TIFF: The New Girlfriend

Nathaniel's adventures at TIFF continued

 François Ozon remains one of France's most prolific directors. Like most prolific auteurs this means an uneven filmography. Even the very good films can feel ever-so-slightly underrealized. Is it the rush or just the nature of the artistry of the prolific, all first draft energies, favorite or borrowed styles structures and themes, and just warming-up ideas with the occasional lightning-strike perfections?

Like many fans I'm still waiting for another of those lightning strike perfections like certain moments in Under the Sand or 8 Women in full but his not-quite-there efforts can still be highly appealing: Potiche anyone?

The New Girlfriend turns out to be all of the above with grand moments, messy ones, energetic diversions, familiar tropes and half formed ideas... which as it turns out is just fine for a movie about embryonic searches for new identities. It begins with a funereal yet beautiful opening sequence that recalls an Almodóvarian trance, and quickly moves into an Up-like backstory prelude detailing the very intimate friendship of Laura and Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) from childhood to Laura's early death. When we begin our actual story Claire and her husband Gilles (Raphael Personnaez, who also starred in The Gate at this festival) along with Laura's widowed husband David (Romain Duris) and his infant daughter Lucie are all still reeling from Laura's demise. One day on a guilty whim, Laura jogs to David's house to check in on Lucie only to make a startling discovery when no one answers the door and she lets herself in: there's David, in full drag, tenderly feeding Lucie with a bottle like a good mother. Claire can't believe what she's seeing and to cover her tracks for where she was that day with her husband she says she was with "Virginia... a girlfriend, someone you don't know." And thus begins our subject matter with the title taking on multiple meanings. Is David more Virginia than David? Which of them is Claire befriending? How desperate are both of them to recreate Laura in her vacuum? And what kind of a girlfriend can Virginia even be since she has a visible penis? 

The rest of the film is largely devoted to both farcical and dramatic consequences of this new secret in Claire's life with delightfully surprising beats amply peppered across the character arcs. Demoustier proves rather masterful in delineating Claire's internal confusions and hypocrisies, especially and most amusingly her illicit hypocritial thrills in having a new girlfriend at all (the prelude makes amply obvious that Laura and Claire were so devoted and happy together that they didn't cultivate other friendships). But full warning: the film is way too comically provocative and politically incorrect to please the easily offended which many in the LGBT community seem to be of late. Claire for example thinks 'gays are fine, trannys are not!' in one joke that goes over well in context but will surely offend out of it and calls David "sick" while still encouraging him to do it. David isn't as certain of what his gender fluidity means to be a role model for any political agenda. And Gilles ignores ambiguities and is convinced that David is just gay, always has been.

Though Romain Duris has long since proved his worth as a leading man, his screen attraction is entirely masculine, so I'll admit that it was easy to wonder what the film would have been like had the more beautiful Personnaez considered his inner woman instead. Would it have dulled the surprise or the comedy or made Claire's confusing situation between the two men in her life and this new girlfriend more believable?  Who can say? The time jumped epilogue leaves things both tied neatly up and slightly ambiguous as to what went down between the climax and the credits roll but by that time we know the characters well enough to draw our own conclusions. B

previously at TIFF

European Film Award Wi -- what? Scorsesaywhat?

I watched a bit of the European Film Awards live streaming earlier today and the first sight that greeted me was Anke Engelke looking like she'd stepped out of the Capitol to announce the next Hunger Games. The only thing she got wrong was that her hair and makeup were too demure. Tim said she looked a "teensy bit too lindt bunny" which made me giggle.

While attempting to watch the show I was pulled into an endless twitter debate about misogyny and glorification/condemnation thereof in The Wolf of Wall Street - a conversation which I expect will rage throughout awards season unless the veritable army of Scorsese stans succeeds in stamping out open discussion about the movie's merits; they're weirdly adamant that one should only do adrenaline fueled wolf howls at it which is, I don't mind saying, one of the worst things that can happen to a movie that merits any kind of considered conversation.

SOOOOOO, while I didn't make it all the way through the EFAs and am ashamed to note that I missed Catherine Deneuve's tribute altogether (argh) here are 5 thoughts from the ceremony...

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TIFF Quickies: Young & Beautiful, Honeymoon, and Belle

Brief notes on three more TIFF pictures

HONEYMOON
Maybe I would be a fan of Jan Hrebejk if I saw more of his pictures? He's been submitted three times for Oscar consideration in Best Foreign Film but of the three I've only seen his most recent Kawasaki Rose which I liked quite a lot. We don't yet know if the Czech Republic will submit his latest, Honeymoon, but it's an involving drama about our past selves and how well we know the ones we love. I really liked the gradual unfolding of its story-puzzle which takes place during a wedding weekend in which an uninvited gayish stranger spoils the proceedings for the bride and groom though they don't quite know why. Or maybe someone does but they're not saying. The relationships were intriguing and the groom is the sexiest ginger bearded actor this side of Fassbender. Though it maybe pushes too hard aesthetically in its climax, the final shots really moved me. 

Of note: Fans of Nastassia Kinski will be delighted at the marquee treatment she receives here. She's not in the film but her late 70s early 80s stardom is a key plot point. B/B+

François Ozon and a British Costume Drama after the jump

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Posterized: François Ozon

Glenn here. Given my penchant for poster goodness I figured I'd pick up Nathaniel's regular "posterized" feature. A fun series that can time to time shine a curious light on the way films are marketed and how certain actors or directors can find themselves in a so-called "marketing rut" where it's the same thing over and over. Think of a Will Smith movie and don't you just picture his smug mug staring out at you in mid-range closeup? Even that one about selling his organs to Rosario Dawson (or whatever Seven Pounds was about - I've sure as hell forgotten!)

This week I've chosen François Ozon - and he's having a helluva week. Not only is his latest (un/lucky number thirteen) film, In the House [Dans le maison], getting a release in America, but his next picture, Jeune et Jolie, was just chosen to compete for the Palme d'Or in Cannes. Well done, Mr. Ozon! Still, don't the words "A film by François Ozon" feel like they should carry more weight than they do. Perhaps, but his career is too all over the place to give him the title of auteur and his films frequently go theatrically unreleased in western countries without a major star (Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Rampling for instance) at the center. 

Combien avez-vous vu?

Sitcom (1998) | Criminal Lovers (1999) | Water Drops of Burning Rocks (2000)

Okay, I have no idea what it's about but that poster for Ozon's debut, Sitcom, is fabulous. 

 Under the Sand (2000) | Swimming Pool (2003) | 8 Women (2002)

more after the jump 

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LFF: The French are coming!

David here, heralding the return of the BFI London Film Festival – Craig and I are back again, and we’ll be bringing you various updates across the next two weeks. The 56th festival kicked off last night with the European premiere of Frankenweenie, but my first round-up post has more of a Francophile feel to it…

Matthias Schoenaerts and Marion Cotillard in 'Rust & Bone'

With Rust & Bone, director Jacques Audiard is still in the business of tempering abrasive, down-on-their-luck characters in the French banlieues with a style that smears the poetic and the aggressive into one confrontational melting pot. It seems to be part of Audiard’s intention to throw severe miserablism at his audience just to see if they can survive. Still, such a vibrantly aggressive film with a charged sense of the physical is a rare thing, and Audiard works to balance the lead performances by Marion Cotillard (whom Jose was just raving about) and Matthias Schoenaerts between a dark emotional percolation and a keen awareness of their physicality and the relationship of their bodies. Cotillard is expert at scorching her character Stephanie’s lust and enhanced sense of her own body onto the screen, and the building frisson between Stephanie and Schoenaerts’ Ali happens less through dialogue (the brisk, careless attitude of Ali puts paid to that) and more through the relation of their bodies and faces. The film may tilt wildly into grandiose dramatics or voracious sentimentality and some notes may strike an off chord, but they are all part of Audiard’s passionate approach; they reflect the beautiful, distorted, uncomfortable mess of a world that these two people inhabit. The rust rubs up against the bone and they spark, hurting but creating fire and feeling. (B+) (full review)

Wild in a different way is the narrative conceit of François Ozon’s In the House, confident again after the successful pastiche. French literature teacher Germain (Fabrice Luchini), despairing of his students’ lack of talent and effort, is intrigued by Claude’s (Ernst Umhauer) piece on the homelife of his best friend Rapha (Bastien Ughetto). Pushing his new protégé to enliven his continuing stories, the lines between fiction and reality blur as Claude, Germain and Germain’s wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) become more invested and obsessed with the lives of Rapha’s family. There are echoes of younger Ozon in the cautious dissection of a middle-class family home by an Umhauer’s enigmatic potboiler, but the director sticks less rigidly to the theatrical setting of Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women and delineates various domestic and public spaces with distinctive mise-en-scene. With this consistent shift in setting come the frivolous shifts in tone – Claude’s interpretation of Germain’s literary suggestions remain unpredictable to all but him, and so the audience is thrown between caustic parody, sensual romance, ghostly thriller, and myriads of diverse moods with gleeful abandon. Ultimately, Ozon makes little of what amounts to a toe-dip in social politics, but it skips along at a brisk pace and Umhauer’s pleasingly chilled performance is matched by Emmanuelle Seignier’s melancholy, spaced ennui as Rapha’s mother. In the House is a unique prospect and even if could’ve been so much greater, it’s a pleasant way to pass a couple of hours. (B-)

Jean-Louis Trintignent holds Emmanuelle Riva in 'Amour'

As you might expect, Michael Haneke’s Amour is pretty much the opposite proposition. Haneke presents the story’s end before his title card prompting a rewind to the beginning. The udience knows they’re in for a wearing, emotional experience to reach the beatific sight of a decomposing body surrounded lovingly by petals. We’re in familiarly confrontational territory with Haneke here, but the title suggests the tender centre of this enterprise, inhabited by breathtaking work from Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva. They play a wealthy, elderly French couple whose life becomes confined to their apartment after Anne (Riva) suffers a stroke. Haneke’s camerawork is predominantly his usual tableau-style observation, but increasingly, as Anne worsens, the close-ups proliferate. The actors and the camera draw us deeper into the nauseatingly devastating slide towards death. Such is the power of Anne’s irascible pride that Haneke feels intrusively cruel when he won’t let her escape his camera, cutting across the apartment to catch her wheelchair zooming away from her husband. Questions niggle about why Haneke felt the need to film such a painful story, but it gains infinite legitimacy and value from the presence of Trintignant and Riva, who uncover every emotional nook and cranny of the wounded dignity and painful decisions involved in such a lengthy and dedicated love. (B+)

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