Tag: France

Passengers of The Night (Les passagers de la nuit)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

There’s a certain serenity and magic that comes over me while listening to the radio late at night. It can often feel like you’re the only one listening to the radio host while the rest of the world has gone to sleep. Named after a late-night show that accompanies truckers on long-distance journeys, Passengers of the Night has a similar kind of soft energy. Director Mikhaël Hers transmits this personal-feeling story to us as if he’s talking alone in a radio booth, creating an ode to both the bonds of family and reminiscences of the era in the process.

Like a lot of French films, it takes a broad, novelistic approach, taking us on a journey through the 80s, a golden age for the left, opening on François Mitterrand’s election on 10th May 1981 and ending with his decline. Hers shoots on film, mixing hazy, muted images with archive footage, creating a nostalgic feel for the time, further accompanied by classic 80s bands like Television and Lloyd Cole & the Commotions. Paris, photographed from all sides, looks particularly dreamy here, with Eric Rohmer films playing in Marquee cinemas, people playing tennis against buildings, and punk parties by the Seine.

Charlotte Gainsbourg stars as Élisabeth, a recently divorced mother looking after her two teenage children, Matthias (Quito Rayon-Richter) and Judith (Megan Northam). Matthias is a classic randy teenager, staring at girls in the apartment block opposite them and dreaming of the first time he will have sex. Judith is the political one, grateful for Mitterand’s election and holding plans to run for office one day. As far as families go, they get on pretty well, Hers electing to explore personal development rather than engineering generic conflicts.

But Élisabeth has to make ends meet for his children and applies on a whim to a late night radio talk show, where people call in and tell their stories. Quite the opposite of modern radio talk shows, which thrive on debate or conflict, Passengers of The Night is a more relaxed and hush programme, simple allowing people to tell us about their lives. Rather frustratingly, we don’t ever see any of these shows in detail, apart from one guest, the enigmatic 18-year-old Talulah (Noée Abita), who lives on the streets.

Élisabeth invites Talulah into their home, but her secrets never unveil. Like the drifter in Agnes Varda’s Vagabond (1985),she is a woman without a past. Usually this would irk me, but it fits in with the central theme of the movie that some secrets, whether written, spoken or implied, are better left in the past, better existing in the memories of just one person. The final result is a rather lovely film, one that never moved me that much, but still evokes a particular time, place and feeling with bittersweet ease.

Passengers of The Night played in the Competition section of the 72nd Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It is out in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival.

One Year, One Night (Un año, una noche)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN!

A tale of two performances: Noémie Merlant as Céline, fresh off A Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019) and Jumbo (Zoé Wittock, 2020) with a credible, affecting portrait of trauma denial; and Nahuel Pérez Biscayart as Ramon, suffering severe panic attacks right from the start without enough depth to properly pull it off. A tale of a couple, navigating the aftermath of the 2015 Bataclan attacks together, with the finer and cleverer performance being dragged down by a messy one.

One Year, One Night is based on the true recollections of two French-Spanish couples who went through unimaginable horror when escaping from the horrific terrorist attack, where 130 people were brutally killed by Islamist terrorists. Using a back-and-forth narrative technique, starting in the aftermath before giving us piecemeal cutbacks to the attacks themselves — tastefully shot so as to avoid any depiction of the gunmen — the result is a touching portrait of trauma and the pains of trying to live within its shadow.

The film works best when explaining the ways that life goes on even when you have suffered a severe event, with Ramon and Céline going back to their jobs; Ramon is in some kind of financial services while Céline is a social worker at a foster home, mostly working with Black and brown kids. With a manner reminiscent of Jean-Marc Vallée, edits come through these scenes like intrusive thoughts, showing us the difficulty of trying to move forward. But while Céline’s arc, telling no one what happened and hoping the negative feeling just goes away, seems more fascinating, Ramon’s everything-on-the-table reaction, vacillating between grief and encounter and moments of strange enlightenment, required subtler execution from Biscayart, who can’t quite pull it off.

Naturally, their relationship, told over the course of a year, comes under great scrutiny, whether they have drunk too many beers in Spain, stressed from work, or try and plan the future together. At times the attack itself fades from view and we are left with a handsome-enough relationship drama. But the dramatic line of the film is left severely wanting, with little shape given to each character’s development or conflict: arguments in rooms and cool dancing scenes can be fun, but they have to actually mean something; instead it just feels like padding.

And at 130 minutes, what could’ve been a neat Panorama film is given the bloated self-importance of a competition entry. While the experiences of the Bataclan survivors deserves a fair telling — with their input and consent, of course — One Year, One Night doesn’t live up to the importance of the task.

One Year, One Night plays in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, running from 10-20th February.

Getting Away With Murder(s)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

There’s something about the enormity of the issues involved here that makes this a very tough watch. (If it wasn’t, there would be something wrong. The Holocaust is not an easy issue to deal with. Films about it can consequently be tough to watch. And so they should be.) That combined with the near three-hour running time (this is not a complaint, honest) means it sat on my pending review pile for quite a while before I finally sat down and watched it.

I suspect Wilkinson is aware of this problem. As the film starts, he takes you (as it were) gently by the hand as he walks into Auschwitz and matter-of-factly discusses its horrors, helped by a man who works in the museum there and has probably helped numerous people before and since to come to terms with the implications of the place as they go round it. Insofar as one ever can.

We learn of the arrivals off the incoming cattle trucks who were told to go down the ten-minute walk to the showers to get themselves cleaned up. They would take off their clothes and fold them neatly so they could pick them up again afterwards. They were herded into the shower interiors, quite densely packed. And they never came out because these weren’t showers at all, but gas chambers used for the systematic elimination of many of the new arrivals. It’s sickening just to think about.

The people who herded them in were inmates themselves. If you were told you could do that job or join them in the gas chambers yourself, what would you do? [A quick aside: the extraordinary and brilliant subjective camera drama Son Of Saul (László Nemes, 2015) goes a long way to understanding an inmate who does this job. Not that that’s possible.] As I say, trying to comprehend the inhumanity of this is really, really hard. These inmate-workers would be told, “the only way out of here is through the chimney.”

The screen shows well-put together maps of the place and gruelling archive footage is presented throughout the film in a non-confrontational, non-sensationalised way which helps. However, this material is, on the most fundamental human level, horrible. There’s a part of you that just wants to get away from the screen and throw up. People shouldn’t treat each other like this. Yet history testifies that they do, and we should never forget the fact. It’s the reason we need films like this, and the reason you need to watch it. Lest we forget, as they say.

Which implies that we know it all already. For myself, though, there is much in this film I didn’t know. Ranging from specific details about perpetrators large and small in the overall process that was the Holocaust right the way through to the scale of the operation (six million Jews turns out both an oversimplification and an understatement) and all the complicated ins and outs of the legal aftermath of the attempts both to track down and administer justice to the numerous perpetrators alongside the numerous attempts of all those involved to evade justice, all to often successfully. Much of what’s shown here is an indictment of humanity, although all the way through there are signs of hope as perpetrators are convicted and justice done. But it seems that too many get (got) off scot free or with woefully inadequate punishment for their appalling crimes. It’s not surprising that someone should want to make a film to address the burning question about the injustice of all this. Kudos to Wilkinson for doing so.

It may make for harrowing and deeply upsetting viewing, but at the same time, it’s consistently compelling. And it absolutely screams out to be seen.

After Auschwitz we move on to France, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Austria and, eventually, Germany. In his own county of Yorkshire which has a population of 5.4 million, Wilkinson attempts to get his head round the sheer enormity of the figures. For comparison, both Denmark and the US State of Maryland have populations of six million. If all those in Yorkshire were killed, he asks, would the UK government remain silent?

York, where the film has its premiere, is the site of England’s largest massacre of Jews in 1190, when some 150 were killed. Lest we think such things could never happen here.

Wilkinson also travels to Galway, Ireland to see the grave of William Joyce who broadcast German propaganda during the war as Lord Hawhaw. He was captured, tried and, in 1946, executed. His case is comparatively cut and dried compared to what happened to those Germans who abetted the Holocaust.

After Germany’s defeat in 1945 and the shock of what they found in the death camps, the Allies vowed to bring the Holocaust’s perpetrators to justice. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg is often cited, but in fact that was held in a building with the capacity to house no more than 24 defendants of whom three never made it to trial and only 12 received the death sentence.

Matters were scarcely helped by the Nazis’ use of law under the Third Reich. Prior to that, law in most European countries had been based on the foundation of the Ten Commandments, but the regime effectively suspended such considerations, creating a legal framework under which it was permissible to eliminate specific ethnic and other minorities. The concept of ‘crimes against humanity’ didn’t exist until its instigation for the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, 1945-6.

Other trials followed, but the Allies failed to keep up the momentum as they became more concerned with the growing threat of the Soviets and the rise of the Cold War than with hunting down Nazi war criminals when Germany was economically on its knees. Finishing the job within Germany’s borders was left largely to Germany itself.

Where East Germany, as a newly formed Communist state, rebuilt its judiciary from scratch with entirely new appointments, West Germany retained many judges who had been in post during the Nazi era, many of whom were somewhat sympathetic to the murderers in the dock. In a very real sense, the post-war, West German judiciary had became Nazified.

Thus, in later West German trials, while some of the murderers received the full force of the law in the death penalty, many sentences were much more lenient or subsequently commuted so that, for example, a 20 year sentence became five years. There are also examples of murderers living in Germany who were never prosecuted, or who got off during a trial using the most spurious of defences. In many cases, these were people living under their real names.

Others fled, most infamously to South America, but to other countries as well, including the UK. In recent years, in his retirement, Nazi hunter Dr. Stephen Ankier researched their whereabouts, often to find the perpetrators he unearthed die of illness or old age before they could be brought to trial. The UK’s record on finding and prosecuting the perpetrators has been poor.

Getting Away With Murder(s) had its premiere on Thursday 9th November in at the Everyman Cinema, York. Dates for further screenings around the UK are constantly being added: click here to see if your town or city is listed yet. If it isn’t, then tell your local cinema you want to see it.

The film is released in cinemas in the UK on Friday, October 1st, the 75th anniversary of the end of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

Review originally published on Jeremy C. Processing. Reprinted by permission.

The World After Us (Le monde après nous)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

The conditions that made Paris such a hub for writers in the early 20th century — cheap flats, strong communities, endless time to put pen to paper — have been more or less swept away by the powers of gentrification. Faced with paying €1,200 in rent every single month, Labidi (Aurélien Gabrielli) is forced to come up with some unusual schemes, like low-key insurance fraud and cycling for Deliveroo, in order to meet the bills.

He is a promising young French-Tunisian writer with an award-winning short story under his belt. His agent secures him a meeting with a top literary firm, who enjoy the first three chapters of his Algerian-war focused novel. With only six months to finish the book, this decision is rather complicated by his romance with Elisa (Louise Chevilotte), who he picks up in true Frenchman-style on a Lyonnaise terrasse by asking for a cigarette. He didn’t smoke before; he will now.

She’s a younger penniless student while his home is in Paris; making the move to one of the world’s most expensive places — drained of the usual romantic clichés of walking along the seine or staring at the Eiffel Tower — difficult for the young, loved-up couple, who can barely rely on their working-class parents for help. The resultant film explores the pressures of being an artist in an increasingly capitalist world, existing without a connection to one’s roots, and trying to stay in love amidst the maelstrom of modern life. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but neatly packaged in a smart, bittersweet yet ultimately optimistic package.

With a light, unaffected style with simple yet effective editing, The World After Us effortlessly brings to mind the films of François Truffaut, especially Antoine and Colette, as well as recent ‘novelistic’ French-speaking films like the work of Xavier Dolan, Being 17 and Next Year. While the New Wave is often parodied for its pretensions, it was filled with great humour; effectively communicated here when Labidi interviews for a job at a high-end optician. The comedy diffuses the self-seriousness of similar writer stories, rounding out Labidi as a man who feels like he actually exists off-screen.

As a portrait of a young man as a writer, a genre often tackled in French literature and cinema, The World After Us, partly based on director Louda Ben Salah-Cazanas’s own life, seems unconcerned with the weight of history, using its tightly-written characters and a condensation of time to easily absorb us into Labidi’s life. Aurélien Gabrielli carries his character with a deceptive simplicity, first appearing like a passive sponge before slowly turning into the hero of his own story without exhibiting any stereotypical or groan-worthy moments of growth. Accompanied by a few choice needle drops — “Knights of White Satin”, “Remember Me’ — The World After Us expertly sweeps us through these six months in a smooth 84 minutes. More novella than novel, this is a lovely slice of Francophone auto-fiction.

The World After Us plays in the Panorama strand of the Berlinale, running between 1st-5th March.

Should the Wind Drop (Si le Vent Tombe)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Stepanakert Airport lies in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-occupied region that is situated inside the internationally recognised border of Azerbaijan. Built in 1974 by the Soviet Union, it hasn’t had any flights since the beginning of the Nagorno-Karabakh war in 1990. In fact, it’s nearly impossible for the airport to operate: if they fly outside of the republic’s borders, there is the very real chance that the Azerbaijani troops will shoot the plane down.

Should the Wind Drop uses this current reality as the backdrop from a fictional story, focused on a French engineer Alain’s (Grégoire Colin) audit of the airport to decide whether its ready for international flights. For the locals, including Alain’s driver Seirane (Arman Navasardyan) and airport owner Korune (David Hakobyan), this is a point of national pride: if they can have flights towards Yerevan, Moscow, and even Paris, then they will have to be recognised as their own country.

Shooting on location, director Nora Martirosyan stresses the reality of the Armenian people in this region, bringing to life a mostly unknown and unthought of part of the world. Alain’s difficult decision is directly juxtaposed with the life of a young boy who cuts across the airport’s weak fences in order to shorten his walking time. By directly contrasting the prospect of international flight with the on-the-ground reality, Should the Wind Drop gently reminds us of the very human stakes at play in the region.

Like Maria Sahakyan’s Mayak (2006), also set during war in the Caucasus, yet without any scenes of actual violence, Should the Wind Drop avoids obvious politicking in favour of a more poetic approach. We see the beauty of the rolling hills and the aridity of the grass, as well as the lived-in reality of cities, shops, restaurants and bars. Their country may not officially exist, but the people definitely do. They deserve a peaceful solution to their crisis.

Given the current situation in the region, Should the Wind Drop feels rather prophetic. One character describes the entire place like a volcano, somewhere that seems peaceful on the outside, but could blow up at any moment. This is stressed by the quietness and beauty of maybe of the epic, sweeping shots, allowing us to bask in the countryside. Should the Wind Drop may have frozen a precarious moment in time before the region descended once more into conflict.

With this outside entity of Alain given such a big decision in a region that he barely understands, Should The Wind Drop reads as an allegory of the way the West tries and fails to mediate conflict. The choice of a Frenchman is no accident: the French saved the people of Musa Dagh from annihilation, and also became the first European country to recognise the Armenian genocide. Yet even France (or Russia, or the USA) cannot be expected to be the saviours this time. The conflict is simply too dense for anyone outside of the region to fully understand.

In writing and researching this review, I have purposefully avoided declarative opinions on this difficult reality. After all, a mere film or a search on Google Earth cannot explain away a region and its vast, complicated history. But what a film can do is foster a sense of empathy for those living under such difficulties. By that metric, Should the Wind Drop is a quiet success.

Should the Wind Drop plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November. It was originally selected to show at this year’s Festival de Cannes (which was cancelled).

Amanda

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

When Isis surpassed Al-Qaeda as the leading jihadist group in 2014, the following three years would see a wave of terrorism sweep across the Continent, killing dozens in France, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Spain and the UK. Of these countries, France was hit hardest, with over 200 people dying between 2015 and 2017. This spectre of tragedy looms over Amanda, Mikhaël Hers’s quiet, unassuming drama.

The title refers to 7-year-old Amanda (Isaure Multrier), who lives with her mother Sandrine (Ophélia Kolb), an English teacher at the local école. Amanda and her mother have an authentic chemistry that’s established in flowing, naturalistic sequences in their light and airy Parisian apartment. Particularly endearing is a scene in which Sandrine explains to her curious daughter the meaning of ‘Elvis has left the building’, which, I must add, educated me as well as young Amanda.

All of this is tinged with dread, for Sandrine, we know, will be killed in a terrorist attack. When this moment comes there is no punch to the gut, but there is no cheap sentimentalism, either. The real pain comes after the event when David (Vincent Lacoste), Sandrine’s twenty-something brother, has to explain to Amanda what happened to her poor mum.

It is David who carries the bulk of the emotional weight in this tragedy. His occupation is that of factotum; when he’s not greeting tourists at Gare du Nord for a vaguely dubious landlord, he’s pruning trees and shrubs at local parks. He’s a good guy though; he may lack ambition and direction but he has a shaggy-haired affability that suggests he’ll get his sh*t together at some point.

David’s prospects are spiced up when he meets Lena (Stacy Martin), a Gallic beauty who moves into one of his employer’s properties. You feel the butterflies in their stomach as they hit it off, such is the understated power of Hers’s direction and the actors’ performances. Lena, however, is also caught up in the attack, suffering wounds to her arm and, most perniciously, her mind.

This is what Amanda is about – the fallout of tragedy. A moment’s violence can cause a lifetime of suffering, but it can also heal old wounds, too. For David and Amanda, Sandrine’s tragic death becomes an olive branch to Alison (Greta Scaachi), David’s estranged mother who moved to London long before her granddaughter was born. It is unclear whether amends will be made in the long run, but the situation rings true for those who have experienced such familial shock.

Ultimately, despite its context, Amanda proves to be a warm, subtle film with an effortless naturalism, yet it lacks a visceral quality that could have made it a more absorbing, affecting piece of work.

Amanda is in cinemas Friday, January 3rd.

South Terminal (Terminal Sud)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

A doctor (Ramzy Bedia) in an unnamed French-speaking Mediterranean country finds himself caught in the grip of endless violence in Terminal South, a meandering drama about trying to maintain dignity in a world gone wrong. Despite boasting solid performances, handsome cinematography and moments of sheer viciousness, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s sixth film has little to say and even less to say it with.

The opening sequence quickly shows what kind of country we’re in; a bus trip through the mountains raided by men in army uniforms who take everyone’s most precious belongings. Moments of bloodshed spark out of nowhere, any encounter containing the ability to erupt into a skirmish. When the bus driver reports the theft to a local newspaper, he cannot identify the men, unsure if they’re actually the army or simply bandits dressed up in their uniform. The chief editor agrees that it’s important, and promises to publish the story the next day. But when he goes to the office the next morning, a car pulls up and he is shot dead.

The shocking death of the doctor’s is treated as a watershed moment here, the traditional Islamic funeral given ten plus minutes to really soak in his tragic fate. Yet this is a guy we have only met a couple of times; making it difficult to really care that he’s gone. Making scenes like this longer than they need to be often achieves the opposite effect of what a filmmaker intended; causing me to lose interest just when my emotional investment should be growing.

Terminal South

Meanwhile, the doctor’s fate is a miserable one, caught up in a Kafkesque world where the line between police, terrorists and militia men has collapsed. There are no real good guys here, no epic signs of resistance, just ordinary men and women trying to do their best. Even he is sent death threats and told to stop his work, treating patients whose ailments have been exacerbated by living in such a society. But the doctor’s story randomly piles on the misery, giving Bedia little to work with dramatically. The predominately comic actor pulls in a decent shift here, yet he cannot overcome a fundamentally weak screenplay without any true central conflict to speak of.

There is a difference between being ambiguous and being vague. While ambiguity invites the viewer to search for different meanings, vagueness can often leave us scratching our heads. We never even find out where the film is set. Are we in the south of France or are we in North Africa? I assume this is the point, to display how any country has the capacity to steadily disintegrate. Yet without any real context, I found it hard to find a foothold in the story, its tale completely washing over me like the Mediterranean Sea.

A French Release date has been set for 13 November. Whether the film is released anywhere else remains to be seen.

Notre Dame

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

The old cliché that no publicity is bad publicity certainly rings true with Notre Dame, the latest breezy comedy from French auteur Valérie Donzelli. She could’ve had no idea while making the film that ancient church’s roof would set ablaze on April 15, making her latest work something of an accidental bittersweet lament for the France’s most enduring symbol.

The burning down of the French cathedral was immediately seized upon as a symbol of the deterioration of France; another debilitating sign, along with Islamist terrorist attacks, the rise of far-right nationalism, the Church sex abuse scandals and the Gillet Jeunes protests, that this is a country slowly losing its way. And Notre Dame eerily captures this downbeat spirit, displaying a capital city and country uncertain of itself, paranoid and on edge. The French Open has been inexplicably cancelled, Lake Annecy has dried up, people randomly slap each other in metro stations, refugees sleep on the streets, and Paris is endlessly drenched by torrential rain. To rally spirits once again, the mayor calls for a “Grand competition for the Grand dame”, putting out an open call for a new esplanade design.

Our unlikely hero Maud Crayon (Valérie Donzelli herself) — built in the mode of Woody Allen’s early comic nebbishes — may be an architect but has little intention of entering the contest herself. She’s too busy paying off her debts, battling with her boss, trying to get her kids to school and finally kicking her ex-husband (although they haven’t signed the divorce papers) out of her flat. Then in a moment of sheer, unexplained magic, her design for a playground mysteriously floats out of her flat window all the way to the mayor’s office. The bold design is picked as a new way forward for the city and she’s instantly put in charge of the most important project in all of France.

Notre Dame

Given that the Notre-Dame itself took one hundred years to build, this premise would be enough conflict for an entire TV series, let alone a zippy ninety minute movie. But Maud’s travails don’t stop there. Firstly her ex-boyfriend (Pierre Deladonchamps) comes back as the journalist covering her story, secondly she finds out she’s pregnant, and thirdly she must contend with her ex-husband trying to win her back. Underscoring this theme, her daughter acutely asks her: “Why do women have to do everything?” To make matters worse, it turns out her design looks kinda like a phallus (the jokes aren’t subtle here), sparking outrage across the nation, and calls for construction to be indefinitely postponed.

France has a fine tradition of protesting its finest symbols. The construction of the Eiffel Tower was once petitioned against by writers as influential as Maupassant and Dumas. Likewise Mitterand’s Grands Projets was looked upon at the time as a sign of grandiosity. Yet now it would be hard to imagine the Paris skyline without the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre without its pyramid. The sheer absurdity of Crayon’s design is the point: showing through satire how even the most outlandish designs should be encouraged due to the way they can help establish and reinforce a city’s unique identity.

Yet if anyone is expecting a serious inquiry into the nature of architecture, they will be sorely displeased. Donzelli’s work is gleefully self-centred, neurotic and strange, casting herself in goofy, off-the-wall tales that make Amelie’s escapades look normal and well adjusted. Notre Dame has a childlike yet bawdy spirit, throwing in the entire kitchen sink, including musical interludes, silent movie homages, quick verbal barbs and politically incorrect sex jokes. Thankfully the movie, flawed as it may be, is inherently enjoyable, Donzelli’s bizarro charm proving infectious and her style strong enough to overcome any imperfections.

At the end of the day, its not really about the Notre-Dame at all, but a woman coming to terms with the chaos of her life, the power of great responsibility, and figuring out what’s actually important. It’s just ironic that Valérie Donzelli will be suddenly thrown into the spotlight due to an event completely out of her control. Talk about life imitating art!

International Sales are handled by Playtime. The film is scheduled for release in France only so far, on 18 December 2019.