The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 12th annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema begins this week (co-hosted by the IFC Center) and includes 16 French films, all making their US debuts.
And, yes, to get it out of the way now, Gerard Depardieu is in two of the films. The first, La Vie En Rose, will open the festival at the cushy Alice Tully Hall, and is a two-hour and 20 minute biopic about singer Edith Piaf. (Who else is tired of movies about famous people? It’s no longer impressive or interesting watching actors pretend to be icons the audience loved already anyway. Please stop talking about how convincing and “realistic” these actors are.) Depardieu also stars in The Singer, which you could think of as The Wedding Singer meets Lost In Translation—but French. As with many of the films in the series, it’s surprisingly traditional, un-ambitious and embarrassingly Hollywood: quite a regression from what we generally associate with “French Cinema.” Depardieu’s daughter Julie also makes an appearance, co-starring in the film Blame It On Fidel; the directorial debut of Costa-Gavras’ daughter, also named Julie.
Other films of note include The Page Turner, which played at Cannes and will have its theatrical release here in a few weeks. Like a less provocative The Piano Teacher, Page Turner is overly slow, with a narrative that depends on its star Deborah Francois to carry the weight, but who unfortunately isn’t convincing enough to do so. Dans Paris, which opens later this summer, is actually pretty good, but you’ll have to decide quickly if you’re able to forgive its pretentious self-consciousness and inability to focus on what kind of film it’s trying to be. Still, it has good performances all around, and is at least trying for something.
The best of the films I previewed was Flanders, directed by Bruno Dumont, a carefully paced, complex film that demands some patience from the audience, but ultimately proves rewarding. Its story shifts between farmland and battlefield and is a passionate exploration of the effects of war on our psyche (and, like any good European film, is about our inability to communicate). Though not without its faults, the film is deliberate and challenging, and therefore far more exciting than most of the others on the bill.
I Do! reunites Alain Chabat and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who appeared together in last year’s The Science Of Sleep. The couple gets together to fool the guy’s family, couple ends up falling in love for real. Let’s think of this as a French Failure To Launch, but without Terry Bradshaw. (I’ll let you decide if that’s a good thing or not.)
