French cinema
Mark Kidel
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a story of impossible love between two young women, takes place in the 18th century, on a wind-swept, wave-battered island off the coast of Brittany. The writer and director Céline Sciamma, who established herself as a unique voice and very capable filmmaker with films like Waterlilies (2008) and Tomboy (2011), explores once again the world of female passion.Marianne (Noémie Merlant) has been commissioned to paint the portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who has just been released from convent life and is destined to be married. She is impetuous, introverted and Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
The second half of Mark Cousins’ documentary on films by women filmmakers starts with religion; it ends with song and dance. This is a second seven-hour journey through cinema. It reconfirms Women Make Film as a remarkable feat of excavation and curation, as its twenty chapters showcase overlooked, excellent work by far-flung filmmakers. Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi and Wang Ping, socialist China’s first female director, are featured alongside film-school favourites like Denis and Akerman.The actresses Thandie Newton (pictured below) and Debra Winger are lead narrators now. Their Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
With influences as diverse as Hitchcock’s Vertigo to 2010’s Catfish, Safy Nebbou’s genre-splicing French-language feature, starring Juliette Binoche, comes loaded with a heady mix of cheap thrills and surprising psychological depth. And it’s a hoot from start to finish. Nebbou’s sixth and most accomplished feature is an adaptation of Camille Lauren’s 2016 novel, ‘Celle que vous croyez’. Binoche is Claire, a fifty-something literature professor, with two children from a failed marriage. We meet her being interviewed by a psychiatrist, Doctor Bormans (Nicole Garcia), the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It may offer veteran French star Catherine Deneuve as substantial and engaging a role as she has enjoyed in years, but the real surprise of The Truth is that it’s the work of Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda. The director, whose Shoplifters took the Palme d’Or at Cannes two years ago, has made a distinctive move away from his native environment – and, no less importantly, language: apart from a few scenes played in English, this is a French-language piece – in a film that catches the tone and nuances of French cinema with a finesse that’s as delightful as it is convincing.Occasionally it feels Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Lest anyone believe that Parasite was the only ground-breaking foreign language film of the past year, Céline Sciamma’s fourth feature, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, arrives to remind us otherwise. Like Parasite, it debuted in Cannes in 2019, where Sciamma won the Palme d’Or for best screenplay and the Queer Palm, a major award on the festival circuit honouring films for their treatment of LGBT themes. Sciamma’s first venture into period drama is set in 18th century Brittany and follows the love affair between a female artist, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is a departure in every sense for François Ozon. The prolific French director has established himself as a master of ludic style in past dramas played out by predominantly female casts, the exceptions, among them his sad black-and-white period romance Frantz from two years ago, largely proving the rule. In By the Grace of God – its French title, Grâce à Dieu, is drawn directly from the story and freighted with a macabre irony revealed in a late scene – he achieves something very different: male roles dominate in a film that follows documentary lines in its investigation of a real-life Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It isn’t provable whether adultery is more accepted in French bourgeois life than in that of other countries, but French films often suggest it’s nothing to get in a lather about. Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction, in which three of the four main fortysomething characters are having affairs, presents infidelity as rote behavior more calmly than would most British or American films, puritanism being not fully extinguished. Assayas doesn’t avoid raising the moral standard – he just doesn’t let it flap excessively.The film isn’t focused on adultery, however, but on the issue of digitisation's Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Proxima is a very special, very beautiful space movie, one of those that are more concerned with the bread-and-butter reality of getting people into space – practically, emotionally, psychologically – than with the starry shenanigans themselves. Think The Right Stuff, the Eighties classic charting the dawn of America's space programme, only this time with a female astronaut battling both sexism and the emotional ties of motherhood on the way to the launchpad. Written and directed by France's Alice Winocour and with Eva Green giving an Oscar-worthy performance in the lead, this Read more ...
Owen Richards
The Shock of the Future is for anyone who's watched a music biopic and thought "that's not how it works!" Directed and co-written by Marc Collin of Nouvelle Vague fame, it's perhaps the most realisitic film about recording music ever made. But as anyone who's ever been in the studio will tell you, the legends are much more exciting than the reality.Alma Jodorwsky plays Ana, an aspiring synth wave sensation. She spends her day (which takes up the entire length of the film) in a friend's flat that she's sitting, along with his huge collection of synthesisers, keyboards and recording equipment. Read more ...
Owen Richards
There were some early warning signs that A Faithful Man might be another box-ticking French romcom. The poster of two women kissing one man, his bemused look in the middle. The lethargic narration referencing childhood and the mysteries of the female mind. Here we go again. But director, writer and star Louis Garrel (pictured above left) subverts expectations just enough to make this French fancy stand out from the pack.Abel (Garrel) is caught off guard by his girlfriend Marianne (Laetitia Casta, pictured below right) when she announces she’s pregnant. For you see, it’s not his. It’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
French director Agnès Varda looks back over a cinematic career of seven decades in this a richly moving film farewell, finished not long before her death at the end of March, aged 90. It’s structured around a series of masterclasses in which she takes audiences through her work, joined in conversation by some of her collaborators (plentiful screen clips present many more). Varda defines the three words important to her in making films as “inspiration, creation, sharing”, and Varda by Agnès is testament to her special talent in that last category.It’s a selective survey, from her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Anyone who saw Félix Maritaud playing the angry activist Max in Robin Campillo’s Paris ACT UP drama 120 BPM will certainly remember him (main picture). He came to the film as a non-professional, from an arts student background, and builds on that performance to deliver a visceral central role in Sauvage, the feature debut of another French director, Camille Vidal-Naquet. It’s a remarkable achievement for both, a harsh study of life on the street in which Maritaud plays a homeless 22-year-old hustler, Léo – though we don’t hear him called that once in the film, fluidity of names being part of Read more ...