Tag: French

Astrakan

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

Astrakan — or, as I would call it, The 400 Woes — had me asking lots of interesting questions: where does the line between a chronicle end and a narrative start; how do diverse individual scenes actually accumulate into a final picture; and what is the line between representing something awful and genuinely exploiting the people in the story? Simply put, it had me asking lots of questions as I was never invested in the story, which ranges from slow to frustrating to ultimately sickening. There’s a lot of craft there, but the final result is really all over the place.

A thoroughly depressing picture that eschews genuine sensitivity in favour of a series of seriously unfortunate events, Astrakan is the kind of coming-of-age story that strains painfully for profundity but has such an over-abundance of ideas, images and things it wants to say, its forced pathos left me both bemused and repulsed.

It concerns a young boy named Samuel (Mirko Giannini), a foster child living with his adopted family in rural France. Ostensibly seen as a problem child, he is berated for his silly games and the fact he cannot seem to defecate naturally, often soiling his pants. That’s the first of many uncomfortable details that Astrakan — seemingly named after a type of lamb wool as opposed to the Southern region of Russia — revels in, subjecting Samuel to more pain and torture than any French person since Joan of Arc.

He meets a girl. She shows him porn. He goes to the cinema. He gets beaten up by guys we have never seen before. He goes skiing. He watches his teacher have sex with an Olympic skier. He throws up. He has more issues with going to the toilet. He is misunderstood and beaten with a belt while thrown between families and people he really shouldn’t be trusted with. The scenes are often randomly strung together, revealing little narrative cohesion while episodically stale and un-compelling.

He’s both your average 12-year-old and an enigma, revealing nothing, a poor wretch that we watch try and find something to enjoy in his poor life. A real child actor has been put in this position to depict these actions. It made me wonder whether putting a child in such scenes — however sensitively they might’ve been handled — is ever worth it. Certainly not when the finished product feels so irredeemable.

David Depesseville, working with cinematographer Simon Beaufils, is a fine image-maker; shooting on film, his depiction of rustic, untamed France brings to mind Maurice Pialat, often contrasting Samuel against an epic landscape with little hint of regular civilisation. We get the sense this is a land with its own rules, filled with hard people, living difficult lives. And his sense of observation is both keen — from a note being passed from child to child from a birds-eye-view to close-ups of bread being cut to small items being smartly hidden — and over-laboured, spinning into the surreal through unwittingly absurd cutting.

Things then really spin into left-field with the final reveal, a fantasia shot to the sounds of Bach’s St Mathews Passion, calling to mind everything from the mass murders of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) to Andrei Tarkovsky’s poeticism to Terence Malick’s mysticism. It’s a neat calling card from the second-time director: a statement that he can also do this as opposed to merely layering on naturalist misery-porn. But once it reveals that this already sad story has an even deeper sadness behind it, like the whole thing is one sad onion with bottomlessly sad layers, this technical ability is ultimately wasted in the service of something absolutely no one needs to see. Miserable.

Astrakan has just premiered at the 75th Locarno Film Festival.

Around the Sun

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

Ever wonder if things may have turned out differently? Would a pithy remark with that boy or girl at the bar have changed anything? This is the power of first impressions, and it is a central notion of Around the Sun.

The film’s lean 89 minutes follows Maggie (Cara Theobold), an estate agent, and Bernard (Gethin Anthony), a film scout, as they walk and talk in a decrepit French chateau. They’re strangers to each other, yet they waste no time with small talk. Their wandering conversations mention everything from ex-partners to existential struggles, but their main topic is Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, a French author who penned Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds while a resident at the chateau.

As Maggie explains the book’s plot – which is a series of celestial conversations between a philosopher and an aristocratic woman – it becomes clear that life is imitating art. Indeed, Maggie and Bernard’s dynamic is reminiscent of Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995), and this conceit has a share of strengths and weaknesses.

The immediate problem lies with the performances; Theobold and Anthony’s dynamic just feels unnatural and scripted, especially when one or the other squirms to point out they meant no offence. However, the quality is redressed as the multiversal narrative unfolds, which splits and reimagines the story several times, presenting the characters with different traits and energies. This redrawing of Maggie and Bernard sees the actors’ performances come into their own, bolstering our hopes for their romance.

After all, these are characters of resonant, empathetic detail. They’re both wanderers without a calling: Maggie is far too learned for her job, while Bernard dropped law school to pursue a career with the meretricious hope of travel, “you can never just be in a place, you’ve always got to pay attention”. When their dynamic is at its strongest, we have a pair of urbane yet rudderless souls, and whether they will finally elope depends on the audience’s careful viewing of this detailed, erudite romantic drama.

Around the Sun is on VoD on Tuesday, August 4th.

Sad Song (Chanson Triste)

Posted on by victorfraga

The artist must look in many places in order to find their muse. For Fonnard, capturing the untamed spirit of the wandering refugee brought wasn’t a mere altruistic gesture. Captured under the slanted camera angles, Fonnard cuts vegetables with Ahmad, sharing a community of comradeship and love. Exchanging lyrics of a poetic and musical nature, the intertwined art forms form the basis for a concert that might prove Fonnard’s purest work. With Ahmad at her side, Fonnard has a new muse, a new mirror and, most importantly, a dear friend.

This is one of the more compelling documentaries of the year, detailing the companionship that close quarters can both bring and inhibit. For a generation of viewers versed in Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, this might not come across as something entirely original, but Narboni’s piece feels genuinely organic, instead of tediously automated.

Barely off camera for a moment, Fonnard speaks to Ahmad with fervent respect, understanding the values that intertwining cultures can bring. Eager to remind audiences that Muslims are not terrorists, Fonnard changes her material to incorporate Mohammedan symbolism. When her concerned pianist questions her use of Arabic in song, she replies “Allahu Akbar only means “God Is Great” after all”.

Then there’s Ahmad, staring magnetically towards the ceiling as she practices her repertoire. Sandy-eyed, he looks wordlessly through her recitals, his eyes ache with the ghosts he unwittingly admits to the camera. Conversing with his new surrogate mother, Ahmad details a harrowing phone call he shared with his biological mother. You can watch the horrors in his body language, that he may not be the infallible tout we opened our eyes on. It’s all there in the undiluted agony, turning himself into his arm to tear up, Fonnard motionless in her incomprehension of the world’s cruelty.

Together, they create a poetry more potent, more real than anything Fonnard could sing in the classical metier. Together, in body and voice, they’ve achieved an art piece.

You can watch Sad Song online and for free throughout the month of December with ArteKino – just click here for more information!

Fittingly, the film comes out only a year after Sinead O’Connor’s (now Shuhada’ Sadaqat) conversion to Islam. Traditionally a Judeo-Christian continent, Europe has shown a growing interest in Islamic Traditions in recent years.

Zombi Child

Posted on by victorfraga

Melissa (Wislanda Louimat) left Haiti at the age of just seven, after losing both of her parents in the devastating 2010 earthquake. She was brought up by her doting and “cool” aunt (Katiana Milfort), who also happens to be a mambo (a type of voodoo sorcerer). Melissa gets accepted into a highly prestigious girls’ school founded by Napoleon because her late mother was in the Legion Honour thanks to her resistance of the Duvalier regime. She befriends four white girls.

At first, the young women are hesitant to welcome Melissa into their clique, an unofficial literary sorority. They challenge the Haitian teen to tell them something peculiar and unique about herself in order to join their close-knit group. She is only entitled to one go, and if the girls are left unimpressed they will simply shun her. That’s when Melissa begins to open up about her family secrets and the voodoo traditions of her native Haiti. One of girls remains a little sceptical, while the more open-minded Fanny (Louise Labèque) becomes almost immediately enthralled by the fantastical stories.

Melissa’s grandfather Clairvius Narcisse (Mackenson Bijou) “half-died” in 1962. Greedy farmers brought him back to life by using a white powder in order to have him work as a slave in their plantations. Clairvius was in a “zombi” state, unable to talk and to interact with others. Until one day he ate salt and broke the evil spell, returning to full life (in non-zombi condition). He reclaimed his family and led a normal existence until he died “again” in 1994 (this time for good). The story of Clairvius is told in non-chronological fragments dispersed throughout the film. Clairvius was a real person, and his zombi saga had been previously fictionalised in Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988).

Fifty-one-year-old French helmer Bertrand Bonello is no stranger to fiery political and social statements, with the controversial Nocturama (about disillusioned youths and terrorism; 2016) and The Pornographer (about a filmmaker who found artistic liberation in erotic movies, 2001) already under his belt. This time he opted to contrast the vivid and fiery religious traditions of Haiti against the rigid and stern literary tradition of his home country. Numerous French writers are mentioned in the boarding school, and the girls are very studious themselves. Their highly regimented existence in an self-contained institution couldn’t be more different to unfettered life of Haitians. Bonello is very respectful of both European literature and Haitian voodoo.

Bonello and his DOP Yves Cape excel in visual wizardry. The voodoo rituals are hypnotic and extravagant, bursting with colour and energy. Melissa, however, isn’t the real star of the film. She serves mostly as a narrator, while her grandfather and aunt embody (quite literally) the exotic traditions. Both Milfort and Bijou are nothing short of extraordinary. Labeque (who plays curious Fanny) also has a little suprise in store.

Zombi Child, however, is not a film without flaws. The story takes a little to long to build momentum, and the first half of this 117-minute movie isn’t as riveting as the second one. The ending is visually spectacular, but also a little clumsy, with too many narrative device suddenly becoming tangled up. Still, very much worth sticking until the very last minute.

Zombi Child shows at the BFI London Film Festival in October. It’s available on Mubi from October 17th and November 16th.

Adolescents (Adolescentes)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Charting the lives of two girls from thirteen to eighteen, Adolescentes is an immersive documentary depicting the vicissitudes of youth. Five years in the making, filmed twenty-four days a year and composed from 500 hours of rushes, it has the flow of a fine naturalist drama, standing nicely alongside Young Solitude (Claire Simon, 2018) and Belinda (Marie Dumora, 2017) as yet another brilliant French documentary about the complexity of growing older.

On first glance Emma and Anaïs seem like very different girls. Emma comes from an affluent background, loves to sing songs from musicals and appears very driven, while Anais is from a poorer background, gets distracted easily and finds it hard to concentrate in class. Right from the start, we learn that education is the main priority, both girls told by their teachers that the way they act in school could easily shape their whole life.

In a traditional feature, the differences between the two girls and their respective outcomes would be more pronounced, but director Sébastian Lifshitz has something much subtler in mind. In real life people cannot be put into boxes, meaning that A rarely leads to B or even C. In keeping with this thesis, little is played for dramatic effect, purposefully stopping the viewer from ever making concrete predictions about these girl’s fates. Omission is constantly used, significant events often only seen before and after and huge swathes of time often passing within the cut of a frame; the audience only learning afterwards that the summer has finished or the school is finally over.

Adolescentes

Artificially skipping the so-called most essential moments of each girl’s life makes the film a fascinating, unpredictable watch, yet this mix of objectivity and narrative slipperiness can make it feel like something of an academic exercise. This is especially true when philosophy and literature classes — whether it’s the concept of Skepticism or the story of Emma Bovary — act as a kind of Greek chorus on the action, underscoring its major themes in a way that can feel quite forced. It’s easy to think a lot watching this movie; it’s much harder to feel anything significant.

Things turn more emotive when the personal meets the political, these girls lives often brutally interrupted by key moments in recent French history, from the Charlie Hebdo and Paris attacks to the election of Emmanuel Macron. While these moments could easily have come off as glib, Lifshitz seems to find more to say than André Téchiné in the recent, misguided Farewell to The Night (2019) about the destabilising effects of terrorism upon a nation; a moment of unreality that puts the grand and noble project of education under existential threat. One moment in particular, when Anaïs seems to have changed her political persuasion in the blink of an eye, confronts simplistic political diagnoses head on, showing how the French character is far more complicated than anyone could imagine.

What’s highly notable is the sheer amount of conversation; ranging from the banal (getting the right grades to move up in school) to the profound (how life seems to imperceptibly change without you even knowing it). Whether it’s chatting with each other, arguing with their parents, or listening to the words of their teachers, people talk and talk and talk, never at a loss for things to say. In fact they are so composed and at times so eloquent, one could be fooled into thinking they are watching a scripted drama. Complemented by intuitive editing, the film finds a way to accrue these moments into something both profound and mystifying: asking what defines a person while boldly skipping any definitive answers. The question it seems, is to keep asking.

Adolescents showed at the Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival. Out on Curzon Home Cinema and MyFrenchFilmFestival from Friday, January 15th. On Mubi on Saturday, July 9th

The Shock of the Future (Le Choc du Futur)

Posted on by victorfraga

Although F.Murray Abraham who won the Oscar, it was Tom Hulce’s arc which led Milos Forman’s astonishing Amadeus (1984) through the cascading chordal changes which haunted Mozart as he wrote his librettos. Staggeringly situated in solemn sincerity, Forman explored the prowess classical opera held and holds on its listeners. Marc Collin, on the other hand, explores the power of electronic music of the 1970s, an esoteric genre as captivating as Mozart’s, imposing an impressive piece, much of it triumphantly directed.

Jodorwsky’s Ana plays the captivated fan, eagerly awaking during the film’s opening to a cigarette and Giorgo Moroder. Sinewy, sensual, sanguine, sagacious, Ana pirouettes periodically from the bathed bed to the multi composed keyboard from where she writes in one of the film’s more outstanding set pieces. This niche genre of avant pop music calls Ana in all its undiluted qualities, while others perceive its improvised mechanics as an affront. Captivated by the raw rigidity, Ana wastes hours reconnecting her thoughts to that of the music, as deadlines and past-times pass her by.

Despondent, her manager informs her that he’s called ten times to no reply, oblivious to the obvious charm this style of music holds. The apartment scenes are gorgeously decorated, spacious halls lit by exterior reflections cascading the outer world from the inner, rugs ravished under the barefooted composer. Working through the sound systems of a device she wishes to buy, Ana finds as much pleasure from the dropped needle as Trainspotting’s (Danny Boyle, 1996) Renton takes from the sharpened device.

It’s a finely accomplished piece of filmcraft, bathetic beats bearing becomingly between the various edits. One telling scene shows Ana writing with another female artist, writing their perspective truths in an industry both phallocentric and underplayed. Between them, the two women embody the steamiest sections seventies youth culture shows in all of its most glorious of detail.

And yet the film lacks the panache posited on personal conversation. At times it comes across a little robotic in delivery, just like the machines portrayed. On the other hand, the soundtrack is reliably stellar!

The Shock of the Future is in cinemas on Friday, September 13th.

The House By The Sea (La Villa)

Posted on by victorfraga

Relying heavily on conversations played out against the beauty of the Southern French coast, The House by the Sea functions as an intimate persona drama, while also setting us up to ponder larger questions about the human spirit. A quiet character piece that successfully relies almost entirely on the strength of the screenplay and Guédiguian’s usual coterie of experienced actors.

Maurice (Fred Ulysse) has a stroke while looking at the Mediterranean, prompting his three children to visit him and to agree on how his estate will be divided. They are Angèle (Ariane Ascaride), a jaded actress who cannot retain her former glory, Armand (Gérard Meylan), a cook in Paris, and Joseph (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), a disillusioned leftist professor. Joseph also brings along, by his own words, his “far too young fiancée” Bérangère (Anaïs Demoustier). Whether by tragedy or by personal failing, the lives of these characters are filled with disappointment. Will returning home heal these old wounds or make them even worse?

Using the death of a patriarch as a means to allow children to reevaluate the course of their lives into action is a common trope, especially in American indie cinema, yet Guédiguian finds a fresh angle by focusing on character first and situation second. All three children are in their 60s – too tired for bitter recriminations yet still relentlessly ironing out issues that have plagued them throughout their entire lives. Their love lives are a mess, yet they cannot help but to dive into questionable situations as a means to feel something new again.

Additionally, the Southern France they know has changed, as displayed by the army knocking on their doors asking them to keep an eye out for refugees. Can their father’s legacy – displayed by the once bustling restaurant he owned and the time he played Father Christmas and distributed presents to all the locals – still be upheld or is it too late for this fading coastal town?

Robert Guédiguian likes to cast the same actors over and over in his films, making the relationship between these characters feel naturalistic. One flashback to a more carefree past is extremely effective, as it simply recycles a clip from his own film Ki lo Sa? (1985) featuring the exact same actors over 30 years younger. This gives the film a stirring metafictional quality, as if Guédiguian himself is looking back over his own cinematic output and asking what good has it done.

Answers come via a feel-good ending. This final act conclusion –  which I will not ruin here – is the kind of thing that would occur around 25 minutes into regular films, yet is used here to finally prompt our previously lethargic characters into action. While a predictable plot development, it is handled with the kind of sensitivity that gives the film a wider, global resonance. After all, sometimes it takes something exterior to put one’s own life into proper perspective.

Allowing this abrupt turn to occur within what was previously a Rohmer-esque rumination on love and life, gives the film a deeper, more urgent meaning, turning a specific family drama into a universal call to action. It may not be handled with much subtlety, yet in today’s times, subtlety can only get you so far. This family knows that fact better than anyone.

The House By The Sea is out in selected cinemas in the UK from Friday, January 11th.

An Impossible Love (Un Amour Impossible)

Posted on by victorfraga

What starts off as an ordinary type romance turns into a tale of pronounced and propelled feminine empowerment. Two lovers share each other with the niceties of bedroom talk. However beautiful the encounter shared between the pair, it is Rachel (Virginie Efira) who must carry the bearings of parenthood on her own. Undeterred by their pregnancy, the more abstruse Philippe returns to his place in the world of bourgeois aristocracy.

Denying her time or their child his name, Philippe would prefer to remember his romance with office worker Rachel as a liaison. Class and societal expectations are common in many European films, but the combination of Corsini’s eye, Efira’s performance and Christine Angot’s base plot (she wrote the eponymous best-selling novel on which the film is based) turns this into an astute and auspicious tale of domestic suffering. At 129 minutes, these plot points become sedating by the end, but the film boasts a very impressive lead indeed.

Even without the substandard selection of make-up, Efira walks from blithe, petite girlfriend to domestic parent convincingly. She has a natural charm to her, likeable across all three of the actors who play her daughter Chantal. Jehnny Beth is the most recognisable face among the cast members playing her adult daughter (the actress is best known for singing with Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz) . Neils Schinder is debonair, charismatic and garrulous in the role of Philippe, fitting in his disapproval of her undistinguished class.

The chauvinistic undertones becomes apparent when Philippe decides not to marry a woman he has professed his love. Gone from his daughter’s sight for years, only through road trip and existential conversations does he re-gain his daughter’s trust. Rachel stands by Chantal both as a mother and friend. Despite her efforts, she is repeatedly informed that two people do not a family make. The latter half of the film is the more interesting half, as we see the consequences behind the passionate warmth a 20-something year old couple enjoy. Rachel loves Philippe unreservedly, despite his shabby treatment of her.

The film’s story belongs to Efira and she is remarkable here. It is Efira who will likely transcend the barriers from national to international delight on the strength of her acting. The postulated gaze she brings when she realises Philippe is leaving her is a particularly potent moment. Efira delivers an incredibly dignified performance, solemn in her role as mother, hurt in her role as a lover, feeling for the many women stuck in similar situation across the globe.

An Impossible Love is in cinemas across the UK from Friday, January 4th. On VoD Friday, February 1st.

The Workshop (L’atelier)

Posted on by victorfraga

Depicting a group of teens who are forced via an integration course to learn the basics of crime novel writing, The Workshop is a slow burn work of metafiction that doubles up as a study in white anxiety. It could also be described as a “sunshine noir” that wears its themes on its sleeve, processing its central ideas through the literal prism of a writer’s workshop. While entertaining for its intellectualism, it cannot maintain its menacing tone, leading to an unsatisfying conclusion.

The film is set in La Ciotat, a town near Marseille that was once famous for its shipping industry. After the docks closed down, the town became divided between the poor residents just trying to get by and the rich people visiting on their yachts. Visiting novelist Olivia Dejazet (Marina Foïs) teaches the local teenagers the building blocks of novel writing in order to help them to enter the world of work. During her workshops, she is struck by one teenager, the obnoxious Antoine (Matthieu Lucci), who bristles against his classmates and seems to be harbouring white nationalistic ideals.

There’s little sense that he has an interior life beyond just a general feeling of alienation. We often see him at home, either playing video games or watching YouTube videos of white nationalists ranting about protecting “indigenous” French culture. He freaks out the rest of the class by reciting a passage depicting a mass murderer mowing down a group of yacht owners. We are told by Olivia, who notes the technical skill of Antoine’s passage, that depicting racist acts in a novel is not the same as endorsement, a view the film evidently holds. It wants to examine a racist character without making explicit judgements.

It’s a common trope to use the classroom as a means to explore ideals of nationhood and solidarity. Director Laurent Cantet did it already himself with the Palme d’Or winner The Class (2008). His ear for the way teenagers speak and express themselves – balancing eloquence and insight with profanity and bemusement – is spot on. Group conversations run on longer than one would expect, the teenage actors playing themselves with ease. It’s only a shame that Antoine is often far less interesting than his counterparts. If Cantet’s aim was to show just how dull racism can be, he succeeded, but it doesn’t exactly make for great entertainment. It can be done correctly, such as with the German drama The Wave (Dennis Gansel, 2008), but the command of tone is too loose, aiming for a conversational vibe instead of a truly piercing exploration.

Antoine doesn’t see his preoccupations as political and cannot understand why others are disturbed by his fantasies of violence. As a white male, he doesn’t have to. His privilege and anxiety means that everything can be about him. Antoine refuses to acknowledge the complexity of post-industrial France.

Antoine’s Arab classmate Malika (Warda Rammach) wants the book to be set in the past, as her Tunisian grandfather helped unionise and strike for better wages on the docks. It’s a great point of pride for her family, who once had honest jobs right on their doorstop. But the solidarity of the worker against capitalist greed is lost on Antoine, who would rather see things in terms of nationhood, racial purity and general white anxiety. Still, Olivia takes an interest in the young man, leading to a classic meeting of the minds; teacherly concern versus blind hatred.

The way it initially develops is reminiscent of the thrillers of Claude Chabrol, in which homicidal tendencies often lurked behind a thin veneer of respectability. But where Chabrol’s films were still thrillers in the end, Laurent Cantet’s subverts the standard conventions of the ‘cosy’ thriller for a more literary exploration of the state of the nation. While there is some interest in whether Antoine’s posturing will turn into legitimate violence – a bit like this year’s Burning (Lee Chang-dong) – he is too un-engaging a character to make his threats seem, well, threatening.

So, having set up an intriguing sense of time and place, with a great setting and a neat metafictional bent, Cantet’s film falters in its final execution, opting for a lethargic tone just when it should be ramping up the tension. Perhaps he should give it to those teens – they’ll know what to do with it. Just keep the story away from Antoine.

The Workshop is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, November 16th.

School’s Out (L’Heure De La Sortie)

Posted on by victorfraga

A teacher in a French classroom stands by the window, watching his students as they work. We share his gaze at the back of their necks, sweaty as the sun sits high in the sky. After a moment of careful consideration, he opens the window wide and jumps out. The children’s screams bounce around the audience’s mind throughout School’s Out, filmmaker Sébastien Marnier’s sophomore feature.

Following his 2016 debut, Irréprochable, Marnier remains concerned by obsessive paranoia born from a generational misunderstanding and shifting value systems in French society. Laurent Lafitte, who you probably haven’t forgotten as the neighbour in Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016), plays Pierre, brought in as a substitute teacher for this class of advanced students, who brag about being a year ahead in their studies and exert their special status over Pierre, who wants to teach them how to behave like normal students. But what initially seems like a Mr Chips rehash soon takes on darker shades. Lafitte has this smug, naturally sinister presence. In different circumstances, you could imagine his character spending his nights going deep on Joe Rogan videos. Instead, he’s obsessing over his students, who he has become convinced have more involvement in these occurrences than the school faculty seem to believe.

The film is good at looking. We share Pierre’s gaze, as he crushes on his best friend, on another teacher, and as he becomes ever more curious about his students. Pierre isn’t entirely out of the closet, which these savant children clock on to and use to imply that his interest in them has a lustful edge. And, perhaps it does. We become implicated in that look the more depraved and self-destructive it becomes. It reminded me of Alain Guiraudie’s brilliant thriller Stranger by the Lake (2013), full of slow pans and Chabrolian dread. School’s Out wraps you so tightly into its protagonist’s perspective that his reality becomes indistinguishable from the audience’s.

An ominous hum overcomes the soundtrack, as the camera pans from the sky down to take in shot after shot of vast fields, you get the impression that this is one of the first movies to bear the influence of Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008), and I mean that as a compliment. That stark sound design intrudes onto the characters’ psychology, slipping into a score reminiscent of Carpenter or Goblin. When a rhythmic alarm blares in the classroom, the students hide against a wall, clearly tired of the regular terrorism drills. “This is the third one this term,” a student blankly tells Pierre. With children beginning to take a stand against these practices, these scenes take on a post-Parkland context that isn’t pursued as the entire end of the film, but rather, is one element of a piece that observes a post-millennial revolution from the outside.

When one of the children is bullied, kids in the background quietly film on their phones. Only in French movies do you see buffed up school teachers showing for work in a tight black tee, or getting into a fistfight with a student on the playground, or huffing fags by the basketball court. But this lack of boundaries is precisely what makes the film’s moral compass so difficult and compelling to follow. The teachers are a complacent clique, oblivious to the harm they cause each other.

Marnier also clashes a use of video camera footage of environmental disasters with the plush digital photography of the main narrative, to question our immersion into the story space. As Dimitri, one of the student ringleaders says, the video camera gets at something more real or authentic, seeing the world as it really is. When this group of Randian teenagers stare into the quarry where they meet to practice improving their pain threshold, I couldn’t help but think of the site as like Galt’s Gulch, the objectivist paradise at the heart of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged.

Their self-isolation asks questions about environmentalism as egotism. While it’s hard to argue that fear for our future is the same as objectivist self-preservation, Marnier might be arguing that wokeness as superiority impinges messaging from reaching the layman, as we see in that bullying scene. While Marnier toys with the children’s malevolence, he withholds their perspective, keeping their motives in the shadows for long enough to constantly suggest Machiavellian intent. But it’s a distraction.

Marnier has presented a slight of hand. The final scene, one of abject terror shot in the lush surroundings of a local lake, presents the relief of our paranoia proved right. The only display of emotion is in that final scene: a reality, a reckoning. Lafitte is framed alongside the children; they are the same now. Its something like an ending of submission, an inevitable nightmare that brings the whole film’s mess of images and messages into sharp focus. What a film for right now.

School’s Out shows at the 62nd BFI London Film Festival, taking pl;ace between October 10th and 21st.

One Wild Moment (Un Moment d’Égarement)

Posted on by victorfraga

It all starts like a conventional French comedy. Laurent (Vincent Cassel) and Antoine (François Cluzet) are old friends going on holiday with their daughters, Louna (Lola Le Lann) and Marie (Alice Isaaz). The famous Charles Trenet song La Mer plays over the soundtrack as they drive to a sun-dappled country-house in Corsica. The teenage girls complain about the lack of mobile reception while the men – one divorced, one seemingly soon to be – moan about their love lives. You might think all four characters are about to find love on the beautiful Mediterranean island, all the while offering up bons mots about the complications of sexual desire.

But initial appearances can be deceiving, as director Jean-François Richet has something far deeper on his mind. A remake of the 1977 film with the same title, One Wild Moment exploits the limits of male desire, offering up a queasy moral play with no easy answers. As the title suggests, the film is structured around one key incident; the seduction of Laurent by Louna by the beach during a party. She may be the one who has started it, but she is only 17 and his best friend’s daughter, making Laurent’s willingness to go along with it all that more problematic.

There’s a lot of ways that this material can go wrong, either leaning too hard on poor-taste comedy or feeling too much like soft-core porn. While the film does very occasionally lean a little too much in the latter direction, it still shows the consequences that such an awful decision can bring. All is held together by a nuanced performance by Vincent Cassel, who plays a decent man who makes one extraordinarily bad mistake and has to get out of the situation alive. While Louna is somewhat underwritten, Lola Le Lann does her best to draw her character out with a lot of youthful energy. The scenes between the two of them are the best in the movie, the couple dangerously navigating each other’s fears in an awkward yet effective way.

A sense of foreboding is created by the boars that ravage Antoine’s garden, trampling on the grave of his forefathers, all buried in the same garden. Antoine, suffering from being estranged from his wife, is taking out his rage on the animals, suggesting that if he were to find out, there’d be hell to pay. This laces every moment in delicious dramatic irony, knowing that the facade of happy vacationers could fall apart at any moment. Yet, the film could’ve done more in using the island itself to represent more primal emotions (like Laura Bispuri’s Daughter of Mine did with neighbouring Sardinia earlier this year), thus coalescing into a suitably catastrophic conclusion. While the house and the neighbouring mountains and coastline are suitably picturesque, the film doesn’t allow the scenery to speak for itself, relying more on dialogue to carry its central moral dilemma.

Ultimately unsure whether its a feel-bad comedy, devastating drama, or straight-up Mediterranean noir, the movie flows gently between genres without ever truly involving us up in its story. Although enjoyable from moment to moment, especially in any scene involving Vincent Cassel alternating between ‘good guy’ dad, friend and even lover, its final power is lost by the underwhelming conclusion, which seems to sweep all its contradictions together and dismiss them with a shrug. It feels like a betrayal of its previously foreboding sense of danger, complicated depictions of power and lust, and of Cassel’s fascinating central performance. Nonetheless, it remains a fascinating portrait of men who think that their indulgences can occur without any repercussions, and how the actual reality can be so different. For one thing, it’ll make you think twice about going on holiday with family friends again.

Watch One Wild Moment right here with DMovies and Eyelet: