French Stars Shine: Stephen Holt covers Rendez-Vous Avec French Cinema 2015

by Stephen Holt

It’s always a pleasure to participate in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s great “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.” The audiences are always as varied, delightful and intensely interesting, by age and gender, accurately reflecting the always-thrilling diversity depicted on screen.

This year the Rendez-vous initiated for its’ 20th anniversary, a series of Live Free Talks open to the public, cinephiles all.

I attended a particularly memorable one called “Actress On Actress” with French film icon Natalie
Baye and actress-turned-director Melanie Laurent. I got to ask the first question, which was how, when it seems even films with women as the central characters struggle to be made in the U.S., never mind films made BY women themselves, how is it that in France, it seems definitely not
be the case.

I pointed out that even this year’s Oscar nominations for Best Actress only had FOUR nominees in English speaking films, and the fifth was a French woman, Marion Cotillard, acting in her own language in a Belgian Film, “Deux Jours, Une Nuit.”(Two Days, One Night).

Both actreses seemed a bit astonished that this should be so, but Melanie Laurent was quick to answer. “In France, it is never the gender of the character that matters, it’s whether the script is good or not. If the script is good, whether about a man or a woman, it will get made.”

And they both felt that actors and actresses were treated equally across the board, and that even extended to women as directors, too.

Laurent felt she experienced no resistance to her attempting to change her career path to include directing. Her second film “Breathe” or “Respire” was featured in this year’s Rendez-Vous. Though “Breathe” was about a teenage lesbian love story, no one even thought to bring this up as a topic or question to Laurent. It was simply accepted as a well-told romance

Also on hand in person, was the charming quipster and heart-throb Guillaume Canet, who picked up all five of the hand mikes that were on the floor when he ascended the stage, and held them like a bouquet of roses, and said “I am not a serial killer.” Though the actor/screenwriter/director actually played TWO in two films at the Rendez-Vous “Next Time I’ll Aim for the Heart” and “In the Name of My Daughter.” Both noirs based on true stories, he told of actually being able to talk on the phone to the man whose character he was portraying in “Daughter” which co-stars Catherine Deneuve as his mother-in-law.”Sometimes the conversations would go on for hours,” he said. “It was wonderful to have that much information, but it was weird.”
And what was it like acting for the first time opposite the legendary Deneuve? “I was always scared,” he said.

Just as scary, I imagine as he was in “Next Time I’ll Aim for the Heart”(“La Prochaine Fois Je Viserai Le Coeur”) which was my favorite film this year I have to say. This year’s theme of the Rendez-Vous was a celebration of French Film Noir and there was plenty of excellent examples of that on hand.

In “Next Time”, Canet chillingly but expertly interprets the mind of a notorious French serial killer, who terrorized France in the winter of 1978-79. The twist here, and it’s true, he was one of the main gendarmes inspecting the case. No wonder they couldn’t solve it!

It was a wonderful cat-and-mouse thriller, with Canet’s schizoid character constantly throwing the police off the track. HIS track. Cedric Anger, who was once a critic for “Cahiers du Cinema” wrote and directed this taut true crime thriller.

I also liked “Wild Life” or “Vie Sauvage” which was about the tortured flight of a father escaping his divorced wife with two of their young sons. Also based on a true story, as many of the films in this year’s Rendez-vous were, it tells the story completely from the point of view of the anguished hippie dad, who wants his sons to live free off the land, nomadic-ly, in modern day France. Not an easy thing to do. Constantly chased by the police, their life underground and on the run was fascinating. Mathieu Kassovitz and Celine Sallette played the warring parents to perfection. Directed by Cedric Kahn.

I also liked “Hippocrates,” a Paris-set hospital drama, written and directed by Thomas Lilti, who is himself a doctor. The lack of funds are crippling the staff of this small hospital which struggles to treat its’ patients, and save their lives against vast bureaucratic and economic obstacles. Another film, “Eat My Bones” showed the underbelly of French society, the lives of the French trailer park gypsies, as they, too, struggle and plot, their only alternative seeming to be a life of crime.

And of course, the biggest French star of them all at the moment, Best Actor Oscar Winner Jean du Jardin, was back in fine form as the good cop in a very gritty gangster flick that is sure to be a hit stateside. “La Connection” is the French side of the drug ring depicted in the original “French Connection.” As a shoot’em-up genre film, it kept the beat going on with the back-drop of the French Riviera in 1970’s glamorous, but drug-ridden Marseilles.

As you can see, these French films keep besting their American counter-parts at every turn. And Vive la Difference, I say!