The 36th Alliance Française French Film Festival has commenced, rolling through Australian cinemas until April 9. Here are three of this year’s most interesting films, reviewed by Luke Buckmaster. For a complete list of titles, locations and session times, consult the AFFF website. C’est super!
Before What Comes After
How do you make a drama centered around palliative care, weaving in stories of terminally ill patients during the last stretches of their lives, and not make it feel awfully heavy and somber? Veteran director Costa-Gavras—who is now 92-years-old—found a way, drawing a lovely tone and tempo to ease us in.
Fabrice (Denis Podalydes) is a famous and widely read philosopher (this is France, so they still exist) who’s shown around a palliative care unit by his soft-faced doctor friend Augustin (Kad Merad). The protagonist is an audience surrogate, learning about this world at the same time as us, sitting bedside, or death-bedside, with various gravely ill people. Costa-Gavras (adapting a book by Régis Debray) establishes their personalities and temperaments quickly, in colourful strokes, as if recognising that time is limited for everybody, including and especially the characters.
Some of the film takes the form of gracefully staged recollections, prompted by Augustin recounting stories of memorable patients. Every person responds to news of their, or their loved one’s, imminent deaths in different ways, which makes for interesting drama. A central message of this superbly balanced film—at once melancholic, ruminative and optimistic—is that “end of life” is still life.
This Life of Mine
There’s an unusual and endearing coyness to Sophie Fillières character-oriented dramedy, which blithely avoids labels and formula. We can be reasonably sure, reasonably quickly, that it’ll fall into the bucket of a “mid-life crisis” story, oriented around a borderline pitiable protagonist, Barbie (Agnès Jaoui), who’s in clear need of a second wind—but instead finds herself in a sanitarium. Comedically, This Life of Mine is subtle and aloof, with lowkey vibes and a feeling that it’s quietly alert to life’s absurdities.
It’s not a great film but it’s a good one, enjoyable from its opening scene, in which the protagonist tussles with the task of writing her memoir, staring at her screen and fiddling with the font. Barbie is intelligent but under-estimated and increasingly unstable. To some extent this is a story about her breakdown, but it’s executed deftly and lightly, with an amiable pace and intuitive editing.
Jaoui’s crowd-pleasing performance makes Barbie relatable and likeable: you want the best for this woman, and it’s a pleasure getting to know her. Sadly, Fillières, who directed six other features, passed away shortly after completing the shoot.
Niki
Céline Sallette’s film about French-American artist and sculptor Niki de Saint-Phalle avoids many of the pitfalls that sully biopics. There are no silly light bulb moments, for example, attempting to neatly crystallise the genesis of an artwork. But structurally and rhythmically Niki is an odd one, somehow feeling both unfocused and fastidiously arranged. Sallette circuitously advances the story: for every two steps forward, she takes one to the side, gradually forming a detailed picture of Saint-Phalle but struggling to invest audiences intellectually and emotionally.
What this film does have is a vivid, fully dimensional lead performance in the eponymous role from Charlotte Le Bon (currently on screens in the third season of The White Lotus). Her performance is powerfully nimble, smoothly segueing from heavy to light, feeling totally genuine and lived-in. Because of Le Bon, Saint-Phalle—who fled the U.S. during the McCarthy era, with her husband (John Robinson) and baby—always comes across as a person of multitudes. After moving into an apartment in Paris, the subject eventually evolves into a great and influential artist, very much of the “tortured” variety.
At times Sallette’s direction is unexpectedly stylish, for instance deploying splitscreens to interesting effect. But Le Bon is very much the pièce de résistance; her performance will stay with you.
