October: French Art House II
October: French Art House II, FLMTQ Releases 208-212
During the month of October Filmatique presents French Art House II, a collection of works by some of the finest filmmakers working in France.
Following his droll Normandy-set murder mystery Li'l Quinquin, Bruno Dumont's Slack Bay once more mobilizes the formalism of the absurd to interrogate class difference amid a provincial French community. Diverging from her slapstick performance in Slack Bay, Juliette Binoche plays the role of a journalist investigating Parisian prostitution rings in Elles, a modern feminist tale by award-winning Polish filmmaker Malgoska Szumowska. Louis Garrel's sophmore feature and New York Times Critics' Pick A Faithful Man charts the evolution of a couple's shifting allegiances over the course of a decade. Both Martin Provost's Violette and Alain Resnais's You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! examine the creative process—the former through the eyes of Violette LeDuc, protégé of Simone de Beauvoir, the latter as a group of theater actors re-enact the play Eurydice.
Themes of love, sex, feminism, art, and class relations pervade the second edition of Filmatique's French Art House series, offering a window into the preoccupations of contemporary French society.
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Slack Bay, Bruno Dumont (2017)
Slack Bay, Bruno Dumont / France-Germany-Belgium, 2017
The bourgeois Van Peteghem family are no strangers to the bliss of upper-class existence. Perched atop the cliffs of Normandy, the eccentric clan of relatives have congregated in their family villa, where they will spend the summer overlooking resplendent Slack Bay. The blithe luxury of their days is interrupted, however, when two local inspectors arrive at their manse, seeking information on a series of disappearances in the area. Mysteries mount as ever more tourists go missing, and internal tensions soon send the stately aristocrats into a frenzy.
Blending Belle Époque-era period details with contemporary class critique, and starring French cinema titans Juliette Binoche, Fabrice Luchini, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Slack Bay is striated along lines of pitch-black, absurdist farce. Bruno Dumont's follow-up to Li'l Quinquin premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Karlovy Vary, Melbourne, Jerusalem, and Seville, where it won Best Actress and Best Film.
Elles, Malgoska Szumowska (2011)
Elles, Malgoska Szumowska / France-Poland-Germany, 2011
Anne is a middle-aged journalist for Elle Magazine who lives in Paris with her young family. As part of an assignment she begins investigating the city's underground prostitution scene, interviewing two students who have entered the profession for disparate reasons. Anne's work on the article soon blossoms into friendships with the two women, their confrontations with fear, desire, and subordination summoning uneasy resonances with Anne's experiences of domesticity and discontent.
Featuring a fearless performance by Juliette Binoche as a woman uncovering the insidious effects of patriarchy and power structures in her own life, alongside those much less privileged than herself, Elles is a daring examination of feminism and gender politics in contemporary France. The fourth feature from award-winning Polish filmmaker Malgoska Szumowska (Mug, Never Gonna Snow Again) premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, Toronto, and Tribeca.
A Faithful Man, Louis Garrel (2018)
A Faithful Man, Louis Garrel / France, 2018
Abel has just gotten back together with Marianne, nine years after she left him for his best friend. In the interim Marianne had a son, Joseph, and Abel seems to look forward to their new life together—soon, however, Abel is being pursued by Ève, a young woman who has been infatuated with Abel since her youth, while Joseph displays escalating signs of disturbance, including troubling accusations regarding his father's death.
Pivoting breezily between past and present, male and female vantage points, and co-written with legendary screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, A Faithful Man unsettles conventional tropes of patriarchy in the French New Wave. Prominent French actor Louis Garrel's second feature film premiered at Berlin; Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize; San Sebastián, where it won the Jury Prize for Best Screenplay; and BAFICI, where it won Best Director. A Faithful Man is a New York Times Critics' Pick.
Violette, Martin Provost (2013)
Violette, Martin Provost / France-Belgium, 2013
Violette hasn't had an easy life. Born the illegitimate daughter of a housemaid, she scrapes by as a black marketeer during WWII, in love but unhappily wed to a gay writer, Maurice Sachs. Violette too is determined to write, and out of both talent and perseverance she nestles herself into Paris's post-war intellectual scene. A deep friendship with Simone de Beauvoir changes the course of her life, as Violette soon finds herself a novelist in her own right.
A finely-drawn portrait of notable twentieth-century writer Violette LeDuc, Violette is attuned to the nuances of one woman's struggle to escape the obscurity of her origins, to forge a life of creative value and personal repute. Martin Provost's fifth feature premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, BFI London, and Haifa, where it won a Special Mention. Violette is a New York Times Critics' Pick.
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet!, Alain Resnais (2012)