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Temps perdu
The Boston French Film Festival goes à la recherche
BY PETER KEOUGH

French filmmakers’ preoccupations with sex, death, and philosophy frame their deeper issue — with time. Proust is their role model. The offerings in this vintage year at the Boston French Film Festival celebrate that obsession, as well as quintessential Gallic actors Gerárd Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve, veteran directors André Téchiné, Benoît Jacquot, Olivier Assayas, and Erich Rohmer (the latter pair’s films, Clean and Triple Agent, were not available for preview), and that sine qua non of French cinema, Les enfants du paradis/Children of Paradise (1945; July 23 at 4 pm).

These films prove once again that the medium can recapture time, after a fashion, but only to make its loss more poignant. They render time sensible in images when they don’t try to do so in words, as is the case in Genesis, a documentary from Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérrenou (2004; July 9 at 5:30 pm). The old African griot who narrates the film defines time as the "form that endures, a form fighting against time that drives all organized forms toward disorder and chaos." True enough, but long before the end of this brief piffle, I wanted to send him and his florid banalities back to the primordial soup. Providing redundant illustration is unamazing nature footage that looks like outtakes from Le peuple migrateur/Winged Migrations, Microcosmos, and Koyaanisqatsi, films whose success Genesis fails to repeat.

More to the point is Cinévardaphoto (2004; July 21 at 6 pm and July 24 at 12:30 pm). Directed by Agnès Varda (a reminder of the Nouvelle Vague, the time that French cinema has been in recherche of ever since), it compiles three of her short documentaries from the past four decades, a regression that subtly underlies her themes. First and best, from 2004, is "Ydessa, les ours et etc . . . /Ydessa, the Bears and Etc . . . " Ydessa Hendeles, a startling apparition in black with long henna’d hair and a red-painted twisted mouth, is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and an artist and curator living in Toronto. In a former Nazi gallery in Munich, she assembled thousands of photographs of people posing with teddy bears, an attempt, she says, to create a world with an illusion of innocence. The impression of most of those who see it — at least, most of those interviewed by Varda — is death. The photos cover the gallery walls from top to bottom in rows resembling drawers in a mortuary. The individual photos show countless strangers, most of them dead. (Surviving teddy bears inhabit vitrine cases on the floor.) In a room off to itself is Maurizio Cattelan’s hyperrealistic sculpture of an undersized kneeling Hitler. Varda in her narration makes acute, witty observations, her wry tone undercutting the oppressiveness and the fascination of the nightmare of the past.

Freud would have had fun analyzing Hendeles’s obsession, and he would doubtless applaud Varda’s crafty dissection of these relics of memory. But for him the tragedy of the past lay not in its loss but in its inescapability. Hitler is also a looming presence in Benoît Jacquot’s Princesse Marie (2004; July 17 at noon; co-presented by the Boston Jewish Film Festival), a 190-minute TV bio-pic of Marie Bonaparte, Princess of Denmark and Greece (Catherine Deneuve, in a consummate performance). Marie is a formidable descendant of Napoleon and, when first seen here in 1922, an unhappy woman. Frigid, she undergoes an unsuccessful clitoral resection and decides that her problem may be more psychic than anatomical. She takes her case to the aging Freud (Heinz Bennent), who restores to her not just the power of orgasm but that of a "phallic woman." This power she wields to save him from the Reich. Although (intentionally?) corny in its psychoanalytical clichés and its use of creaky devices like archival footage and maps showing the indomitable Marie’s travels, the film triumphs in dramatizing the past — and recovering it.

And where would French film be without the Oedipus complex? Variations on that theme and on Jean Vigo’s 1933 classic Zéro de conduite (and later manifestations of that film from Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . to Richard Linklater’s The School of Rock) shape Jean-Jacques Zilbermann’s Les fautes d’orthographe/Bad Spelling (2004; July 10 at 3:15 pm and July 14 at 6 pm; co-presented by the Boston Jewish Film Festival). But it’s a gem in its own right. Fifteen-year-old Daniel (Damien Jouillerot) must contend with both the abuse of fellow students and his own parents’ tyranny in the latter’s boarding school, a pit not unlike the one in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les diaboliques. He also suffers the title affliction and what the school nurse describes as "late development." When his suffocating mom (Carole Bouquet) expels his only friend, a Jewish boy with whom he’s smitten, he decides to fight back — not with guns but with economics. It’s a tribute to individual resourcefulness and class revolution.

A very different boarding school, a cross between the set of the ’60s TV show The Prisoner and that of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, figures in Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence (2004; July 21 at 8 pm). Little girls arrive from who knows where in little coffins and, severed from their past, undergo an eerie training for no clear purpose. Then when they reach a certain age, they disappear. Sounds like an allegory to me. Hadzihalilovic has an unnerving style like that of her husband, Gaspar Noé, but without the jarring violence. Innocence evokes the mystery of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Return with its dreamlike, impeccably photographed alternate universe. It’s sure to irritate many and not be forgotten soon.

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Issue Date: July 8 - 14, 2005
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