Sydney Film Festival’s French connection

This year’s Sydney Film Festival opens on November 3 in cinemas. On the program is what amounts to a mini-French film festival with more than a dozen French movies, many of them directed by women.

Mia Wasikowska in Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘Bergman Island’. Source: Distributor

Titane

Julia Ducournau’s ‘Titane’. Source: Distributor

One of the biggest highlights of the French films at the 2021 Sydney Film Festival is Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or winner, Titane, showing at SFF ahead of its national theatrical release later this month. With this incendiary body-horror-science-fiction tour de force, Ducournau became the second woman, after Jane Campion, to win the top award at Cannes.

Petite Maman

Céline Sciamma’s ‘Petite Maman’. Source: Distributor

Sydney is also screening the new film from Céline Sciamma, director of Portrait Of A Lady On Fire. Petite Maman, which will have a cinema release in 2022, explores a mother–daughter relationship in an unusual fashion. At her mother’s family home, after the death of her grandmother, an eight-year-old girl connects with a new playmate in extraordinary circumstances.

Bergman Island

Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘Bergman Island’. Source: Distributor

Director Mia Hansen-Løve makes her English-language debut with Bergman Island, another festival preview ahead of a 2022 release. Hansen-Løve (Father Of My Children, Things To Come), has a longstanding interest in the nature of vocation, explored here through the figures of husband and wife Tony and Chris (Tim Roth and Vicky Krieps), filmmakers at different stages of their careers. They have come to spend time at Faro Island, a location and then a home for Ingmar Bergman. For more than 10 years it has been a retreat for artists, writers and scholars; Hansen-Løve wrote the script for this film when she was there.

On the island, as Tony finishes his screenplay and gives masterclasses, Chris experiences more uncertainty and less of a sense of progress. Yet the script she is working on, but can’t decide how to finish, is brought to life as a kind of “film within a film”, with a central character, Amy, played by Mia Wasikowska, who comes to a friend’s wedding where she will reconnect with her first love; ABBA and the Go-Betweens are part of the soundtrack of the event. Memory and creativity, the imagined and the observed, play off against each other, lightly yet decisively.

Slalom

Charlène Favier’s ‘Slalom’. Source: Distributor

In Charlène Favier’s Slalom, the filmmaker gives us a claustrophobic sense of proximity to the experiences of Lyz (Noée Abita), a 15-year-old skier who has just joined an elite training course. She is an isolated figure, with little support: she has no contact with her father; her mother never seems able to visit her, and she isn’t comfortable with the partying ways of many of her fellow athletes.

Her ambition and her vulnerability make her a target for her coach, Fred (Jérémie Renier), who is already a harsh, bullying teacher. The more success she achieves, the more intrusive his attention becomes. It’s a compelling, unsettling depiction of the gradual course of sexual abuse. Favier also evokes the details of the particular world Lyz inhabits: the stark, overpowering Alpine settings, the kinetic rush of the skiing sequences, and the athlete’s body and the demands that are made of it. 

Abita, who gives a memorable performance, made her feature debut with a lead role in Ava, Léa Mysius’s 2017 story of a teenage girl facing impending blindness.

Paris, 13th DistrictImageLéa Mysius – as well as Céline Sciamma – is one of the writers of another SFF feature, Paris, 13th District (also titled Les Olympiades), working with co-writer and director Jacques Audiard, in a melancholy yet playful black-and-white tale of transition, hesitation and distance. Paris, 13th District is adapted from several short stories by American graphic novelist Adrian Tomine. Lucie Zhang is Emilie, a university student-turned-call centre worker, who takes in a new flatmate, Camille (Makita Samba), a schoolteacher who is about to start his doctorate. Noémie Merlant (the artist of Portrait Of A Lady On Fire) is Nora, a real estate agent from the provinces who has come to Paris as a mature-age student in search of a new beginning. A camgirl, Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth), impinges on Nora’s life in initially devastating fashion. In the world of the film, physical intimacy doesn’t bring closeness; a computer screen, on the other hand, offers unexpected intimacy. A story of seemingly unreciprocated desires and lost opportunities takes unexpected turns; it’s an engrossing, criss-crossing evocation of place and character.

Honey Cigar

In Kamir Aïnouz’s Honey Cigar, set in the early 1990s, a young central figure wrestles with issues of identity and belonging. Zoé Adjani (niece of Isabelle) is Selma, a seemingly confident young woman whose sense of self is more complicated and contradictory than she is initially able to admit. How does she define herself? Algerian? French? “I’m double,” she declares, in an interview for the tertiary institution she hopes to enter – yet she’s increasingly struck by mixed messages from her parents, and the constraints that are placed on her. The focus is on Selma, but her parents also have things to learn, about who they are and where they wish to be.

A Tale of Love And Desire

Leyla Bouzid’s ‘A Tale Of Love And Desire’. Source: Distributor

The central figure in Leyla Bouzid’s A Tale of Love And Desire is also caught up in questions of family and identity. Ahmed (Sami Outalbali) is a disciplined, earnest young man about to start university. His parents are Algerian, but he knows very little Arabic. He is constrained by his sense of propriety and caution.

From the very first day, he’s unsettled by a comparative literature class that includes a course on Arab erotic poetry, and also by the presence of Farah (Zbeida Belhajamor), a vivid, outgoing young woman who has come to Paris from Tunisia to study. They’re a study in contrasts: Ahmed never knows where to look; Farah’s gaze is open and direct. Language connects them and separates them; it also has the potential to bridge the gap that arises between them, if it’s not too late.

My Best Part

The co-writer, director and star of My Best Part (French title, Garçon Chiffon) will be a familiar figure to many from his role in the popular TV series Call My Agent! Nicolas Maury (Hervé in the TV series), making his second feature as a director, plays Jérémie, an actor whose life seems to be in a state of awkward chaos on every front.

As jealousy completely undermines his relationship with his partner, he heads off to the country to take refuge with his mother, Bernadette (Nathalie Baye) and to learn lines for an audition he’s not even sure he wants. Jealousy, it turns out, is connected to many other aspects of his life, past and present, and there’s more than one way to tackle its debilitating impact.

Beautiful Minds

The possibility of change is also a theme of Bernard Campan’s Beautiful Minds (Presque), co-written with his co-star Alexandre Jollien. Campan plays Louis, an undertaker who has learned to focus his life on control and restraint; Jollien is Igor, an outgoing man with cerebral palsy and an irrepressible taste for philosophy. Their paths cross, literally, when Louis knocks Igor off his delivery bike.

Their fleeting encounter is prolonged when Louis has to take the hearse on a long journey to a funeral in the South of France and Igor accidentally comes along for the ride. The story is based in part on the experiences of Jollien, a philosopher and best-selling author, who has worked with Campan before; this film marks his acting debut.

Love Songs For Tough Guys

Samuel Benchetrit’s ‘Love Songs For Tough Guys’. Source: Distributor

Performance and art have an unexpected significance in the world of Love Songs For Tough Guys (Cette Musique Ne Joue Pour Personne). In a small coastal town, younger toughs threaten the standing of a gang of dockside hard men who are discovering their softer side. They are being unexpectedly derailed by art and emotion, by, among other things, a poetry workshop and a local theatre production.

There’s a Cyrano-style narrative about the wooing of a supermarket cashier who can’t make sense of the poems she is receiving. Meanwhile a standover man (Gustave Kervern) gets caught up to a dramatic, deadly degree in the dreams of a woman (Vanessa Paradis) who is about to star in a small-scale new musical about Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. It’s a deadpan tale with a sense of the absurd from writer-director Samuel Benchetrit.

Other French films in the 2021 SFF program

The SFF French line-up also includes Danielle Arbid’s erotic drama Passion Simple, based on the novel by Annie Ernaux, which stars Laetitia Dosch and ballet dancer turned actor Sergei Polunin in a story of an obsessive affair and the escape it seemingly offers.

Then there’s Anaïs in Love, the feature debut for director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, the tale of a romantic triangle in which the title character, played by Anaïs Demoustier, becomes entangled with an older couple, a publisher and his novelist wife (Denis Podalydès and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi).  

Another feature is Pierre Coré’s The Fantastic Journey of Margot & Marguerite, the time-travelling tale of two 12-year-old girls, one from 2020, one from 1942, who swap places and share an adventure.

Even the festival’s closing night film, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, has a Gallic connection beyond the name. Angoulême, in south-western France, was the location in which Anderson shot his loving tribute to the glory days in the last century of an imaginary New Yorker-style magazine produced in the fictional French regional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. It’s a setting brought to life with all the Andersonian sense of detail and cinematic references you could imagine.

The Sydney Film Festival runs to November 21.