The San Francisco Film Society French Cinema Now series
Oct. 28-Nov. 3, 2010

Following is the schedule of the SFFS French film series, which shows at the Embarcadero Cinemas at the times given below. I've already reviewed three of these films (see links) and plan to be reviewing some others, including Copocabana, A Real Life, and The Princess of Monpensier.

Copacabana
Marc Fitoussi (France 2010) (screener)
Thursday, October 28, 6:45 pm & Friday, October 29, 9:30 pm
Isabelle Huppert reaffirms her status as one of cinema’s most indispensable actresses. She plays the flighty, strong-willed Elizabeth (“Babou” to her friends), who lives with her more conservative daughter Esmeralda in the north of France. When the latter announces that Elizabeth is not invited to her upcoming wedding, mom decamps for the coast of Belgium in order to prove to her child that she can live a “normal” life. There, her gregarious but no-nonsense nature brings her in contact with friendly locals, a homeless couple traveling rough and an increasingly jealous cadre of coworkers. Marc Fitoussi’s charming script refuses to point fingers, presenting mother and daughter as the flawed people they both are. Adding additional cinephiliac frisson to the scenario is the fact that Lolita Chammah, who plays Esmeralda, is Huppert’s real-life child.

Rapt
Lucas Belvaux (France 2009)Thursday, October 28, 9:30 pm & Monday, November 1, 9:15 pm -- seen and reviewed.[/b] Fendez-Vous with French Cinema, Lincoln Center, Feb. 2010.
With his newest work, director Lucas Belvaux continues his interest in using the thriller genre to explore issues of class and society. Based on the real-life 1978 kidnapping of wealthy playboy Edouard-Jean Empain, Rapt stars Yvan Attal as Stanislas Graff, a wildly successful but self-centered and arrogant CEO abducted by a brutal group who want €50 million for his return. As investigators move in on the case and uncover Graff’s various debts and affairs, his family and business partners become increasingly embarrassed and upset. So much so, in fact, that they decide they’d rather not pay the ransom, a decision which takes the film into highly original and divergent territory. Attal is mesmerizing, taking his character through wrenching emotional and physical shifts, supported by stellar work from Anne Consigny and Claire Denis regular Alex Descas. Thought-provoking on many different levels, Rapt offers genre entertainment with brains and style.

Sisters
Éléonore Faucher (Gamines, France 2009)
Saturday, October 30, 3:45 pm & Sunday, October 31, 6:45 pm
Landmark's Embarcadero Center Cinema
Based on Sylvie Testud’s autobiographical novel, this elegiac film tells the story of three sisters and their overwhelming longing for their absent father. Growing up in 1970s Lyon with their Italian mother, the siblings overhear discussions about and find pictures of this mysterious parent, but are kept away from him. Rumors of inappropriate behavior and excessive drinking dog his reputation, but the Mercier girls—especially pale, freckled middle-child Sibylle, who is constantly referred to as her dad’s spitting image—still obsess and muse about his interests and appearance. Telescoping the action between two pivotal time periods—a summer in early adolescence and 30 years later when the girls are young adults (with Testud playing her alter ego Sibylle)—writer/director Éléonore Faucher (Sequins, SFIFF 2005) depicts a warm yet unsentimental portrait of a closely knit clan who nevertheless remain mysterious to each other and sometimes to themselves.

Irene
Alain Cavalier (France 2009)
Friday, October 29, 5:00 pm & Saturday, October 30, 1:45 pm
Landmark's Embarcadero Center Cinema
Alain Cavalier’s moving, intimate film is resolutely small-scale, recorded by the director himself using a small digital camera. With a diarist’s sensibility, he revisits the components, both ecstatic and painful, of his first marriage, a relationship abruptly ended by his wife’s fatal car accident in 1972. Finding her resemblance in a Manet painting or brought to reminisce by a ruffled duvet, a heart-shaped rock or a particular journal entry, the filmmaker delineates their life together, touchingly parsing his deep love for his troubled wife. In addition to his very personal and idiosyncratic dive into the past—making “a whole film on a person vanished,” as he puts it—Cavalier explores his present-day circumstances and its limitations brought on by age and illness, including gout and an escalator accident. Steering clearly away from pity or hagiography toward its subjects, Irène is a sublime thought piece on memory and marriage.

Love Like Poison
Katell Quillévéré (Un poison violent, France 2010)
Friday, October 29, 7:00 pm & Sunday, October 31, 9:15 pm
Landmark's Embarcadero Center Cinema
A young girl’s confirmation provides the staging ground for issues of faith and sexuality in Katell Quillévéré’s assured debut feature. Young Anna lives in the Breton countryside with her devout mother and three grandparents, one of whom is bedridden. These adults, along with her nonreligious father and the parish priest, offer new and often-conflicting world views and words of advice to the confused teenager. Her burgeoning relationship with a neighborhood boy unveils additional unexplored territory. Compactly and fluidly shifting between these various characters as Anna pinballs uneasily among them, the film demonstrates the challenges of life at all ages, particularly heightened in adolescence. Augmented by a haunting score and lush outdoor locations, Love Like Poison attains a rapturous tone that makes it one of the more remarkable coming-of-age tales of recent years. Great performances abound, including newcomer Clara Augarde as Anna and esteemed comic actor Michel Galabru as her earthy grandfather.


The Princess of Menpensier
Bertrand Tavernier (La Princesse de Montpensier, France 2010)
Saturday, October 30, 6:30 pm & Sunday, October 31, 3:45 pm
Landmark's Embarcadero Center Cinema
With Mélanie Thierry, Lambert Wilson, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, Gaspard Ulliel.
Celebrated filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier’s latest is a sweeping drama of love and conflict set in the 16th century during France’s Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants. In a calculated strategic move by her father, Marie de Mézières, who has sworn young love to the dashing duc de Guise, is given in marriage to the prince of Montpensier, who rides off into battle soon after the wedding. The duc d’Anjou, heir to the throne, and the comte de Chabannes, a Prostestant deserter who is left to tutor Marie while her husband is away, are also drawn into the orbit of Marie’s magnetic beauty and intelligence, complicating both her and their own struggles with wealth, duty, stature and power. With realistically bloody battle scenes, a handsome cast of experienced pros and newcomers and a keen understanding of the intermingling of personal and political, Tavernier’s take on the costume romance feels at once true to its time and bracingly original.

A Real Life
Sarah Leonor (Au voleur, France 2009) -- (Screener)
Saturday, October 30, 9:30 pm & Tuesday, November 2, 6:30 pm
Landmark's Embarcadero Center Cinema[/b]
In this assured and visually compelling film, Guillaume Depardieu (in one of his final film roles) brings all of his scruffy charm to the character of Bruno, a small-time criminal living among a group of motley thieves. He encounters Isabelle (Florence Loiret-Caille), a German teacher, just after she’s been hit by a car. They meet again and become lovers. As the cops close in on Bruno, the couple takes to the woods and the film shifts from small-town portrait to romantic-pastoral idyll. It’s a tricky gambit, but writer/director Sarah Leonor pulls it off with aplomb. The first section uses very little music or extraneous details, paring Bruno’s and Isabelle’s lives to their essentials. The latter half is lighter and funnier with strange songs and beautiful countryside forming the backdrop to their languorous days. The puzzle of which environment is better—more “real”—is one of the tantalizing questions posed by this assured and visually compelling work.

Two in the Wave
Emmanuel Laurent (Deux de la vague, France 2009)
Sunday, October 31, 1:30 pm
Landmark's Embarcadero Center Cinema -- seen and reviewed. (Film Forum May 2010)
In 1959, Cannes screens The 400 Blows; in 1960, Breathless is released. The French New Wave is born and cinema is forever changed. With witty narration and in-depth knowledge of its subject, this informative and entertaining documentary covers the early careers of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, their close friendship borne out of their mutual love of film and their relationship’s eventual sundering. Film critic and former Cahiers du Cinema editor Antoine de Baecque’s script covers the filmmakers’ different biographical backgrounds; comradeship over mutual appreciation of particular directors; early short films; and subsequent peaks and valleys in their careers. Those who are familiar with the lives and work of the directors will appreciate the access to rare photos, magazines, interviews and film excerpts while those new to the story will appreciate the informative presentation. Actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, who worked frequently with both directors, also looms large in the tale, serving as the beloved child of two warring, impassioned parents.

Hidden Diary
Julie Lopes-Curval (Mères et filles, France 2009)
Monday, November 1, 6:30 pm & Tuesday, November 2, 9:15 pm
Landmark's Embarcadero Center Cinema
Past secrets irrevocably impact present relationships in Julie Lopes-Curval’s moving and graceful drama. Audrey (Marina Hands) returns to France to visit her aging parents at a critical juncture in her life. Her fraught relationship with her mother (Catherine Deneuve at her chilly best) leads Audrey to move into the abandoned house of her grandfather. There, she discovers a book of recipes and journal entries written by her grandmother, notes that reflect the circumscribed life of a married woman in a small town during the 1950s. As Audrey delves deeper, she comes to a greater understanding of her grandmother’s predicament, her mother’s anger and feelings of betrayal and her own life choices. With terrific performances and a keen eye for visual detail, including flashbacks based on Audrey’s reading of the diary, the film gradually, and with increasing emotional resonance, uncovers the layers of its three complex and conflicted female protagonists

Certified Copy
Abbas Kiarostami [Closing Night]
Wednesday, November 3, 7:00 & 9:15 pm -- seen and reviewed. (NYFF Lincoln Center Oct. 2010)
Playing with representations of authenticity and facsimile, master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami creates this gorgeous puzzle about a man and a woman’s travels through Tuscany. He is a British writer named James Miller, in Italy to promote his new book, and she has appointed herself as his tour guide. Miller’s essay—and this film—proposes that a copy has an inherent value that is separate from the original work. The two characters discuss this thesis along with related matters concerning art, nature and marriage, with issues of communication and language differences occupying the background. Kiarostami even playfully mimics himself during the couple’s long journey, using the windshield’s reflections of sun-burnished Tuscan buildings to refract the pair’s conversation. As the unnamed woman, Juliette Binoche’s wonderfully humane approach complements the film’s more formal pursuits and deservedly garnered the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her efforts.