Kore-eda’s The Truth

Fabienne Dangeville was no Joan Crawford, but she wasn’t the paragon of maternal virtue her new memoir makes her out to be. Instead, she has always been more interested in career than anything else. That is how her daughter Lumir remembers their family history, but her memory is also subjective. No matter whose recollections are more accurate, family is still family in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth, the first French-language production from the Japanese auteur, which opens today in very select cities and also releases on VOD.

Lumir has returned to Paris with her TV actor husband Hank and their daughter Charlotte, to celebrate the publication of her mother’s book, but Dangeville’s reluctance to send her an advance copy has aroused her suspicions. Meanwhile, the great actress struggles to relate to her latest film role, playing the aged daughter of a terminally-ill woman, who has used the relativity of interstellar space travel to stretch her time, but as a result, she has been almost entirely from her husband and daughter’s lives. Frankly, she only accepted the part to work with Manon Lenoir, the daughter of a former friend and colleague, whom she may have done wrong, at least according to Lumir.

If that premise sounds familiar, it is because associate producer Ken Liu’s story “Memories of My Mother” was previously adapted as the short film Beautiful Dreamer before becoming the source of Kore-eda’s film-within-the-film. It is quite a unique distinction for Liu among his fellow sf writers, but it is easy to see how the themes of his story overlap with those of Kore-eda’s family drama (and his entire oeuvre).

Of course, patrons of French cinema will be much more interested in the first-time pairing of Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche as the mother-daughter tandem. They will not be disappointed. Admittedly, Deneuve is playing with her own image to some extent, but her grand diva act is certainly entertaining to behold. She also has some terrific scenes with young Clementine Grenier, as her granddaughter. However, Binoche is totally believable as the down-to-earth Lumir, who nurtures her resentments without wallowing in them. She plays Lumir as a functional adult rather than an over-the-top cliché. (Thank heavens, Meryl Streep is not in this film.)

The Brand New Testament: God and Man in Brussels

Surveys suggest Americans are more religious than Europeans, but you can find conclusive proof in the movies. When God appears in American films, we cast the likes of George Burns and Morgan Freeman, but the Belgians opt for Benoît Poelvoorde. We’re not being snarky here. Viewers are meant to be under-awed and even contemptuous of him in Jaco Van Dormael’s The Brand New Testament (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

God according to Van Dormael and Poelvoorde is neither infinite in his mercy or a benignly disinterested watchmaker. He is a Belgian grump, who regularly devises new laws to make mankind miserable, like dropped toast always lands with the buttered-side down. He is a domineering sod with his wife and daughter Ea, frequently becoming borderline abusive. Yes, there was once a prodigal son, but nobody talks about JC anymore.

After one particularly dramatic flare up, Ea strikes back at her father, texting everyone on Earth the date of their death and then locking the mid-1990s vintage PC on which her father does all his deity business, before running off the earth in search of six apostles of her own. It turns out, this leaves her father at a distinct disadvantage. While Ea and JC could perform light miracles, their father was completely dependent on his computer. When he follows Ea into terrestrial Brussels, he is just crank with a bad temper claiming to be God.

There is a reason for those six additional apostles, beyond the fact it allows Ea to recruit six colorful characters, several of whom are played by some of Francophone cinema’s top stars. That is indeed Catherine Deneuve, as the recently spurned Martine, who finds the romance of her life with a gorilla. Frankly, it is really no big deal, considering how often she played opposite Gérard Depardieu.

For further French star power, there is also François Damiens (Delicacy, Les Cowboys) as his namesake assassin, whose line of work becomes almost absurdly irrelevant when everyone knows their expiration date. Of course, Poelvoorde hams it up shamelessly as the prickly creator, while Yolande Moreau is painfully mousy as “the Goddess,” even when it is her time to shine.

The broad strokes of BNT might sound like cloyingly cutesy blasphemy, but it has a darkly cynical attitude nobody will confuse with the Oh, God movies. Yet, somehow it mostly manages to avoid direct critiques of any particular religion or denomination. Basically, Van Dormael and co-screenwriter Thomaas Gunzig offer up some warmed-over Gaia-friendly feminism, in between the gallows humor, porn-related subplots, and sex with primates.

In fact, all the edgy, risqué, and potentially offensive material is pretty funny. The film only really gets tiresome when it wimps out and gets politically correct and sentimental. Highly episodic in its structure, the film largely plays like a series of sequential comedy sketches rather than a narrative to emotionally invest in, but at least it delivers the laughs. Recommended for those not put off by the premise, The Brand New Testament opens this Friday (12/9) in New York, at the IFC Center, just in time for the Christmas season.

The Pirate: Caviar and Crossbones

For centuries, Greeks have maintained a commanding share of the global shipping business. Arguably, Ioannis Varvakis was part of that tradition. He specialized in re-routing Ottoman shipments. He was a proud pirate, but he became a Russian officer and nobleman, while never relinquishing his Greek identity. Yannis Smaragdis, Greek cinema’s prestigious bio-pic specialist turns his attention to the swashbuckler in his English language production, The Pirate (a.k.a. God Loves Caviar), which releases today on DVD and is available on multiple VOD platforms from Vision Films (trailer here).

The dreaded pirate Varvakis will end up old and infirm, living as a secret captive in a remote British “clinic” for infectious diseases. We know this because the film starts at this cheery point, telling his story in competing flashbacks. Lefentarios a dodgy veteran of the Greek resistance will explain to the British superintendent how he goaded the buccaneer into more direct action, while Varvakis’s former servant will explain to a group of street urchin’s how great his former master truly was.

Varvakis had always fought the Turks ship to ship, claiming the spoils for his efforts. However, at Lefentarios’s urging, Varvakis hatches an unlikely plan to wipe out the entire Ottoman fleet (apparently by setting his ship on fire and pointing towards several hundred Ottoman vessels). Needing safe haven, Varvakis offers his services to Catherine the Great, who appoints Varvakis her personal agent for the Caspian.

The mostly reformed rogue makes decent coin tending to her interests, but he becomes vastly wealthy when he develops methods to ship caviar without spoilage. Russians love caviar. So do the Persians, which lends his operations additional strategic significance. Catherine is well satisfied with Varvakis, bestowing rank and title upon him. Unfortunately, his personal life is a mess.

Frankly, the Greek resistance to the Ottoman occupation is not exactly over exposed in Western media. The Pirate’s home viewing release comes at an opportune time, countering Russell Crowe’s ripping well-made Water Diviner, which views Greco-Turkish conflicts through the lens of Smyrna. However, Smaragdis devotes an awful lot of time to Varvakis’s loveless marriage to the unfaithful Helena, his strained relationship with a grown daughter from a previous union, and the whiny son who can never live up to his father’s expectations.

Even though it is a minor role, John Cleese not surprisingly delivers all the best lines as McCormick, the British administrator. Sebastian Koch (still best known in America for The Lives of Others) has the appropriate presence for a figure of Varvakis’s stature, but despite no shortage of makeup, he never looks like he is the right age for the character’s successive stations in life. In contrast, Evgeniy Stychkin never ages a day as Ivan, the loyal servant who manages to make his way to Varvakis’s double-secret island prison without arousing any suspicion. Of course, Catherine Deneuve does her stateliest as Catherine II, but her screen time is limited.

The Pirate was a big hit domestically, arriving to bolster national spirits in a time of austerity. Tellingly, the Greeks would look to a pirate, who lives off contraband appropriated from others, as a source of inspiration. Still, there is something appealingly old school about its earnest approach to historical drama. You can practically hear the voiceovers announcing “special guest stars” Cleese and Deneuve. Recommended for those looking for some unselfconscious, slightly creaky, throwback entertainment, The Pirate (a.k.a. God Loves Caviar) is now available on DVD, as well as on VOD services like iTunes, DirecTV, and Vudu.

Téchiné’s In the Name of My Daughter

What was a classy lady like Renée Le Roux doing running a casino in Nice? Unfortunately, she did not have much time at the helm of the Palais de la Méditerranée before getting forced out by the Mafia. Pardon, make that: eased out by a rival casino operator with reputed underworld ties. It would be a bitter defeat for Madame Le Roux, costing her far more than control over the casino. André Téchiné adapts her memoir of the so-called “Nice Casino War,” but he de-emphasizes the Scorsese-esque elements throughout In the Names of My Daughter (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

The Palais was once tightly held by the Le Roux family, but when Madame Le Roux assumed the directorship of the casino, they barely retained a fifty-one percent stake. Many of the minor shareholders were opposed to her appointment, requiring her slightly estranged daughter Agnès to duly vote in favor of her mum. It was a victory orchestrated by her legal advisor Maurice Agnelet, who made something of an impression on the recently divorced Agnès. He happens to be married, but that does not mean much to either of them. Frankly, he is not nearly as attracted to her as she is to him. However, when Madame Le Roux refuses to appoint him as her general manager, he starts manipulating her daughter (and her shares) to extract revenge.

The daughter will indeed betray the mother, but from that point on, the chain of events gets mysteriously murky and tragic. Agnelet will ultimately face trial three times, yet Téchiné prefers to handle such dramatic red meat in the film’s postscript. Arguably, the intrigue and duplicity of the Casino War could have challenged the gangsterism of Cédric Jimenez’s The Connection, but Téchiné prefers to zero-in on the emotionally fraught mother-daughter relationship. The screenplay co-written by Jean-Charles Le Roux, who excised himself and his brothers from the picture, focuses on his anguished mother rather than the defiant Angelet.

Nobody can lord over an elegant old-money casino like Catherine Deneuve. If you had shares in the Palais, you would vote with her too. Despite some unnecessary passage-of-time makeup, she rock-solidly anchors the film as Madame Le Roux. She instantly suggests a sense of Le Roux’s comfort in this exclusive world, as well as the long and thorny history she shares with both her daughter and former advisor. Guillaume Canet’s Agnelet is not exactly flashy, but he is convincingly cold-blooded, thin-skinned, and borderline sociopathic. On the other hand, Adèle Haenel’s turn as Agnès, the needy hipster, often rings hollow, sounds flat, or some such metaphor, but as you might surmise from the title, she will not be around for the closing credits.

The seductive and captivating thing about Téchiné films like Thieves and Unforgivable is the way they incorporate thriller elements while skirting the boundaries of genre cinema. Yet, it becomes almost perverse in the case of the Casino War and the three resulting murder trials. Nonetheless, Téchiné pulls viewers into the story and through the film with a strong directorial hand that characteristically feels deceptively light. Recommended in spite and because of his auteurist idiosyncrasies, In the Name of My Daughter opens this Friday (5/15) in New York, at the IFC Center and the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.

3 Hearts: the Mister and the Two Sisters

Could you fall for a taxman? Two women from the provincial French town of Valence will do exactly that. Their similar tastes make sense, considering they happen to be sisters. Complications will necessarily ensue in Benoît Jacquot’s 3 Hearts (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Marc Beaulieu is a revenue agency bureaucrat based in Paris, but he sometimes ventures out into the field for an audit. He missed the last train home on his first fateful night in Valence—the sort of sleepy town that rolls up the streets after eleven o’clock. However, Sylvie Berger is also roaming through the shuttered nocturnal streets. She guides him to a hotel, but they spend most of the night gliding through the quiet sidewalks together. Little is said, but a connection is formed. Beaulieu leaves for Paris in the morning, but they make hasty plans to rendezvous at the Jardin des Tuileries, but a few mild hassles like a heart attack make Beaulieu prohibitively tardy.

Naturally, the two would be lovers never exchanged cell numbers or even properly introduced themselves. That would have killed the mood, which is admittedly intoxicating. We wish the film would return to that vividly in-the-moment romantic vibe, so we can understand why Beaulieu will do some truly reckless things later in the film to recapture it.

For the time being, life goes on. Berger agrees to move to Minneapolis with the underwhelming boyfriend she had just broken up with, resigning herself to a crummy relationship and cold winters. Returning to Valence on business, Beaulieu looks for Berger, but instead he finds her sister Sophie weeping in the tax office over the state of her returns. Of course, the name Berger means nothing to him. Taking pity on her, Beaulieu straightens out her bookkeeping, winning her heart as a result. Through a carefully contrived set of circumstances, he never figures out who the absent sister is until their wedding plans are well underway.

When they finally come face-to-face, it is rather awkward. Sylvie Berger tries to avoid her new brother-in-law as much as possible, but their mutual ardor is constantly at risk of boiling over. As Beaulieu becomes rasher, the threat of scandal grows. Clearly, it is all building to a bad end for several sides of the love triangle, as Bruno Coulais’s surprisingly moody and somewhat discordant score has foreshadowed right from the beginning.

3 Hearts could be considered the dark analog of films like Brief Encounter and An Affair to Remember. While the romanticism of the initial meeting is overwhelmingly potent, it leads to an obsession that becomes toxic over time. Frankly, love at first sight is not a healthy proposition in 3 Hearts.

Much will be made of Catherine Deneuve once again portraying the mother of her real life daughter Chiara Mastroianni, but Madame Berger plays a tangential role in this drama. The real show is Mastroianni and Charlotte Gainsbourg complimenting and contrasting with each other as the needy insecure Sophie and the reserved but passionate Sylvie, respectively. They are totally credible as the closest of sisters, but it is a bit harder to understand why they are both so profoundly attracted to a wheezing, walking coronary like Beaulieu. Regardless, Benoît Poelvoorde is uncomfortably compelling as the compulsive, self-destructive auditor.

While 3 Hearts sounds like a straight drama on paper, its tone approaches that of a thriller. Jacquot constantly maintains the nagging sense something dreadful might happen in the very next scene. It is tenser and more unsettling than most infidelity films, including those that venture further into violent or noir territory. Consistently effective despite, or because of its openly melodramatic inclinations, 3 Hearts is recommended for Francophiles when it opens this Friday (3/13) in New York at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema.

On My Way: Catherine Deneuve Takes a Road Trip

A former Miss Brittany, Bettie has always been able to turn men’s heads, but that does not necessarily mean she has an aptitude for business. No seriously, it doesn’t. With her bills and the disappointments of life compounding, she sets out on an impulsive road trip in Emmanuelle Bercot’s On My Way (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

For years Bettie has settled for being the mistress of the man she thinks she loves. However, when he leaves both her and his wife for a much younger woman, Bettie loses her only reason for staying in her ever so provincial town. While serving lunch at her soon to be insolvent restaurant, she suddenly ups and leaves in search of cigarettes. She will range pretty far in search of smokes, but why not?

After a night drinking at a road house and an incredibly awkward tryst, Bettie finally gets a justification for her walkabout. Her estranged, nearly unemployable daughter needs her to drive Charly, the grandson she barely knows, to his paternal grandfather’s house, so she can leave for a dubious job abroad. 

Of course, it will not be a smooth ride, but at least OMW picks up speed as it goes along. As viewers learn Bettie’s backstory, they will become more apt to forgive her dubious decisions, but she remains a hard figure to fully embrace. That makes her psychologically realistic, but also a bit of a pill to spend screen-time with. Likewise, Bercot’s real life son Nemo Schiffman is certainly convincingly churlish as the androgynous Charly. However, in his screen debut, painter Gerard Garouste supplies exactly the sort of worldly gravitas the film needs as Alain, Charly’s curmudgeonly grandpa.

Like a cross-country drive, OMW has its highs and lows.  While Bettie is essentially the sort of sexually confident senior Shirley MacLaine used to specialize in, her chemistry with Garouste, the non-professional thesp, is fresh and appealing. Pleasant enough, but overly susceptible to unnecessary detours, On My Way is mostly recommended for Deneuve’s older Francophile fans when it opens this Friday (3/14) in New York at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.

Beloved: Honore’s New Movie Musical

Prague and Paris have to be two of the most romantic cities in the world.  Yet, a mother and daughter have relationship issues in both European capitals.  It seems like codependent sexual dysfunction runs in their family in Christophe Honoré’s latest movie musical, Beloved (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Beloved opens in swinging sixties Paris, as Honoré revisits his acknowledged Jacques Demy influences.  It is like a fairy tale, in which shopgirl Madeleine falls in love with Jaromir, one of the prostitution clients she sees on the side.  It’s a French fairy tale.  After Jaromir completes his specialized medical studies, she moves to Prague with him, becoming his wife.  Soon, the hotshot doctor acts like he also has a license to philander, but his wife refuses to recognize it.  Things come to head just as the Soviet tanks start rolling through the streets of Prague.

Madeleine divorces Jaromir but she never gets him out of her system.  Even though separated by distance and ideology, he maintains a hold on her, despite her second marriage to an adoring gendarme.  It will be a pattern that somewhat repeats for her daughter Vera.  Her colleague Clément is devoted to her, but she only has eyes for Henderson, a rock drummer from New York, who happens to be (mostly) gay.

Anyone who has ever considered themselves losers for carrying a hopeless torch will feel much healthier once they watch Vera pine away her life.  Initially it is rather uncomfortable, but it gets downright tragic.  Beloved is far from your typically bubbly movie musical, but it works better than Honoré’s prior attempt, Love Songs, largely because the characters are not as irritating and the situations are less stifling.  Beloved can make viewers wince, but it also gives them air to breathe.

Honoré walks quite a tightrope, using perhaps the two greatest post-war tragedies, the 1968 Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia and September 11^th, as backdrops for his mercilessly intimate drama.  Honoré focuses exclusively on the micro level, where painful personal conflicts continue unabated, even when the wider world is turned upside down.  Nonetheless, some of the “internal contradictions” of post-Prague Spring Czechoslovakia are duly noted and images of the 1968 invasion are suitably ominous.  Given their visceral nature, the scenes of 2001 Montreal (where Vera’s flight was diverted) are somewhat iffier, flirting with exploitation by mere association.

Happily, Milos Forman never sings in Beloved, but he is perfectly cast as the old charmingly degenerate Jaromir of 2008.  In contrast, Honoré alumnus Chiara Mastroianni handles her husky vocal features fairly well and keeps viewers vested in her angst far more compellingly than in his outright maddening Making Plans for Lena.  Her real life mother Catherine Deneuve has some nice moments as Twenty-First Century Madeleine, but it is totally the sort of diva-centric character we are accustomed to see her assume.  In contrast, Ludivine Sagnier is appropriately spritely as young Madeleine in the early Cherbourg-esque scenes.  Louis Garrel (son of Philippe) is his usual sullen screen presence as Clément, but American Paul Schneider is surprisingly engaging as the commitment-phobic Henderson.

As a musical, Beloved works rather well, thanks to some frequently distinctive songs penned by Alex Beupain.  They certainly fit the vibe and context of the film (as well as any movie musical tunes ever do) and often serve to advance the story.  While it is a bit overstuffed with characters and hoped for significance, it is definitely one of Honoré’s better works.  Recommended on balance for Francophiles and those who appreciate moody musicals, Beloved opens this Friday (8/17) in New York at the IFC Center.

Ozon’s Potiche

There have not been a lot of films made about umbrellas, but it makes sense to cast Catherine Deneuve in each and every one of them. Indeed, François Ozon tries to recreate some of the spirit of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (right, good luck with that). Still, he achieves an engaging retro-1970’s vibe in his period battle of the sexes and classes, Potiche (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Deneuve’s Suzanne Pujol is the “Potiche,” or trophy wife in American parlance. As the daughter of her husband’s umbrella factory owner boss, she was also something of the brass ring for Robert. Now he runs the factory with an iron fist. If he wants an opinion from his workers, he’ll give it to them. All Robert Pujol is missing is the big Monopoly Man cigar.

Not surprisingly, Pujol clashes frequently with Babin, the Communist mayor and MP for the district. It is not just a matter of ideology though. Babin has a bit of history with his wife. Wound way too tight, Pujol finally has that big Fred Sanford heart attack. With hubby laid up, Madame Pujol takes the factory reins, using the more cooperative methods of her fondly remembered father. She also has an in for dealing with the workers’ unofficial rep, Babin. Frankly, it all works much too well for her husband’s liking. Family drama ensues.

Potiche is probably the lightest, frothiest excursion into class warfare one will see on-screen for foreseeable future. The film nails the disco-dancing tracksuit-wearing 1970’s ambiance and it is always worth the price of admission to watch to legendary pros like Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu circle each other flirtatiously (but if you’ve seen him lately, you know she has her work cut out for her). Unfortunately, Fabrice Luchini is not able to counterbalance (don’t go there) Depardieu, as the rather clichéd and deliberately unlikable Pujol. By playing favorites on behalf of the leftist mayor, Ozon’s skews the film a bit too much for its own good. After all, the whole point seems to be only Suzanne Pujol has the wisdom and grace to chart a Harold Macmillan-esque middle way between the extremes represented by both men.

Still, Deneuve and Depardieu are not legends for nothing. Their “if only” romantic chemistry works on a smartly adult level. You also have to love the groovy umbrellas designed by Pujol’s searching-for-himself son Laurent (these are for you Cherbourg fans). A light and pleasant outing for two of France’s biggest stars (but hardly a treatise on industrial organization), Potiche should satisfy Francophiles when it opens this Friday (3/25) in New York at the Angelika Film Center.