NYFF ’16: My Journey Through French Cinema

Bertrand Tavernier might be the best director in the world at taking audience Q&A. Based on his good humored appearance for Princess of Montpensier during the 2011 French Rendezvous, he displayed a genuine knack for extracting a salient point from even the most rambling, off-topic questions. While this talent for inspired free association comes across as keenly focused during a Q&A session, it might strike some viewers as eccentrically eclectic when applied to a three-hour-plus documentary. However, the audience still gets to hear a lot of interesting stuff as a result throughout Tavernier’s My Journey Through French Cinema (trailer here), which screens during the 54^th New York Film Festival.

Yes, this is indeed all about Tavernier discussing the films he has seen and the filmmakers he has known. Of course, he had early gigs as the publicist for Godard’s Breathless and as an assistant to Jean-Pierre Melville, so he definitely has an insider’s perspective. Who knew former Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson sideman Rex Stewart appeared in Jacques Becker’s Rendezvous in July? Tavernier, that’s who—and being a jazz fan as well, he shows a long tantalizing clip of Stewart blowing his horn in a hip French nightclub.

In fact, Becker is the unlikely first-among-equals under discussion in Journey. Once Tavernier finishes with the Casque d’Or helmer, he then gives the themes and films of Melville and Claude Sautet similarly in-depth treatment. Although he mostly focuses on auteurist directors, Tavernier also champions the film scores of Maurice Jaubert and Joseph Kosma. These sequences are especially valuable, since even major French film composers like Georges Delerue and Philippe Sarde are not exactly household names anymore.

Those who require a rigid structure to appreciate a film are simply out of luck here. Tavernier can hardly pause in mid-air as he jumps from topic to topic, in order to give viewers time to carefully scrawl out their notes, even if he were so inclined. Essentially, this film is designed to approximate the experience of chewing the fat with Tavernier on the subject of movies. If that sounds like fun to you (and it should), the good news is there is obviously a planned second installment in the works. Logically recommended for Francophile patrons, My Journey Through French Cinema screens tomorrow (10/1) and Sunday (10/2) during the 2016 New York Film Festival.

The French Minister: Old Europe Quotes Heraclitus

In the days leading up to the Iraq War, Jacques Chirac strained French relations with the new democracies of Eastern Europe by condescendingly declaring they “missed a golden opportunity to shut up.” After the fall of Saddam Hussein, several French officials, such as the former UN ambassador Jean-Bernard Mérimée were implicated in the Oil-for-Food scandal. However, no such troubling details will intrude on the self-aggrandizement of France’s political class in The French Minister (trailer here), a rare misfire from Bertrand Tavernier that opens this Friday at the IFC Center.

Technically, Alexandre Taillard de Worms is a “conservative,” but his contempt for America is so great, he has no problem hiring a young lefty like Arthur Vlaminck to be his new speech-writer. It is hard to write for the eccentric minister, but a couple of quotes from Heraclitus usually placates him. Essentially, the Taillard doctrine boils down to this: French intervention in its former African colonies is good, but American intervention in the thinly fictionalized Lousdemistan is bad.

While Taillard often acts like a pompous buffoon, especially during a lunch with an American Nobel Prize winning novelist (supposedly based on a real life incident still remembered in hushed tones around the Quai d’Orsay), French Minister has all the satirical bite of a retirement roast. That old Taillard might be nuts Tavernier and his co-writers Antonin Baudry and Christophe Blain tell us, but he is crazy like a fox. As for any soul searching regarding French colonialism, Oil-for-Food, or France’s grand ambition to subordinate EU policy making to its own ends, do not hold your breath.

Even if you agree with the film’s extreme Chirackian-Gallic perspective, it is still difficult to watch Thierry Lhermitte’s ridiculously over the top turn as Taillard. You will see less shtick in an average Pauly Shore film. On the other hand, Raphaël Personnaz’s vanilla Vlaminck does nothing more than applaud his boss’s dramatic outbursts like a trained seal. The only measure of redemption comes from the unflaggingly reliable Niels Arestrup, who plays veteran civil servant Claude Maupas like a sly, understated cousin to Nigel Hawthorne’s Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister.

Bertrand Tavernier has made some great films, including one of the all time great jazz movies, Round Midnight, as well as the elegantly tragic historical, The Princess of Montpensier. This is not anywhere close to their league. Frankly, Pierre Schöller’s similarly titled The Minster brings far more wit and insight to bear on French politics, but frustratingly, it has yet to find an American distributor. Smugly self-satisfied and self-congratulatory, The French Minister desperately wants to soak up the adulation it hasn’t earned. Not recommended, it opens this Friday (3/21) in New York at the IFC Center.

Tavernier’s Princess of Montpensier

Apologists often claim arranged marriages produce wedded contentment, at least by the standards of their specific cultural contexts. One Sixteenth Century French noblewoman would beg to differ. Only tragedy and resentment will follow her forced union in Bertrand Tavernier’s The Princess of Montpensier (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

In love with the rakish Duc de Guise, Marie de Mézières is content with her promised marriage to his adoring brother, expecting it will allow their affair to continue unabated. Unfortunately, for reasons of money and prestige, her father accepts a better offer, marrying her off to the fiercer but less dashing Prince of Montpensier. With a religious civil war sweeping France, the Prince sends his reluctant new wife to his most secluded estate, leaving her in the charge of his former mentor, the Comte de Chabannes.

A grizzled veteran wracked with guilt over the atrocities he has committed, Chabannes is now the Sixteenth Century equivalent of a conscientious objector. He is also a deserter according to the King’s law, so his liberty is entirely dependent of Montpensier’s protection. This puts him in an awkward position when he also falls in love with the Princess over the course of their lessons. It is not mutual though. The Princess still loves the Duc, making little effort to conceal her feelings from her husband. When the Princess also turns the head of the Duc d’Anju (the future King Henri III), his unwelcomed interest dramatically increases the stakes for her romantic intrigues.

Tavernier and co-screenwriters Jean Cosmos and François-Olivier Rousseau radically reconceived Madame de La Fayette’s short novella, yet the two-plus hours never feel padded. Quite the contrary, Montpensier is a lean, muscular film, brimming with war and amour. Instead of a cautionary tale of a woman undone by yearning, their Princess becomes her own woman, though it costs her dearly.

Mélanie Thierry shows tremendous range as the Princess, assuredly depicting her evolution from an innocent coquette to a wisdom-hardened woman mature beyond her years. Nevertheless, Lambert Wilson (recently seen in Xavier Beauvois’ mostly very good Of Gods and Men) truly personifies the soul of the film as Chabannes. It is not mere remorse or longing that he expresses, but something even more profound. He loves for love’s sake, while coming to terms with his contributions to the chaos and hatred roiling the era.

In a way, Montpensier is a familiar story of thwarted love, yet Tavernier spins his yarn into a big bold historical epic. His battle scenes are gritty and grimy, but he also deftly draws viewers into the characters’ web of mutual and unrequited passions. Once again, Tavernier’s film strikingly employs music. For obvious reasons, the Academy Award winning jazz of Round Midnight and the blues and Zydeco of In the Electric Mist would clash with the tenor of the time, but frequent collaborator Philippe Sarde’s stirring score incorporates chorale and string arrangements that evoke the period without slavishly mimicking its composers.

Montpensier is the type of sweeping and sprawling epic that is a joy to dig into when done well. In this case, Tavernier’s execution is masterly. Richly entertaining and thoroughly engrossing, Montpensier opens this Friday (4/15) in New York at the IFC Center.

Swamp Noir: In the Electric Mist

In the Electric Mist
Directed by Bertrand Tavernier
Image Entertainment

While New Orleans might be the birthplace of jazz, there has always been plenty of blues going on in the rest of Louisiana. After all, it is delta country, where bluesmen like Robert Pete Williams and Lightnin’ Slim helped develop an appropriately swampy local sound. The bayou is also the stomping ground of James Lee Burke’s Detective Dave Robicheaux, who makes his second film appearance in Bertrand Tavernier’s In the Electric Mist (trailer here), now available on DVD.

Mist is Tavernier’s first dramatic feature shot in North America, but he seems to have an affinity for the region beyond the French language. The veteran film-maker directed Dexter Gordon to an Academy Award nomination in the classic jazz drama ‘Round Midnight and with Robert Parrish co-directed the documentary Mississippi Blues. Indeed, the sounds of the region are well represented in Mist, particularly in the figure of bluesman Sam “Hogman” Patin, played by the true blues legend Buddy Guy, long a fixture of the Chicago Blues scene, but born in Lettsworth, LA.

Tommy Lee Jones specializes in playing the world-weariness Robicheaux will soon feel in Mist. A recovering alcoholic, Robicheaux has a loving wife and young daughter, but his professional life is about to get ugly, and even tragic. While frustrated by the lack of leads in the case of a savagely murdered prostitute, Robicheaux is tipped off to the location of a decades-old body of an African American man in the swamp. The disinterested cops in the neighboring parish simply dismiss it as a matter of extra paper-work, but the circumstances of the crime scene strike a chord with Robicheaux. As he pursues both cases, officially and unofficially, he begins to suspect a connection between them, focusing his attention on “Babyfeet” Balboni, a local mobster turned Hollywood moneyman.

It is surprising Mist had such scant American theatrical distribution after its premiere at the Berlinale Film Festival, considering it top-shelf cast. Jones is perfectly cast as the craggy Cajun. John Goodman chews the scenery with relish as Balboni, and Mary Steenburgen does what she can in the thankless role of Robicheaux’s understanding wife, Bootsie. Also, look out for indy filmmaker John Sayles in a small role as a director making a Civil War film in the parish, which he pretentiously intends to be an allegory for Iraq.

As Patin, Guy shows impressive screen-presence, probably beating Jones at his own game of understated intensity in their scenes together. He also has some cool musical numbers with Nathan Williams and the Zydeco Cha Chas, nicely integrating the earthy goodtime sounds of Louisiana with the dramatic story.

While the relatively routine crime story of Mist might harbor few surprises, the sheer volume of suffering inflicted on its protagonist sets it a measure apart from other mystery fare. It is a decidedly dark film noir, deeply steeped in the Bayou atmosphere. That music and ambiance, along with the perfectly pitched performances of Jones, Guy, and Goodman make Mist quite an entertaining little thriller.