Something to watch this month: 28 May-29 June

While the Italians make their slow-but-steady way around the coun­try for 11 months, the French Film Festival packs all its activ­ity into four weeks from today – at 35 cinemas in 21 centres. There are 23 fea­ture titles in the pro­gramme and, unlike the Italians who like to go back to the clas­sics, these are all brand new.

I only got to pre­view three of the 23 so I won’t pre­tend that they are in any way rep­res­ent­at­ive, in fact they feel suit­ably random.

This week I finally read Robert Bresson’s fam­ous 1975 mani­festo Notes on the Cinematographer. I’ve had my pre-loved copy for at least ten years and this edi­tion was pub­lished in 1986 (and is help­fully annot­ated by the pre­vi­ous owner).

Bresson’s defin­i­tion of cine­ma­to­graph­er isn’t the cam­era or light­ing dir­ect­or as we under­stand it now. He was mak­ing a dis­tinc­tion between cinema (defined by him as filmed theatre with all of the inau­thenti­city that entails) and cine­ma­to­graphy – an essen­tial and unma­nip­u­lated filmed truth. Bresson doesn’t argue that there’s any­thing wrong with theatre per se, just that attempt­ing to recre­ate the arti­fice of theatre with a cam­era is the wrong approach:

The pho­to­graphed theatre or CINEMA requires a metteur-en-scène or dir­ect­or to make some act­ors per­form a play and to pho­to­graph these act­ors per­form­ing the play; after­wards he lines up the images. Bastard theatre lack­ing what makes theatre: mater­i­al pres­ence of liv­ing act­ors, dir­ect action of the audi­ence on the actors.

He is scath­ing of act­ing for cam­era and he describes the tal­ent he pho­to­graphs as “mod­els” rather than “act­ors”:

In a mix­ture of true and false, the true brings out the false, the false hinders belief in the true. An act­or sim­u­lat­ing fear of ship­wreck on the deck of a real ship battered by a real storm – we believe in neither the act­or, nor in the ship nor in the storm.

I think Tom Cruise might have some­thing to say about that.

Bresson was los­ing this argu­ment even as he was writ­ing these notes in the 1950s and defin­it­ive proof of that loss can be found in the three films I pre­view here. Yet, I couldn’t help feel­ing as I was watch­ing them that truth – Bressonian truth, human truth, emo­tion­al truth – was nev­er what these films were inter­ested in and that maybe, thanks to Bresson, I was see­ing feel­ings being man­u­fac­tured in front of me more than usual.

The pro­gramme launch film Les règles de l’art has the ter­rible English title, The French Job to kindle memor­ies of Michael Caine’s 60s heist film The Italian Job, a com­par­is­on that does neither film any favours. Based on an unlikely true story, it’s about a burg­lary at the Paris Museum of Modern Art and the attempts by the thieves to suc­cess­fully fence some of the most fam­ous paint­ings in the world. Actually, nobody knows for sure what happened to them and Dominique Baumard’s film is a fanci­ful and enter­tain­ing ima­gin­ing of the whole affair.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Melvil Poupaud plays a mild-mannered insur­ance assessor and watch valu­er drawn into the orbit of con­man Sofiane Zermani and burg­lar Steve Tientcheu. The “law-abiding” one of the trio being played by a white act­or while the genu­ine crim­in­als are of Algerian and Camerounian back­grounds felt like an tone-deaf choice to me, but the per­form­ances by all three got me past it.

An even dark­er com­edy is on offer in Franck Dubosc’s How to Make a Killing (aka Un ours dans le jura – A Bear in the Jura, I can under­stand why the lit­er­al trans­la­tion here wasn’t used …). Dubosc him­self plays Michel, a strug­gling pine tree farm­er on the verge of the Christmas rush, is startled by an unlikely bear on the road and crashes his ute into a rich-looking couple who have stopped by the side of the road for a pee. These are not your aver­age rich-looking couple, how­ever, as they are inter­me­di­ar­ies between some hardened gang­sters and migrant drug mules in the forest. The 2 mil­lion Euros in their car then becomes a source of some tempta­tion – not just for Michel and his wife (Laure Calamy) but for every­one in the vil­lage who comes into con­tact with it.

Played with admir­able dead­pan by every­one – not least the out­gunned town cop, Benoît Poelvoorde – this is anoth­er crowd-pleaser with some neat plot twists. It also man­ages to pat­ron­ise the poor migrants who are giv­en not-a-jot of their own human­ity to share with the audience.

Much more frus­trat­ing to try and fol­low is the music­al biop­ic Bolero, about the cre­ation of the fam­ous piece of music by early 20^th cen­tury com­poser Maurice Ravel (Raphaël Personnaz). The open­ing titles make innov­at­ive use of the piece’s ubi­quity since its debut in 1929 but you may end up becom­ing as sick of it as the actu­al Ravel was before the film ends. Bolero is only 17 minutes long and I feel sure we heard the whole thing mul­tiple times, des­pite Ravel him­self sug­gest­ing that the piece “con­tained no music”.

The long sec­tions of the film devoted to Ravel scratch­ing out notes – either in his study at the piano or in his (real-life) garden, only con­firmed to me what I’ve always thought about com­pos­ing music. That the com­poser simply finds a note that they like and then tries every oth­er note – one after the oth­er – until they find one that goes with it, and so on and so forth.

By focus­ing on the peri­od dur­ing the com­pos­i­tion of Bolero for a bal­let by Russian emigré Ida Rubinstein (Jeanne Balibar), the film actu­ally leaves out – or simply alludes to – lots of oth­er inter­est­ing aspects of Ravel’s life. Interesting aspects, but per­haps not dra­mat­ic enough for a whole film. Anyway, Bolero was a dis­ap­point­ment and I found myself wish­ing that I’d chosen the oth­er music-themed film, Monsieur Aznavour.

Also not pre­viewed, but catch­ing my eye non­ethe­less, an epic new ver­sion of The Count of Monte Cristo and the mid-life crisis com­edy This Life of Mine, a film made poignant by the passing of writer-director Sophie Fillières before she could com­plete it in 2023.