Category: FFF

There is a stereotype that the British view the French as over-sexed. So far in the French Film Festival I’m realising that is not a stereotype. The Comparative Literature lecturer in this hands out the course text of poetry and tells the class to really “savour the eroticism”. You do that in Glasgow, the whole class would cut up laughing and make a dick-sucking gesture behind your back the entire year.

A Tale of Love and Desire follows two lovers Ahmed and Farah, as they negotiate the complexities of sex and relationships in today’s France. Farah is a Tunisian student who’s come to study in Paris, and is eager to see all this new world can offer, and cut loose and enjoy the uni experience. Nervous virgin Ahmed is here to make sure it’s a real bummer.

Ahmed is from a working class neighbourhood and feels like a fish out of water at the Sorbonne. He barely speaks, can hardly look anyone in the eye, and struggles to relax or make friends. Then he spies Farah.

To Farah, Ahmed is French. She came to France for the French experience, you know, smooth talking, poetry whispering, wine-quaffing, romantic shaggers. Ahmed is none of that. He’s awkward, inarticulate, emotionally crippled, sexually repressed, and painfully shy to the point of paranoia. He acts like Tunisia is some back of beyond, but Farah is freer, more sexually experienced, more confident and happier in her own skin.

Ahmed’s parents are Algerian, but he doesn’t speak Arabic or even know much about that part of his heritage. Class is a much more defining part of his identity in relation to folk at uni. He doesn’t even seem to consider himself particularly religious, but he is heavily invested in the sense of propriety he was raised with. Which is a happy coincidence if you’re an anxious virgin.

To Farah, Ahmed seems more conservative and parochial than the middle-class Tunisian culture she grew up in back home. She finds him blowing hot and cold very frustrating, as you would, and feels judged and shamed whenever she reaches out for him. In all honesty, Ahmed manages to have all the hallmarks of a fuckboy without the fuck.

But I’m being a little harsh. Ahmed is 18. All his mates are other guys, who in typical toxic masculinity fashion, talk up a good game about women, then can barely interact with them. They swing between desire for sexual accessibility and controlling, shaming, and repressing women who are. You know, the usual patriarchy standards.

It doesn’t exactly equip you to deal with first love, or your first time, or living in a very sexually-charged French culture. This is one of those love stories where the only obstacle two lovers have is themselves.

While I still think Ahmed acts like a twat in this, I do get his fear of sex in a world where it has become so much of commodity, a chit in social standing, a matter for the public record. It’s not even about sex not being about love, it’s about sex not even being about sex. It’s about ego, and using the body of another for validation, and as a status symbol. Even if sex were just about sex, it would still retain respect, intimacy, privacy, and eroticism. But we all know of that dead-eyed fucking, that fucking where it’s like you’re trying to stab yourself. In a world where people are used as objects, sex is reduced to a transaction of social currency, and ceases to be, in a word, sexy.

Ahmed loves Farah but doesn’t know how to tell her what he wants. When he wants to touch her, he pulls away if she responds. If she initiates, he shuts down. When she offers to go slow, it comes to a grinding halt. And Ahmed is as frustrated as anybody at his own inability to respond correctly, or illicit the response he wants, or to know in the least bit what the fuck he’s doing.

In a hypersexualised culture, to negotiate love and desire remains as enigmatic as the world of the centuries-old poets they read.

Playground is a film about a brother and sister surviving primary school. The opening scene is of Nora’s first day, being reassured by her big brother Abel, and torn away from her father.

I just watched this and was like, yup, that’s what it’s like. The synopsis of this film will say it’s about bullying, but it’s not, it’s about the way the world is, the way people are. I remember talking to some lassies at uni about primary school stuff, and getting annoyed when they gasped, “Were you bullied?” No, that’s just life.

If anything, Nora is in a far nicer school than I remember it being. All the teachers are sympathetic and patient, and genuinely concerned by her silences. I watched the movie thinking, Where’s this school? Where the teachers have the time deal with every playground fight, and get to the bottom of exactly what’s behind it? Where they have the patience to sit and comfort children until they’re ready to talk, and give a fuck?

The teachers I think are paragons so as to be a non-issue, and keep all the focus on the world of children, or the world of people as it’s also known. Again, and I think I’ve said this before in another review, I hate how we treat children and their problems as though they’re separate and different from the world we live in. We talk about bullying and use it almost solely in the context of school, but all it is is assholes. People are arseholes, and when you are legally obliged to show up to the same institution every day with the same arseholes, it makes you miserable. How do you adjudicate for that? How do you administer that?

We talk about children’s bullying because their issues look small to us, their interactions seem trivial. But once they are out the peri dish of school and into the wider world, the same dynamics take hold, the same struggles and the same miseries, and they get writ large as huge social problems. Nora and Abel’s problem is that social groups have a pecking order, and it’s dangerous to be at the bottom of that order. That’s it.

My other great annoyance is when adults act like all problems are solvable when the people experiencing them are children. They’re not. If bullying was a petty children’s issue that was resolved by telling a teacher, it wouldn’t exist, it would have been resolved. If we knew how to fix this problem, it wouldn’t be a problem in every classroom, in every school, generation after generation.

Nora and Abel are on their own to try and find a way to exist in this world, safely and happily. And if they don’t, it’ll be decades before they’re free of this system. You can only hope, with what lies ahead of them, that they have each other.

This is a wonderful and warm film about Irene, a 16-year-old girl, bursting with life, who is practicing for her audition to get into drama college. A Radiant Girl follows her as she annoys her brother, has her first crush, shares her secrets with her grandma, and embarks on the journey into the bright world of adulthood.

When you first see Irene, you can tell that the clothes are old-fashioned but your mind doesn’t immediately place the time. They don’t lean into being a period drama, showing it more as a family story with Irene at the heart. The buildings and settings all seem familiar, and nothing strikes you as the alien past.

So you are in quite a bit, having watched her run her lines with her friends, bam up her brother, and talk with her grandma about boys, when you hear her dad say, “Bring me the ID cards, they need updated with a new stamp”, and you realise it’s the 1940s and they’re Jews. Oh.

A Radiant Girl is about the life of a girl, not the death. It is a very warm and joyful story on one hand, but also a respectful attempt to show and celebrate the life of someone who might otherwise only be known for what was done to them.

Irene is a force of nature, fearless, energetic, full of love and life. She is playful, cheeky, and has youth’s intensity. She winds up her brother but is fiercely loyal and loving to him at the same time. She can always cheer up her worry-wart father. And she and her grandmother share the same rebellious spirit, keeping each other alive with gossip and excitement.

The other, the antisemitism, comes in so stealthily and suddenly, and in such weird and bureaucratic ways. And while it is shit, to Irene it has nothing to do with her, or her world, or her plans. It is not a new thing for Jews to face discrimination, be made to jump through legal loopholes. A stamp on a card, and eventually a badge on a jacket, is an irksome but not unprecedented event. Antisemitism has existed in societies for centuries, and though it ebbs and flows, people survive. What we know is to come seems impossible from where Irene stands.

A Radiant Girl is a wonderful film which asks us to celebrate the life of one girl, to share her joys, her hopes, her dreams. To laugh with her and her family, to sigh with her first love’s kiss, and to rejoice in her achievements with her friends and schoolmates. And not let the darkness eclipse her story, but let her take centrestage in her life. A magnificent film.

This is such a Sunday afternoon movie. Lying on your granny’s carpet listening to her tell you what everyone on screen died of.

Summer Light reminds me of nothing so much as an episode of Frasier. There’s everyone chasing each other, a ludicrous and precarious party, and disaster always looming. While ostensibly a romantic drama, it has enough helpings of comic relief that it’s not far off.

It is about Michele, a beautiful and innocent young woman who comes to meet her lover in a hillside bed and breakfast in Provence. There she learns lessons in love that will leave her older and more cautious.

Obvious cad, and full-on no-righty, Patrice catches sight of her, and marks her for his next conquest. His last one is Cricri, who runs the hotel, but he has since grown bored with her.

Cricri is half mad with jealousy, knowing full well that Patrice no longer cares for her, and has his eye on the younger woman, but he gaslights her and manipulates her until she is unsure where to focus her rage. She alone knows what Patrice is capable of though. She covered for him when he murdered his wife, believing him to have done it for love of her. She also nursed him when he was mentally unwell after the death. Now he is back on his feet, he is done with her.

Patrice’s seduction doesn’t go as planned though. Michele is devoted to her lover Roland, who she seems to have met during a creative manic streak, and is now getting to know on his way down, into despair and alcoholism. Working in the theatre and being three sheets to the wind, Roland is ostentatiously melodramatic, playing the tortured artist. But sincerely he begs Michele to leave him, knowing he will pull her down in his spiral of self-destruction too.

The other innocent in this is Julien. He works on the nearby dam, and only comes across this shower of upper-class shambles by stopping by the hotel on his way to work one night, and accidentally walking into Michele’s room. In the darkness, she kisses him passionately, believing him to be Roland. From the first kiss, Julien falls in love with her.

The film follows Michele as Patrice draws her ever closer in a web of falsehood and ill-intent. He encourages Roland’s drinking, leaving Michele despondent and disillusioned with love. All the while Cricri tries to warn Michele and regain Patrice’s affection, a dual purpose which leaves her with no credibility. And what will Patrice do when finds the lowly Julien is a rival?

All this culminates on the night of the masquerade ball at Patrice’s mansion. Will Michele be seduced by his machinations? Will the fair Julien win her love? Will she bring herself to leave the drunken Roland? And what will happen when Cricri makes clear just what Patrice is capable of to get what he wants?

Overlong and tedious film. It focuses on France de Meurs, a tv personality who starts taking crying jags. France is a rich, privileged, white woman who has everything, but is still somehow sad. It’s the Anna Karenina conundrum. And I give zero fucks.

There is barely the wisp of a plot to this. Whole scenes effectively repeat themselves in different settings. There are, hm, maybe 4 or 5 hundred shots of France just staring silently directly into the camera while tears roll down her cheeks. The camerawork is so lazy, there’s nothing to even keep your attention visually. There will be the same three types of shots just used over and over again. And towards the end, when we get something which might be considered a dramatic incident, it is so OTT that people in the cinema were actually laughing. It was like a cartoon. I actually wanted to take a red pen to this film and scrawl over it, “What is the point of this shot? What does it give the audience that they don’t already have?”

There is no character development. It’s hard to even describe France as a character. She doesn’t do anything but cry and have an apartment that looks like if Liberace ran a museum.

One good thing I will say about it is the costume design was on point. I feel like the costume department had a clearer idea of who this character was than the writer, director, or the audience.

An absolute waste of time.

Set almost entirely within an A&E on a night of Yellow Vest protests, The Divide follows the collision of a number of characters as tensions run high. Reminiscent of something like Clash, the political situation in France is boiled down to this one place.

There are four main characters, a lesbian couple on the verge of breaking up, a Yellow Vest protestor, and a nurse who is at her wit’s end trying to meet the needs that are far outstripping the hospital’s ability to provide. There are only a few establishing scenes before entering the A&E, introducing Raphaelle and Julie.

Julie is leaving her wife, and you understand why after 5 minutes of sharing the screen with her. She’s narcissistic, relentless, and thoroughly obnoxious. She goes down on her elbow in the street, after following and continuing to argue with Julie after she’s been clear and explicit about wanting to drop the subject because her decision’s been made. She then tries to leverage her injury to make Julie stay with her, if only for the evening at the hospital.

The other short scenes before we enter the A&E are of Yann, a truck driver, sick of insecure employment, shit wages, and being unable to support himself, who has come to protest in a march down the Champs-Elysee towards the presidential palace. Yann is passionate, pissed off, and hopelessly naïve about what to expect. He’s actually enjoying himself and having a laugh, he offers the riot cops a smoke and asks them to join the protest, since it’s their shit wages and pensions too. He seems genuinely surprised when they respond with tear gas and grenades.

So you have an A&E full of the usual night’s falls and scrapes, the Yellow Vests pouring in injured, and the hospital understaffed and struggling to hold it together. The hospital staff themselves have been out on strike, with signs on the walls saying, “Overworked staff = patient safety”. Yann tells them they should be out protesting with him, they ask who would be here to treat folk like him if they did that.

At first the film is somewhat buoyant, even funny at times. Yann tries to rally support for the protests from people in the waiting room who are just exhausted, hungry, and sore. Raf throws a fit like a toddler every time Julie leaves her side. Together they end up bickering, and are generally the kind of nightmare patients hospital staff dread.

But as the night wears on, tensions ramp up. It’s obvious the nurses don’t have enough staff to cope, people are waiting for hours to be seen by a doctor, and it’s only a matter of time before something gets missed. And then the police show up and make everything worse. Classic.

The Divide shows the effects of the public sector cuts, while simultaneously showing the violence of the repression of those trying to oppose them. It puts a face on the long waits, the exhausted staff, and traces the impacts that get hidden among the stats – not catching a problem in time, leaving vulnerable patients alone for hours on end, having problems escalate when they could be avoided altogether with timely and effective first treatment.

The Divide in the film stands for many things, for Raf and Julie’s breakup, for their separation from their son who is also demonstrating in these matches, for the haves and have-nots in France. Whether it is class, politics, love or power, The Divide shows a deeply fractured society that is struggling to unite even behind the basic fight to survive.

Lingui, meaning The Sacred Bonds, is a film about a woman seeking an abortion for her daughter in Chad where it is illegal.

A real feminist film about throwing off what’s been handed down from on high as the misogynistic status quo, and prioritising women’s wellbeing and relationships. Amina is a devout Muslim, going to mosque for every prayer, dressing modestly, and working hard turning old tyres into baskets. One day she finds out her only daughter, Maria, is pregnant.

Amina is herself a single mother, having been deeply in love with, but abandoned by, Maria’s father. Castigated and thrown out on her own by her family, to Amina her daughter is her only family, and her world.

So when she discovers her daughter is pregnant at 15, it’s like a nightmare come true, watching history repeat itself. At first she reacts like she’s been shown all her life, beating her daughter and scolding her for the shame she’s brought upon them. When Maria says she wants an abortion, Amina tells her it is forbidden in Islam.

But when it looks like she might lose her daughter for good, Amina realises what’s really important. She puts everything she has into getting her daughter an abortion. Her top priority is safety, but there is a cost. So scrambling for money becomes a night-and-day endeavour, taking her to places she never thought she’d go.

And in some ways, it changes her. Sometimes the worst happening is liberating. She finally stops putting all her strength and energy into winning at a game that is rigged against her from the start. When you finally let go off trying to live up to patriarchy’s impossible standards, it makes you realise how exhausted you’ve been this whole time.

Amina starts smoking, and doesn’t bother covering her hair, or showing up to mosque. She still prays, you can see her, but she prays with her heart looking out towards God. In some ways, it’s a sincerer form of religiosity than she had before.

Maria sees how much her mother is doing, to ensure she can get safe healthcare and return to school to study. Their relationship improves greatly, because they see their love for each other clearly. Amina is not trying to beat Maria down like she was, she is taking her daughter’s hand and liberating themselves together.

A wonderful story of a mother-daughter relationship, and about the power of women supporting each other.

Hello World is a beautiful little children’s film, mixing paper mache stop-gap animation with a traditional 2D animation, to bring to life the wildlife of a forest pond.

Each animal starts off being born and discovering the world, the beaver, the pike, the dragonfly, the salamander, the owl, the bittern, the tortoise, the kingfisher, the bat. They try to figure out what they are and what the world is, what can be eaten and what might eat them. Each views themselves as the centre of their universe, and delights in finding a world so plentiful and resplendent.

The animation style is just great, with you still able to read the text on the paper under the painting. The moon glows, and has typing across its face. It’s just lovely to see.

A great film to get kids interested in ecology and the natural world.

This movie is so French.

It’s about a cook who is fired from the service of an evil Duke, and opens the first restaurant in France. It’s basically about the first Frenchman to French. It’s great.

Delicious is a feast for the eyes, even with its almost fable-like plot. Every shot is sumptuous, tracing light like dripping honey. The palette is warm, with earthy hues of peasant life. The kitchen glows like the beaming of homely joy. The cook’s cottage is illuminated in the pocket of country fields.

And the food! My god, eat immediately before seeing it, or you’ll come out ravenous. I wanted to taste everything I saw. The walnuts, the chorizo, the omelettes, the roast pig, the salmon, O! This is a film that really asks you to smell what is before you.

The plot is hilariously tropish, but in a way that is so wholesome, like a bedtime tale. The evil Duke spurns the cook, and humiliates him. But the cook returns to his cottage in the country with all the skills he learnt, and opens a roadside tavern, which grows into a new kind of idea as the film goes on – a restaurant. Influenced by his son’s burgeoning class consciousness, and his own awakening sense of the unfairness of the situation, he decides to throw open the ability to enjoy his cooking to the people, of any status, who may come and eat anything they like for equal payment.

Perhaps the best revenge is living well.

Based on George Orwell’s The Road To Wigan Pier, Juliette Binoche stars as an undercover journalist reporting on work instability and poverty in France. The first half of the film shows the realities of work on the tenuous end of the breadline in 21st century France, while the latter half of the film deals with the ethics of such an investigation.

I didn’t read The Road To Wigan Pier, but I did read Down and out in Paris and London, which had a similar premise. Orwell was an aristocrat’s son who committed to his socialist principles, and decided to work in the entry-level jobs open at the time. He hoped to expose the appalling conditions the working class endured. I suppose because it was long ago, and we know Orwell spent his life fully committed to those principles, we don’t question really the ethics of what he did.

But Juliette Binoche’s character really does bring the morality of it starkly to the fore. By setting it in the here and now, it actually reminded me more of something like Black Like Me, another book in which a white Northerner went undercover as a Black American in the South during segregation. That books attracts a lot more scrutiny, and for good reason. It begs the question of Binoche’s character, why do we need the middle-class to translate the working-class experience? Why do we need her to expose it? It is already here for anyone to see. And when she justifies it by saying she wants to raise awareness of it as an issue, you just want to ask, are people really unaware of the fact folk are broke? Or is the issue that all the people with the power to change it don’t give a fuck?

After all, the journalist walks away at the end of the day with a best-selling book, reaping the rewards of purveying a look at these people’s poverty, and the people themselves go right back to work every day, scrubbing shit off toilets and stripping beds. What money do they see off their story? A story they could easily tell for themselves if they weren’t busy being exploited all fucking day.

The character you feel sorriest for is Christele, who doesn’t have much, living hand to mouth to feed her kids, but who feels like she’s finally found a friend. Of course, that turns out to be bullshit too, and ends in disappointment as so much in her life has.

An interesting look at journalist ethics and class in today’s France.