As the Renault-sponsored French Film Season spreads to a number of prestigious venues, it chose it's opening in May to prove just how glamorous, just how eclectic and just how cultured French cinema can actually be.
With both the art-house circuit, courtesy of Breillat, Noë and the like, and popular cinema, with the likes of Belleville-Rendezvous and Jean-Pierre Jeunet booming, this festival certainly indicates that while the French film industry may never rival Hollywood in terms of audience figures, it can certainly deliver everything that Hollywood offers and more.
So the festival brings us a host of acclaimed stars and directors, and four very different films: Bon Voyage, Pas sur la Bouche, Nathalie and Love Me If You Dare/Jeux d'Enfants.
Pas sur la Bouche, the new project of veteran filmmaker Alain Resnais is probably the strongest film. An adaptation of an early French operetta and set in the 1920s, it has a cast of the most popular and recognised actors in France. Sabine Azéma stars as Gilberte Valandray, the wife of a successful metallurgist. Without warning, her first husband (Lambert Wilson), whom she met in America, turns up. The new husband doesn't know anything about her first marriage, so there follows a series of mistaken identities and deceptions, with a lot of singing along the way. The film also stars Pierre Arditi, Isabelle Nanty, Audrey Tautou, Darry Cowl and Daniel Prévost. Wilson, Azéma and Prévost have worked with director Resnais several times before, most recently in 1999's successful On connaît la chanson (Same Old Song) . Both Wilson and Azéma maintain that there was never any specific plan to work with Resnais again until he approached them. "I don't decide - they recruit us", says Azéma, who believes "there is a great deal of friendship" between filmmakers and actors in France . "You have a sort of pairing," she states.
Azéma has worked with Alain Resnais on no less than five films now. For Wilson, the situation is even more surprising. He's worked with a variety of international directors, from Carlos Saura and Andrzej Wajda to Peter Greenaway and Fred Zinneman and Claude Chabrol and André Téchiné. Recently, he's spent a lot of time filming small parts in American films with the likes of James Ivory on Jefferson in Paris and more recently with the Wachowski brothers of the Matrix sequels. So, with such a prolific career, how did another film with Resnais come about? According to Wilson, "[after Pas sur la Bouche Resnais] wanted to do a silent film with the same group of actors and that film turned out to be difficult because it was too expensive and also he was dissatisfied with the state of the script, but it's interesting to see how he wanted to keep his crew of actors and embark them on another project very rapidly to keep their availability so he just decided to look at something that was already written, a comedy or something musical for which he'd always had a passion."
Like On connaît la chanson, Pas sur la Bouche has its characters suddenly burst into song. Unlike that film, however, these characters all sing in their own voices, a process that was possibly easier for Wilson , having sung in several stage shows and released several albums of his own work. The difficultly for him was the fact that he had to speak and sing in an American accent, something he's never had to do before, "It was actually pretty technically difficult but very enjoyable," he says, "really a lot of fun". For him, the challenge was to "work on an American accent for the French imagination of the twenties and also of nowadays. In fact Alain Resnais told me you must take an American accent but it's going to have to be an American accent that is not realistic, it has to be the idea of an American accent of someone in the twenties". Wilson pulls it off perfectly. He recreates the accent of a character that is unmistakably an American, but seen from a European viewpoint. The accent has a natural falsity to the tone and the character is reserved and self-important. The title, translated as "Not On The Lips", refers to the Wilson character's phobia of kissing on the lips, which he perceives as dirty and too intimate, something the French cannot relate to in the film. Wilson seems to allow the perfect combination of the reserved and the unnatural that the part demands. Yet he remains unnecessarily hard on himself: "I'd been concentrating so much on the American accent in French that whenever I actually said a few words in English I actually sound English, not American, and I have few words but I failed miserably there". This doesn't show; he plays an American caricature brilliantly and imbues a considerable amount of depth and subtlety to such a depthless character.
Sabine Azéma also faced difficulties with the singing. Bruno Fontaine, composer on the film, wanted the actors to sing in the same way they talked, a large feat considering that Wilson was the only one who had ever sung professionally. When Azéma came to the role, it was up to Fontaine and Yann Molénat, singing coach, to teach her how to sing. It was initially a nerve-wracking experience, but, she states that Resnais had told her that "actors are really singers" and that "it is something intuitive that comes from inside". But it is not, she claims, part of her heritage. She's always seen song and dance as being something belonging to British culture: "We sing less in France , when I come to hotels in England , people sing and dance. That doesn't really happen in France ". So, singing was something that did not come naturally, but took a lot of work to develop. Azéma's character is extremely vibrant and dominates the screen. Her passion for acting is evident from the beginning of the film. Singing seems to be the next logical step for her, despite the fact that the film requires her to neither dance or move (this differentiated French operettas from the musical comedies being made in America ). How did she cope with such restraints? "I use my body to express myself", she says. Her eyes dart nervously around and she moves with extravagant and over-the-top expression.
Pas sur la Bouche is a film that taps into popular French heritage, but, as Wilson maintains, it is very much a Resnais film; "Most of Resnais's work is about ghosts," he says, "characters drift on stage and suddenly disappear". Many critics have maintained that this film and On Connaît are a move further away from the avant-garde sensibilities of L'année dernière à Marienbad and Hiroshima mon amour , and while the latest films may be more palatable to the Hollywood audience, they are also just as complex and intriguing. Resnais's film is not only representative of popular French heritage, but also a return of one of the country's favourite directors to making ambitious works of art.
Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Bon Voyage is also a period film, set during the Second World War. It begins as occupation by the Germans looks ever more imminent. The story focuses on a small group of characters that are brought together by chance; Grégori Dérangère has escaped from jail with friend Yvan Attal, and have ended up in Bordeaux, where actress Isabelle Adjani has fled with minister Gérard Depardieu, and Virginie Ledoyen is desperately trying to keep the Germans from discovering bomb-making materials. The film is punctuated by turns hilarious and tragic, as each character comes to terms with complex relationships that are threatened by the encroaching war. The film is a dense period piece that tackles France's relationship with the war through a light-hearted meditation on destiny. Resnais and Rappeneau have been making films since the late-fifties, although Rappeneau has concentrated on filming expensive, extravagant pieces, with the likes of Cyrano de Bergerac and The Horseman on the Roof , and his work is frequently comic with a tragic central core. Bon Voyage is no different, with hoards of extras, expensive sets and a popular leading cast. Like previous efforts, Bon Voyage is destined to be popular overseas, although its naturalist style has more in common with Lucas Belvaux's Trilogy series than with the post-modern style of Amélie that has taken the world by storm. The film isn't really destined for the art-house circuit where most foreign-language films end up, yet is not destined for the popular success of Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
This brings us to the most modern film of the season; Yann Samuell's Jeux d'Enfants (Love Me If You Dare) . The film focuses on the relationship of Julien (Guillaume Canet) and Sophie (Marion Cotillard), as they embark on a series of dares throughout their life in order to hide their true feelings for each other. Both actors have had international success abroad in recent years; Canet was the Virginie Ledoyen's boyfriend in The Beach , and Cotillard recently turned up in Tim Burton's Big Fish . This was Yann Samuell's first feature film, so how did such casting come about? "We had a list of say forty or fifty different actors, and [my producers] told me to meet one and make a choice. And unfortunately for them, Marion was the first one to get into the room, and she opened the door, she says 'hello', and before she sits in front of me I knew she was it. And I go to see my producer and I tell him that, and he says, 'you haven't seen the 49 others so take time to meet them.' And I said, 'there's no reason'." The casting of Canet was just as easy; he had the actor in mind before writing the second screenplay.
Jeux d'Enfants is a striking visual film. It uses a lot of CGI effects; the pace is very rapid and could read as a series of cinematic tricks: superimposition, flash-pans and such shots as a car speeding towards the camera. The film blurs the concepts of reality and fantasy. Why does he use such a visual style? "I think cinema is a language and you can use camera to tell a story as well as a script and your actors, the whole thing, everything has to speak." His films bring the role of filmmaking right to the fore of storytelling, a post-modern technique that has obsessed American filmmakers such as Tarantino, and, in his own country, the likes of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Unlike Jeunet, though, he takes elements of everyday reality and uses them to construct a childhood fantasy. Samuell cannot understand the comparisons that are made between the two directors, stating that, "I feel very confused and I know Jean-Pierre is very confused too, because we don't see any relationship between the two films ( Jeux d'Enfants and Amélie ). Maybe we are some kind of pioneers in the way that we use CGI and all this kind of technology to tell poetic stories and not science fiction stories or monster stories, we use it for a human purpose and not only visual purpose". Samuell is the festival's youngest and least experienced director, and it is hard to believe that his film is being presented along with Pas sur la Bouche and Bon Voyage . It represents a shift away from the naturalist and contemplative values that Rappeneau's film embraces, towards France 's explosive post-modern future in filmmaking. How does he think his films are going to be perceived abroad? "I don't know a thing about English audiences. I know it worked in France and in America but I cannot tell about England ." It's more than likely to be a huge success.
While an exercise in glamour, the opening of the Renault French Film Season remains earthy. Lambert Wilson is the most charming person you're ever likely to meet; Sabine Azéma is incredibly passionate about her status as one of France 's leading actresses and Yann Samuell remains surprisingly un-phased about presenting his film alongside such luminaries as Alain Resnais and Jean-Paul Rappeneau. The season has chosen four very different films with which to begin, and from this point onwards it showcases talent from directors abroad, such as Theo Angelopoulos and Alexandre Sokurov, and work from popular art-house directors such as Bruno Dumont and Catherine Breillat, as well as featuring new films from Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais's pupils during the New Wave period. The festival embraces France 's diverse film culture while recognising the country's rich heritage that is responsible for its status as the second biggest industry in the world.
Click here to view a trailer of Love Me If You Dare or or visit the website
Pas sur la Bouche is released in April; Bon Voyage in May; Nathalie in July and Love Me If You Dare in August.
Forthcoming French Films, in participation with RFFS:
Carnage (Dir. Delphine Gleize with Chiara Mastroianni, Angela Molina)
Monsieur N (Dir. Antoine de Caunes with Elsa Zylberstein, Richard Grant)
Strange Gardens (Dir. Jean Becker with Jacques Villeret, André Dussollier, Thierry Lhermitte)
Devils (Dir. Christophe Ruggia with Adèle Haenel, Vincent Rottiers)
Since Otar left (Dir. Julie Bertuccelli with Esther Gorinthin, Dinara Droukarova)
Tais-toi (Dir. Francis Veber with Jean Reno, Gérard Depardieu and André Dussolier)
Haute Tension (Dir. Alexandre Aja with Cécile de France, Maiwen Le Besco, Philippe Nahon)
Mille Mois (Dir. Faouzi Bensaidi with Fauad Labiea, Nezha Rahil, Mohamed Majd)
Errance (Dir. Damien Odoul, with Benoît Magimel, Laetitia Casta, Matteo Tardito, Yann Goven)
L'Histoire de Marie et Julien (Dir. Jacques Rivette with Emmanuelle Béart, Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Anne Brochet)
Triple Agent (Dir. Eric Rohmer with Serge Renko, Katarina Didskalou, Cyrielle Clair, Grigori Manakov)
Choses Secrètes (Dir. Jean-Claude Brissaud with Coralie Revel, Sabrina Seyvecou, Roger Mirmont, Fabrice Deville)
Les Clés de la bagnole (Dir. Laurent Baffie with Laurent Baffie, Daniel Russo)
Confidences trop Intimes (Dir. Patrice Leconte with Sandrine Bonnaire, Fabrice Lucchini)
Dans Ma Peau (Dir. Marina de Van with Marina de Van, Laurent Lucas, Léa Drucker)
Feux rouges (Dir. Cédric Kahn with Jean Pierre Daroussin, Carole Bouquet, Vincent Deniard)
La Fille de Keltoum (Dir. Medhi Charef with Cylia Malki, Baya Bela)
La Fleur du mal (Dir. Claude Chabrol with Nathalie Baye, Benoît Magimel)
Novo (Dir. Jean Pierre Limousin with Eduardo Noriega, Anna Mouglalis, Nathalie Richard)
Père/Fils (Dir. Alexandre Sokourov with Andrei Schetinin, Alexkesei Neymyshey)
Qui a tué Bambi? (Dir. Gilles Marchand with Sophie Quinton, Laurent Lucas, Catherine Jacob)
Saint Ange (Dir. Pascal Laugier with Virginie Ledoyen, Lou Doillon)
Stupeur et tremblements (Dir. Alain Corneau with Sylvie Testud, Kaori Tsuji, Taro Suwa)
La terre qui pleure (Dir. Théo Angelopoulos with Poursanidis)
Anatomie de l'enfer (Dir. Catherine Breillat with Amira Casar, Rocco Siffredi)
Tiresia (Dir. Bertrand Bonello with Laurent Lucas, Clara Choveaux, Thiago Teles)
Twenty Nine Palms (Dir. Bruno Dumont with David Wissak, Katarina Golubeva)
Un Crime au paradis (Dir. Jean Becker with Jacques Villeret, Josiane Balasko, André Dussollier)
Simon Bull
www.institut-francais.org.uk/renaultffs/
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