she needs one).   DeNeuve plays a 1977 potiche, French for “trophy housewife”, married to a guy who is a male chauvinist pig both by choice and cluelessness.  He is also the meanest industrialist in France – Ebenezer Scrooge would be a softie next to this guy – and the workers in his factories are about to explode.  He becomes incapacitated, and she must run the factory.

Now, this is a familiar story line for gender comedy – so why is it so damn funny?  It starts with the screenplay, which is smart and quick like the classic screwball comedy that American filmmakers don’t make anymore.  And the cast is filled with proven actors who play each comic situation with complete earnestness, no matter how absurd.

Director Francois Ozon, best known in the US for Swimming Pool and 8 Women, adapted the screenplay from a play and has a blast skewering late-70s gender roles and both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  Gerard Depardieu plays the Communist mayor, who is both the husband’s nemesis and the wife’s former fling.   Two of the very best French comic players, Fabrice Luchini and Karen Viard, shine in co-starring roles as the husband and his secretary.