Rendez-Vous With French Cinema
With a brief note about the Oscars
Watching
Love Affair(s) / Les choses qu’on dit, les choses qu’on fait [The Things We Say, the Things We Do] (2020)
The key to succeeding as a writer is to have a cousin with a vacation home you can retire to on your week off from work; just make sure he isn’t married. When Maxime (Niels Schneider) arrives at his cousin François (Vincent Macaigne)’s house in the country, he’s greeted by François’s 3-months-pregnant wife Daphné (Camélia Jordana). The cousin has been called back to Paris for work, so in the meantime Maxime and Daphné keep each other company by telling tales of romances past, One Thousand and One Nights-style, to fend off the mischievous influence of hormones.
In his city life Maxime once unknowingly had an affair with the married, McKinseyish Victoire (Julia Piaton), who calls the romance off so she can rejoin her husband in Japan. Dejected, Maxime moves in with his old friend Sandra (Jenna Thiam), with whom a relationship never worked out, and her boyfriend Gaspard (Guillaume Gouix), despite everyone seeing from at least three miles away that Maxime’s going to end up falling for Sandra in these new circumstances. He falls for Sandra!
Somewhere across town, Daphné had been editing a documentary about an Alain Badiou-esque philosopher for a famous director. One day the director asks her to dinner and, lonely, she obliges. Nothing comes of it, but on her way home Daphné meets François, who approaches her to ask if she’s seen a scarf that he lost then takes a hard pivot into asking her out. Better than dating your boss, I guess: Daphné starts sleeping with François and learns that he’s married—of course. Thankfully for someone, they don’t even have to keep up a pretense very long because François’s wife, Louise (Émilie Dequenne), beats them to the punch. She confronts François at home with the news that she’s been seeing another man and is leaving François, effective immediately. Having dodged that bullet, François and Daphné settle down, and eventually even make gestures at amends by going over to Louise’s new place for dinner with her new partner Stéphane (Jean-Baptiste Anoumon).
The twist upon which the entire movie hinges isn’t that spending 6 hours talking to each other about love pushes Maxime and Daphné into bed together, but rather that Louise lied to François about cheating on him. She caught the old pig in the act without his knowing and decided to enact a peculiar form of revenge. One night before the breakup François insists on watching a TV documentary (guess whose) about a philosopher of love. He dozes off, but Louise keeps watching. “One doesn’t seek revenge for love,” the philosopher says, “one doesn’t kill for love. True love is only interested in the other’s happiness.” Wounded as she is, Louise understands that she still loves François, and decides to demonstrate it by letting him have Daphné and whatever happiness she brings him. She invents a story about having a lover of her own so she can make her exit with dignity. Only later does she ask Stéphane—who’s really just a stranger she met in a park—to role play for an afternoon to help her complete the illusion.
Love Affair(s)—a horrible English title that saves space in a tweet at the expense of the specificity of the French title—was nominated for 13 Césars, though only Dequenne (clearly the best in cast) won. This feels about right to me. The movie, aided by a soundtrack mix of unsurprising classical music choices and pretty, understated cinematography, goes down too easily. That Louise, the only faithful human around, should also be the only person more than merely inconvenienced by adultery feels preordained by a script that’s more invested in its own acrobatics than it is in examining the fruits of infidelity. Maxime, Daphné, François, and Victoire (whom Maxime ends up with again in the end) are never at risk of serious consequences. Even François, after he’s already expecting a child with Daphné, gets to sleep with Louise one last time! As if.
À l’abordage! / All Hands on Deck! (2020)
When I watched À l’abordage! its title hadn’t been given a proper English translation yet, though Variety’s Jessica Kiang claims it’s what French pirates say before striking when they pull up alongside your ship—or what buccaneering actors yell at amused children in summertime street performances (as is the case in the film). À l’abordage! is at home in multiple genres: the road-trip buddy comedy, the young summer romance, the “just vibes” film. In a twist to the usual French variants of these kinds of movies, the main characters are black, though director Guillaume Brac and his co-writer Catherine Paillé opt out of trying to Say Something about racism. The film has the same energy as Daniel Craig saying “Ladies and gentlemen…The Week[e]nd” in that one video a Twitter bot tweets every Friday night.
As best I can tell, none of the cast are professional actors, and some are just playing improvised versions of themselves. The most scripted characters seem to be Félix (Eric Nantchouang), a college student and in-home eldercare assistant, and Chérif (Salif Cissé), a close friend who works at a grocery store. After meeting a cute girl at a dance by the waterfront, Félix convinces Chérif to skip town with him and surprise her while she’s on vacation in the countryside. They rideshare with a fretful, Bo Burnham-esque kid who gets stuck with them at their campground after his car breaks down. Félix finds mostly disappointment; “his” girl isn’t too happy to see him turn up out of the blue—can you blame her? Chérif fares better, befriending a young mom he meets at the laundry station. In keeping with the first general law of French cinema, they end up in bed together while her husband’s away.
A Tale of Springtime (1990)
People in Rohmer movies talk philosophically without necessarily talking about philosophy as such (My Night at Maud’s, which might seem representative of his filmography, is in this regard more of an exception). This principle holds even when one of the characters is an actual philosophy teacher.
Jeanne (Anne Teyssèdre) teaches high school philosophy in the suburbs and spends nights at her boyfriend’s place in Paris while renting out her own flat to her cousin. The boyfriend (whom we never see) leaves town frequently for work, leaving Jeanne a bit out of sorts and unable to get any rest in his untidy apartment. Jeanne finds a sympathetic ear for her insomniac woes in Natacha (Florence Darel), a teenager she meets at a party who is quite taken by Jeanne and suggests that she stay with her; Natacha’s divorced father Igor (Hugues Quester) has been cohabitating with his young new girlfriend Eve (Eloïse Bennett) so his old room’s free. Jeanne enjoys the company of her new acquaintance and takes her up on the offer.
Natacha, easily read by all the adults around her but still a mystery to herself, is soon plying Jeanne with the suggestion that she would make a better stepmom than Eve (though she later denies she would have ever done such a thing). While Natacha is at school the next day, Igor, a possumlike, yet charming bureaucrat, comes home unannounced to fetch something from his room and bumps into Jeanne on her way out of the shower. It’s hardly a romantic encounter, but it sets the stage for later ones, both at the apartment and at Igor’s country home, where much of the second half of the film takes place. (The second general law of French cinema is that at least one character will own a country home.)
Eventually the five main characters all come together for dinner and Jeanne is put on the spot to talk about her work. She lights up at the chance to talk about her pedagogical approach and the observations she’s made in her years of teaching. Her working-class students, she’s noticed, take philosophy more seriously than their other classes. Nobody cares if you flunk math, but doing poorly in philosophy is a mark against your character. Eve, herself only 20 and fresh out of a college course on Kant, diverts the conversation so she can show off how much she recalls of her own schooling (not much, she realizes with embarrassment about a minute in to her impromptu lecture). One sees why Natacha finds Jeanne, who never speaks just to hear her own voice, a more desirable match for her father.
If people are the most interesting part of any Rohmer movie, their homes, as partial extensions of their selves, can be just as fascinating. There’s a wide variety in A Tale of Springtime, from Jeanne’s IKEA-chic pad stuffed with philosophy books, a portrait of Wittgenstein, and some cheerful Matisse prints that belie their owner’s typically stoic airs, to the country home with its wilderness of mismatching wallpaper and upholstery. When the choice is eventually put to Jeanne to stay with her boyfriend or give Igor a try, it’s as though she’s deliberating between homes as much as men.
Rohmer is at his best in A Tale of Springtime, between the revealing conversations and the beautiful cast and the drops of nature like honey in tea (the country home has some especially pretty flowering trees). In two scenes he employs a camera movement I can’t recall seeing in any of his other movies. When Jeanne meets Natacha at the party, the camera inches in on them at the start of their chance meeting, then pulls back minutes later when the conversation starts to break off. The slow zoom returns at the country house in a scene where Igor sees Jeanne’s journal on a patio tab and stops to read it. Despite what people sometimes read into his films because of his well-known spirituality, Rohmer tends to be careful about depicting numinous intrusions onto his characters’ stories. Rohmer’s biographers claim that his mise en scène “let[s] the actor imagine that he is running the show, whereas in fact everything has been decided by a secret demiurge lurking in the shadows.” The “demiurge” feels more present than usual in this film; perhaps the seasonably nice weather drew him out.
An Autumn Tale (1998)
Because of the Oscars I ran out of time to write about this one, so I’ll leave you with the anecdotes that Marie Rivière got in trouble with Rohmer for modifying her skirts to show more leg and Béatrice Romand sparked a “Homeric conflict” with producer Françoise Etchegaray for wanting to enforce strictly organic catering on set.
The Oscars!
All things considered I actually sort of liked this year’s production? There were obviously some kinks to work out—show us clips of the nominees, cowards!—but things like the smaller scale and the distancing aspect ratio worked for me. People are going to hate, as they always do. One of my daily newsletters, which has nothing to do with movies, called the show “boring-as-usual”; why do you care? It’s an industry awards show that some people like to play along with at home, leave us alone! It was weird, though, for the show not to include any mention of the Academy Museum opening this fall.
I, too, would have liked to see Chadwick Boseman win Best Actor (show producer Steven Soderbergh, responsible, I presume, for switching the presenting order of Best Picture and Best Actress–Best Actor, seems to have been in that camp as well). Yet…Anthony Hopkins is still a pretty great winner! I think there’s merit to the complaint that Oscar voters opted for the character they (falsely) saw as more universal, more relatable—there’s too much ~race~ happening in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom to relate to Boseman’s character, I guess the thinking goes. I think there’s less merit to the complaint that Boseman could have played Hopkins’ character but not vice-versa—come on, you don’t know what Boseman would have still been capable of at 83. In short, The Father was in my opinion the best of the Best Picture nominees and Hopkins isn’t undeserving. If you’re going to spend $20 watching an Oscar nominee you could do worse. (And you could do better! Quo Vadis, Aida? and Collective are both cheaper to rent right now.)
It was nice to see the return of internet favorite Bong Joon-ho’s translator Sharon Choi, and Youn Yuh-Jung’s acceptance speech joins the greats as far as I’m concerned. Never in all my life (or at least in the last 10 years) did I think Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross would be multiple Oscar winners yet here we are.
Miscellany
According to an interview in the New Yorker, Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese are planning a three-year series for Netflix dramatizing the early years of Christianity.
A few days ago I learned about the unused ending to Vertigo. “Contrary to reports that this scene was filmed to meet foreign censorship needs, this tag ending had originally been demanded by Geoffrey Shurlock of the U.S. Production Code Administration, who had noted: ‘It will, of course, be most important that the indication that Elster will be brought back for trial is sufficiently emphasized.’ Hitchcock finally succeeded in fending off most of Shurlock's demands (which included toning down erotic allusions) and had the tag ending dropped.”
Léos Carax’s Annette, with Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, will open the Cannes Film Festival on July 6. It’s a…musical? I refer you to the trailer.
Speaking of Cannes, festival director Thierry Frémaux has confirmed that Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch will finally debut there (along with Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta).