Unfaithful

In 2009, writer-director Claude Peres pushed the envelope of gay movies beyond most movie-goers' tolerance level. The Frenchman's first feature, Unfaithful (Infideles), showed his night of sex with Marcel Schlutt, a German model, escort and professional gay porn actor.

Peres had a storyboard on the wall of the apartment in which they met, but there was no film crew. Peres was his own cameraman, editing the footage caught by fixed cameras (in positions fixed between scenes) and mobile cameras (hand-held by him and Schlutt). He recording what they said to each other (in English) and the ambient sounds of the apartment building.

Peres's first film, a short made in 2006, showed a man viewing photos of a kiss and recalling homosexual love (La memoire vive). His feature's in-your-face directness was not a complete novelty in France, as lesbian director Emilie Jouvet had already filmed live action with a similar intellectual g-string of sexual discussions added to the hard core. Most of that is hidden from view, though, in darkness, inadequate lighting of out of the fixed camera's position.

The concept had value, and it would have been interesting to experience an honest exchange of views and sexual activities by a pair of strangers. It need not have been at the self-consciously and overly intellectual level of My Dinner with Andre, but it did need two people with an ability to communicate in words and body languages. However, a coy Frenchman and blase German cannot be expected to spark verbal wonders in the English language when neither of them are fluent in it. Peres adds voice-over comments without adding to the overall impact or meaning. This film is "so not about sex", he comments, but fails to prove it.

As the DVD extras show, neither of the men is bursting with extrovert intelligence. They are nice young Europeans with good bodies, and their movie merely proves a basic fact of sexual life: that horny men are faithful to nothing but their penile urges. They are polite, considerate, use condoms, smoke joints and have breakfast; they don't teach their audience enough about male sex and bonding, or the relationship between a director and an actor, in terms of reality or symbolism.

Choses secretes

Choses secretes (Secret Things) was a 2002 "New French Extremity" movie, another example of French auteurs' self-conscious effort to push their envelopes without crossing the line into inanity. That's difficult creative juggling, which was beyond the skills of writer-director Jean-Claude Brisseau (then almost 60).

A bisexual nightclub nude dancer opens the movie with a ponderously-staged full-frontal display that captivates a new bartendress. Cue a very long teasing tete-a-tete (one full of giggles, the other of frowns) before they get round to mutual passion. Entering a state of happy flatmatedness, they get extra kicks from wandering through Paris with nothing under their raincoats.

They organise their lives and future by both working for the same corporation. Its middle-aged human relations chief is ripe for seduction, its young maliciously rakish heir-apparent is their prime but dangerous target for marriage and wealth. In the end, they get what they want, after some semi-comic orgiastics, lovers' deceptions, sibling incest and a murder.

In non-French eyes, such soft-porn noir can either be camp or horrifying, but should be fun cinema either way. This effort isn't, and its consolatory award at Cannes 2003 is yet another condemnation of that festival's past directorate.

Demonlover

At some point during the making of Demonlover, released in 2002, writer-director Olivier Assayas apparently underwent a severe mental brainstorm. A movie that had been a bizarrely entertaining account of power play, female feuding and industrial espionage in the international business of hard-core 3-D anime porn movie production and distribution collapsed, chaotically.

Chapters and/or basic plotlines seemed lost or jumbled, characters changed from dominant to passive and vice versa, leading roles died or didn't, and the collage of French, American and Tokyo motifs and moods imploded, as if time- and mind-warped by the Japanese capital's kinetic, frenetic, psychedelic neon and naughtiness.

Initially, the self-proclaimed "technological neo-noir thriller" looks set to be a intriguing case of "New French Extremity". Globalisation, the Internet, pornography and women's rights form the narrative framework, stylishly performed by Charles Berling (mostly in French) and a trio of strong female executives (Connie Nielsen, Chloe Sevigny and Gina Gershon). The production designs, soundtrack, costumes and Japanese anime drawings are all admirable, technically. Cinematically, they add up to a pretentious waste of time.

Two in the wave

Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut are the focal points of Two in the Wave, "the story of the friendship that changed cinema forever". In French, the 2010 documentary is entitled Deux de la vague, and only a film buff could have made such a Francocentric assertion about a pair of French directors.

Prolific Cahiers de Cinema writer Antoine de Baecque reviews the early collaboration and later fallout of two of his magazine's famed former staff, their key early movies, and their shared leading actor Jean-Pierre Leaud. The screenplay was written and narrated by de Baecque, directed by Emmanuel Laurent.

It is an unforgivably verbose and messy collage that takes almost half-an-hour to provide basic data about the two directors' family backgrounds and cinematic influences. The script, which seems to have set the aimless tone for the whole documentary, jumps around confusingly and purposelessly.

A dead-pan young French actress flips through clippings albums, a shadowy writer (possible de Baecque) looks at his computer, various faces make comments in archived material, and brief clips from some of the directors' movies pop up, rarely illustrating anything narrated in the commentary. That contains far too many irrelevant dates (of meetings) and passing names (producers, other directors) fails to note Truffaut's early death, and lurches into a very incomplete study of Leaud's work and feelings for the two feuding father-figures in his career.

There are frequent moments when a viewer is shown a factual or cinematic gem worth studying in more detail, only to have it trampled in the rush to the next non-consequentiality. So many promising documentary topics await focused attention: Andre Malraux's dominance in the Gaullist cultural machinery, his dismissal (and forced reinstatement) of the Cinematheque director Henri Langlois, ways in which the Nouvelle Vague presaged the May 1968 riots, the persona of Antoine Doinel (the semi-autobiographical boy in Truffaut's debut 400 Blows and a life-long role for Leaud), Marxism in movie-making, the then and now of other Young Turks in French cinema, the risk-taking independent producers.

Other possible topics could or should have been noted en passant, notably the love-hate complex that drives French auteurs to adore parts of Hollywood (from Welles and Hitchcock to Woody Allen) while despising its commercialism and insincerity. The narcissism of the two leading French directors and others, a form of cinematic nationalism and incest, is noted only briefly but uncritically, as is their snobbish intellectualism. Clearly, the subjects were too close to the hearts and archives of the writer and director for them to do justice to the medium or its pair of message maestros.

Of gods and men

There must be significance in the English translation of the French docudrama, Des hommes et des dieux. Why entitle it, in reverse order, Of Gods and Men? Do the rules of polite English-speaking movie-going society demand that gods must precede mortals? Maybe the rules of France, as an officially secular society, ordain the opposite?

This is not totally idle musing. The reality-based story of seven Trappist monks abducted and killed in 1996 during the Algerian civil war asks why the men chose to stay in their stark Atlas Mountains monastery, beside an impoverished Muslim community. Why stay, dispensing medicine, advice and prayers, rather than escape likely slaughter by encroaching fundamentalists who'd already massacred a Croat highway construction team nearby?

For such a simple and soul-searching narrative, the production had no choice but to proceed as slowly, quietly and thoughtfully as the monk's lives. It won the 2010 Cannes second prize (Grand Prix), losing out to Thailand's tedious cult fantasy (Uncle Boonmee). Clearly, there was no other "serious" competition at Cannes that year for cultists to appreciate, and the French entry may have been viewed by the judges as not tedious enough to deserve first prize.

The film did win three French 2011 Cesar awards: Best Film, supporting actor (veteran Michael Lonsdale, born 1931) and cinematography (Caroline Champetier, who'd worked for Beauvois on his award-winning Le Petit Lieutenant in 2005). Beauvois had won the Cannes Jury Prize in 1995, for Don't Forget You're Going to Die, and collected many awards for his debut feature, Nord (1991), which might explain why the 2011 Cesar voters apparently felt that Roman Polanski deserved the Best Director award more for The Ghost Writer. (I haven't yet seen a reason why that German-funded British political thriller set in Martha's Vineyard was given a slew of Cesar nominations. Surely not just because Polanski was born in Paris?)

Of Gods and Men ends up, after two hours, being half-an-hour too long, mainly because the screenplay runs out of ways to show the human natures and godly hearts of the ageing monks. They elected a scholarly, Koran-reading high-principled monk as their leader (Lambert Wilson) and he's remarkably quick to learn that the other men's views must be considered before he can decide whether or not the Algerian army should be allowed to occupy and protect their monastery. Later on they all consider the options of leaving, or staying with their "flock" of Muslim villagers.

At the end there's an almost credible unanimous decision to stay, and a very incredible "last supper" for which doctor-monk Lonsdale brings out two bottles of red wine and a cassette tape of Swan Lake. Maybe there was such a meal (two of the nine monks present did survive and may have told their tales), and maybe they did all exchange wordless happy smiles and teary eyes, but few directors would dare to spend so long focusing on weepy ageing men's faces.

When they are abducted, along with the medical supplies the rebels need, and led through a snowy forest into the distance and a slow fade, their fate is still not clear, forcing the end credits to begin with the news of their killing. Prior to that there have been politically and religiously correct monologues and conversations to suggest that not all rebels were murderous zealots, that Islam can be loving and inclusive, that monks desire to go to heaven and meet their god, and a few more Religion 101 thoughts.

By comparison, a Thai director's Buddhist-based fantasies must have looked excitingly special to the Cannes jury. In the real world, though, Of Gods and Men was a box-office triumph in France and a very profitable old-fashioned movie, costing 4 million Euros and grossing six times more.

Brief crossing

Not so surprisingly, one of cinema's most successful directors of movies with bold sexual themes is a Frenchwoman, Catherine Breillat. Her 2001 movie, Brief Crossing, having been commissioned for French TV, is a short (80 mins) and bitter-sweet tale of inter-generational lust.

A 30-something French-speaking Englishwoman meets a virginal French youth half her age on an overnight ferry to Portsmouth. She has a cabin with twin beds, which she pushes together by the end of the trip. After having a cafeteria meal, cabaret-bar drinks, and exchange of views (hers, mostly) about males and female relationships, the older woman guides him to her cabin, and ends up smiling lovingly. The teenager thinks he's seduced her, loves her, and is loved.

In the early morning, during disembarkment, she slips away, revealing to the audience, and then the young tearful man, that she's a "happily" married woman with a child.

Such a simple plot requires a convincing pair of actors. Sarah Pratt, presumably of English origin, had appeared in some French TV productions. She's stereotypically aloof, with calculating eyes and cynical dialogue, while the youngster, Colombia-born Gilles Guillian (then 18), looks at her with smoldering shy stares and a growing awareness of her teasing interest. Neither of them needed to do much more than express longings and lusts through their eyes, strip for full-frontal moments, and engage in measured sexual simulations. Neither of them added extra depth, or obtained bigger or better roles in the next decade (though Pratt worked for Breillat again on Une Vieille Maitresse in 2007).

The development of their one-night affair during the sea crossing is written and directed well enough by Breillat but it's too clearly a televisual exercise, a dramatic device to present women's socio-political frustrations in a male-dominated world.

Carlos the jackal

In Hong Kong, Olivier Assayas is best-known as the ex-husband (1998-2001) of Maggie Cheung, who starred in Irma Vep, his biggest success, and remained amicable enough to make Clean with him in 2004. More recently, the Frenchman (son of director Jacques Remy) is better-known in Europe for directing and co-writing a three-part 330-minute TV mini-series, Carlos. Abridged versions (140/160 minutes) also appeared in 2010 in theatres and on DVD, where its anti-heroic title character was more clearly identified as Carlos the Jackal.

After watching the shorter version's first hour, I paused ... the movie's pace, action scenes, cinematography in various countries, multi-lingual script, edge-of-the-seat edginess, and lead actor (Edgar Ramirez) were so good that I wanted to watch the full version and not miss three hours' worth of detail in the extraordinary life of a revolutionary Venezuelan killer who captured OPEC.

The story of "Carlos", originally given Lenin's first name (Ilich) by his father, provides an historical review of the 1970s and 80s by Assayas and lead screenplay writer Dan Franck. Initially a devoted supporter of the Palestinian cause, the violent terrorist became a media notoriety, a star attraction on a global stage. He was also a bon-vivant serial lover, and Assayas boldly includes full frontal nudity to illustrate Carlos's vanity (and European broadmindedness).

Assayas again chose an ideal lead actor: Ramirez is also Venezuelan, he fattens up just as Carlos did in real life, and he dominates the movie with entrancing images of a fiercely driven professional, charming and chilling, calculating and callous, arousing surprising empathy for a mercenary radical.

The abbreviated movie was a cinematic page-turner, and there's a great chance that 330 minutes of my life will be rushed through very happily by a top-grade TV mini-series that is also very good cinema.

Yves St Laurent

If Hollywood makes a YSL bioepic soon, an obvious choice for lead actor would be Crispin Glover, the unforgettably gangly George McFly from the first Back to the Future. The intensely nervous shyly-smiling French couturier resembles McFly in Yves St Laurent: his life and times, one of two 2002 documentaries about him written and directed by then-unknown David Teboul.

The pair of insider stories was clearly produced with the full cooperation of YSL, his business and ex-marital partner Pierre Berge, and some of their fashion house personnel and close friends (such as actress Catherine Deneuve and socialite Betty Catroux). It would not be too cynical to assume that the circumspect 75-minute overview of YSL's life and 60-minute inside glimpses of his fashion house were PR efforts and pre-retirement commemorative archives.

It helps an audience if it can jump to the appropriate conclusions about matters that are only referred to obliquely, including YSL's domineering mother and his electricity-shocked spell in a mental hospital, cocaine addiction (one of "naughty things" YSL admits to impishly), wild nightclubbing in Paris and NY, sexual separation from Berge, and YSL's home in Marrakesh.

Some omitted facts are odd: why no mention of the US millionaire who was a key backer of YSL's solo venture in 1962? Or YSL's successful legal action for wrongful dismissal by the owner of the Dior house? The subsequent takeover (rescue? sell-out? opportunistic deal?) of YSL by the conglomerate owning Gucci also needed attention, as did its use of Gucci's Tom Ford as YSL's creative director.

It's understandable that Berge's conviction and fine for insider trading in 1996, for suspiciously timely sales of YSL stock, is not mentioned, but Berge himself reveals the gossipy news that he had been in a relationship with painter Bernard Buffet for eight years before he was introduced to YSL in 1958. Gratuitous as well as gossipy: Berge doesn't add the news that Buffet married a writer-actress in December the same year and had three children.

A fuller account of YSL's relationship with Berge (from the viewpoint of Berge, who was still alive in 2010 at the age of 79), and the multi-million-euro auction of their joint art collection in 2008, has been told by another French documentary-maker (L'amour fou). It was screened at the 2010 Toronto film festival, won an award there, and should be worth looking out for.

In Teboul's earlier movies, key threads more than justify the severe trimming of YSL's real life and times. Above all else, the designer's sketches and finished clothes illustrate the remarkable four-decades-long career of an artist of both haute couture and pret-a-porter. YSL explains, succinctly and disarmingly honestly, that he was great but that the only true master couturiers were Balenciaga and Chanel. He was approaching their level, he believed, but it is clear from the interview sessions that YSL, haggard and hesitant, slow-thinking and addicted to cigarettes, was close to death at the start of the 21st century. He died of brain cancer in 2008.

One fascinating counterpoint for fashion buffs to watch is Valentino : The Last Emperor. A similar saga of the fashion world's pampered pets, superegos and business-minded lovers, that "official" documentary reveals a central character who was more joyous, self-loving and flamboyant but, I'd guess, much less talented as a leading figure of fashion.

La graine et le mulet

La graine et le mulet, lower-cased as titles are in France, was given an art-housey English-language title, The Secret of the Grain. The French words literally translate as "The grain and the mullet", and the movie's grain is that used to make Couscous, which was the film's alternative and more appetising title for foreign markets.

The documentary-style 2.5-hour saga shows the attempt by a gaunt 60-year-old Arab-French dock labourer and his extended family to create a specialty fish couscous restaurant on a dilapidated boat in the Mediterranean fishing port of Sete.

Its Tunis-born Abdellatif Kechiche writer-director has an excellent track record. He won seven awards (including two at Venice) for his debut movie, La faute a Voltaire (Poetical Refugee), in 2000, and another 15 (including 4 Cesars, for Best French film, direction, writing and most promising actress) for his second feature, L'esquive (Games of Love and Chance) in 2003. Couscous collected another 18 awards, including 4 more Cesars in 2008 (the same ones as in 2003) and 5 Venice 2007 awards, and it's a bewitching reason to try and catch up on the earlier works.

Only five of the complex movie's 15 lead roles had ever acted before, and most of them were non-Arab French. Yet the naturalism of the ensemble multi-ethnic (Arab, Russian and French) French-speaking cast is remarkable. They perform with overwhelming credibility in tight close-ups, individually and in clusters, among hand-held cameras, possibly improvising, compelling audiences to feel they inhabit a documentary. Clearly, Kechiche's skills include the abilities to identify and develop natural acting talents in photogenic people.

The central figure of the old man, Slimane (Habib Boufares), struggles with bureaucrats and bankers in his patient effort to create a legacy for his large family. His divorced wife is a master couscous cook, preparing a weekly feast for the extended family and it is her recipe on which unemployed Slimane builds his dream; his key ally is the strong-willed young daughter of his hotel-keeping lover's previous marriage. Towards the end of the movie, her passionate impromptu belly-dance saves cooking time and rewards diners' patience at the boat-restaurant's inaugural feast, threatened with failure when its cauldron of the special couscous goes astray. It's the role of a lifetime, winning newcomer Hafsia Herzi her Cesar.

In the beginning sequences, Kechiche's screenplay introduces the family while Slimane rides his scooter around the port city, dropping off fish for his ex-wife, children and beloved grandkids, and his lover's hotel. At the end, circumstances bring them together, but there are no easy happy endings in this enchanting family story, and Kechiche leaves his audience to imagine the future fates of Slimane and his family. It's unlikely that such a master movie-maker would indulge us with a Hollywood-style sequel.

Home

Swiss director Ursula Meier chose wisely for her feature debut, Home. Most important, she conceived a simple plot and gathered a team of screenwriters to fill out the tale of a family of five isolated beside an unfinished motorway in rural France. Second, she recruited veteran film actors (Isabelle The Piano Player Huppert and Olivier The Son Gourmet) to portray the parents. Two teenage actresses and a boy completed the household. Crucially, for the good look of her movie, Meier employed the skills of experienced cinematographer Agnes Godard.

What happens, the scenario wondered, to the family when the motorway opens, after ten years of delayed readiness? They'd crossed it every day to reach their only access road, mail box and garbage pick-up point. The boy had cycled on the empty highway, the eldest girl sunbathed beside it. Close to the back of their simple five-room house a high wall ensured that they could only look one way in their world, at the highway, not at the farm fields behind.

The road opens, inevitable noise and air pollution arrive, privacy is lost, going to school and work needs usage of a drainage tunnel. The traffic volume increases; jams create huge audiences beside the highway railings. The already fragile nerves of the insomniac mother crack, the father's repression intensifies, the second daughter becomes a masked health freak. A rural setting has become a horror movie environment.

But the horror evaporates through plot devices that creak almost comically. An audience can accept that the mother' psyche cannot cope with relocation. It can imagine that traffic noises and vibrations trigger clinical phobias, but its belief is stretched to breaking point when the parents decide to cinder-block all the doors and windows of their house. Within, they slip into squalor and sickness. The eldest daughter had fled earlier. She returns in a friend's car, looks at the bricked-up house, assumes her family too had abandoned the house and drives off.

We have to assume that the telephone line expired but the electricity supply didn't. We must believe that no work colleagues, distant farmers or schoolfriends had asked questions. Okay, for the sake of a gloomy horror story. But Ms Meier abruptly challenges her audience to accept the possibility of the frail mother's burst of hammer-wielding self-redemption and family release.

The bad choices for her movie's ending turned a potentially fascinating fiction into a silly fable. Huppert's tears are worth watching, but they're not reasons enough to see this vehicle for them.

Bancs publics

Bancs publics, aka (Versailles rive droite), has the English title of Park Benches. Moliere it isn't, or even La cage aux folles, but it is a star-studded confection of French forth from Bruno Podalydes. He appears in it, as do dozens of French actors in cameos.

The movie's first interior set shows three office secretaries and two of their male bosses deciding to investigate a banner that has appeared below a facing window. In black and white, it states Homme Seul (Man Alone). How long could the comic mystery of that simple sitcom-like premise be sustained? How many small jokes and cameo parts could it spark? 20-20, remarkably.

Some of the office workers take their lunch break in the small garden below, where the park benches of the title are filled with other oddball French provincial characters of all ages. This is Altman or Curtis territory, where the cameras scamper around the park, eaves-dropping on its conversations and mini-dramas. Many feel fresh, some are surreal, and the whole comic exercise is a joy to watch and hear, a cavalcade of funny surprises.

The third, more farcical and least successful, segment takes us into the adjacent hardware staff, over-staffed and fussily micro-managed, where additional French talents (including Deneuve) appear to create mechanical disasters and comic woes. Finally, the action shifts back to the office and its Gervais-style retirement party for a secretary. When the light goes on and then off again in the lonely man's flat, the tale is over.

As usual with his movies, Podalydes worked with his brother, Denis, on this film. It's a sequel of sorts to their 45-minute 1992 comedy, Versailles rive-gauche. That will be worth finding, as will other award-winning joint efforts (including Only God sees me, 1998; Liberte-Oleron, 2001; Le parfum de la dame en noir, 2005; Montmartre segment of Paris, je t'aime, 2006).

Petit Nicolas

Rene Goscinny wrote and Jean-Jacques Sempe illustrated a series of children's comic books, first published in 1959. Director Laurent Tirard and his team of Franco-Belgian co-adaptors turned them into a live-action screenplay, et voila, they created the French box-office champion of 2009, Le petit Nicolas.

The world of eight-year-old Nicolas is middle-class provincial France in the 1950s. There are no black or Arabic faces in his classroom, or his city's streets. Even the lower-class kids are all-white. Adults are strange or buffoons, except for his class's young schoolteacher, who tries not to get exasperated with boys who are fat, sleepy, long-legged, aggressive or simply nicely egocentric, like Nicolas is.

When Nicolas's parents are discovered to be producing a second child, he panics. Rather than be cast aside, he must ensure the failure of the pregnancy. His classmates will help, of course.

This is a movie whose viewer will either feel it is charmingly, amusingly old-fashioned or insufferably, cloyingly cute. The provincial French obviously had the first viewpoint, dragging their grandchildren out to see and experience Les Good Old Days. The alternate viewpoint is mine: this movie's only bearable cuteness is its stick-up paper-cut credits.

Prophet

The main French winner at the 2009 Cannes fest, A Prophet, is a nominee for the foreign-language Oscar. It won't win, of course, because it's up against the Austrian entry, The White Ribbon, which has triumphed in all contests so far.

Praised as a parable foretelling Austro-Germanic readiness for National Socialism, that black-and-white tableau could have been a masterpiece if it had known how to end meaningfully. That's another story, though.

It's A Prophet's ending that bothers me now. It also maims a potential masterpiece, by craftily constructing a feel-good finale to a tale of a descent into moral Hell.

The anti-hero starts out as an insignificant Arab teenager in a French prison dominated by a clique of Corsican gangsters. President Sarkozy's decision to move most Corsican convicts closer to their home island changes the prison's power game. The Muslims have a chance to assert themselves but the anti-hero decides to stay alongside his old Corsican mentor. The cast of criminal characters expands, both in the prison (adding a Gypsy drug dealer, an Egyptian operative and token blacks) and outside (where an Italian gang and a released prison pal with testicular cancer are drawn into the plot strands).

Clearly drawn from real-life experiences, the film becomes a complex onion of a semi-documentary, discreetly dressed with telling details. However, there is a fantastic quality in the development of the Arabic anti-hero, convincingly portrayed by a newcomer who deserved his Cannes Best Actor nod. He transforms himself from an invisible Arab gopher into a hitman, a Corsican-speaking henchman taking advantage of day-long paroles to build his own drug operation on the outside. He grabs a position of power inside, as a multi-cultural wheeler-dealer getting in-house sex and drugs.

In a cliched movie, he'd spin out of control a la Scarface or mature melodramatically a la Godfathers. Instead, he walks into a sunrise with an inherited wife and son, followed by a respectful retinue. Or is it meant to be viewed as a cortege? No, I'm sure it's deliberately hopeful. He's become a prophetic figure, and audiences are left to prophesy his future. It all appeared too pat to be truly credible. So did the village at the end of The White Ribbon.