Posted on Wednesday, 6th July 2011 by Declan Palazzi
A cultural beacon shining in the summer blockbuster wilderness, the Museum of Fine Arts’ annual Boston French Film Festival (July 7-24) is back for its 16th year. Among the actors in the 24-film slate are Mathieu Amalric, Gerard Depardieu, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Isa-belle Huppert, Fabrice Lu-chini, Yolande Moreau, Lea Seydoux and Kristin Scott Thomas, none of them super-heroes or Autobots.
A sleeper at this year’s event might be “Mozart’s Sister,” a modest, visually lush, historical drama about the musical Mozart family on a grinding tour circa 1763, focusing on the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s brilliant older sister Maria Anna. Another potential art-house breakout is Philippe Le Guay’s “The Women on the Sixth Floor” (also known as “Service Entrance”), a Pedro Almodovar-like farce about a wealthy financier (Luchini), who discovers his joie de vivre living in exile in his Paris apartment building’s servants’ quarters with the eponymous les femmes espagnoles. Mathieu Amalric’s “On Tour,” which I saw last year, is a fascinating account of a variety show on tour in port cities in France, featuring old-fashioned burlesque-style strippers who also sing and dance.
A stunning debut feature by Mona Achache, “The Hedgehog” has been around (it was released in 2009), but is one of the finest films sampled this year. Featuring standout performances by veteran Josiane Balasko as a gruff, drudgelike, secretly well-read concierge in a Paris luxury apartment building and preteen Garance Le Guillermic as a suicidal child-occupant, “The Hedgehog” is a modern variation on a “Beauty and the Beast” theme.
Speaking of fairy tales with a Gallic pedigree, Catherine Breillat’s made-for-French-TV “Sleeping Beauty” is notably less transgressive than the work she is known for (“Romance,” “Anatomy of Hell,” etc.) and even sweetly innocent at times. The re-vival film in this year’s event is Francois Truffaut’s “The Soft Skin” (1964), a love tri-angle featuring a radiant Francoise Dorleac, the ill-fated sister of the legendary Catherine Deneuve, and black-and-white photography by Raoul Coutard (“Alphaville,” “Pierrot le Fou,” “Z,” etc.).
Also showcased is veteran Jean Becker’s “My Afternoons with Margueritte” with Gerard Depardieu as an outsized childlike villager living unhappily in a trailer outside his unloving mother’s home and 98-year-old Gisele Casadesus as the elderly lady he befriends. For those of you fed up with CGI and 3-D animation, see “A Cat in Paris” — a hand-drawn, traditional 2-D-animated film featuring le chat noir named Dino, a cat burglar, a mute child heroine and the fabled City of Light.
Less appealing by far are Michel Leclerc’s “The Names of Love,” with Sara Forestier as a free-spirited French-Algerian beauty, and “Love Crime” from director Alain Corneau (“Tous les matins du monde”), fea-turing a French-speaking Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier in a kind of caricatured, high-finance version of “All About Eve.”
Still, it’s all just in time for Bastille Day (July 14) and a chance to brush up on your French. Neuf said.
All screenings at the MFA’s Remis Auditorium. For information, go to mfa.org/programs/film.
Tags: Film Fest, French
Posted in Entertainment Today | No Comments »