Adjani

Why are so many French films such unremitting rubbish? Out of a sense of loyalty, I keep going to the cinema in the hope of being surprised -- but I so rarely am. Even the films one feels relatively positive about -- like "Welcome" (see recent post) -- aren't, if we are honest, particularly brilliant. Just ok. They pass muster. Most films that I see are simply bad. A couple of weeks ago, it was the new Daniele Thompson-- "Le Code a Changé". Everything that people complain of in French film was here concentrated in two hours of tedious, self-regarding bilge. Yet another film about relationships in the dinner-party land of the Paris in-crowd. No plot. Suddenly one couple is getting divorced, and another couple is getting it together. No explanation. No development of character. No acting even. The actors just recite the lines. How on earth does French cinema get away with it? A few days later, another disappointment. "La Journée de la Jupe" features in the next edition of Champs-Elysées, so I thought I would give it a look. The beautiful Isabelle Adjani plays a French literature teacher whose class of banlieue thugs is so out of control that one day she flies off the handle and takes them hostage. It's a nice premise for a film. Politically very incorrect, which is always a good thing. And at the start, there are a couple of good moments -- like when she holds a gun to the head of a particularly nasty individual and demands that he repeat Moliere's real name (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, since you ask). But once again, it all collapses. The plot goes nowhere. There is absolutely no suspense. And Isabelle Adjani is hopeless. She wanders about the room with her revolver, swinging vertigineously between the only two emotional registers she seems capable of: lost and silent, then angry and loud. My friend John Lichfield of the Independent backs me up on this. He saw Adjani in the theatre a couple of years ago -- one of those performances that the critics fawned over -- and his view was simple: she cannot act. "It's emperor's new clothes," he told me. "No-one dares to say what is staring them in the face." And here I think is the nub of it. The French cultural commentariat is complicit in the marginalisation of French culture. It is all back-scratching and aren't-we-great and friends together in Paris dinner-party land. No-one ever says anything is bad. Even when 'bad' doesn't begin to do justice.

The poster for "Welcome"

Talk of the town this week is the new film by Philippe Lioret called 'Welcome', which looks at the human drama unfolding at the northern port of Calais. That is where hundreds of migrants from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere gather with the purpose of secretly crossing the Channel to England in the back of lorries. They are generally thwarted in their endeavours, because security is tight, but enough evidently do make it over to keep hopes alive. In the meantime the migrants live rough in makeshift camps on the outskirts of Calais, subsisting on hand-outs from charity and looked on with a certain resentment by many locals.

Periodically French government ministers feel compelled to promise more substantial shelter -- but this immediately triggers howls of protest from the right-wing press in Britain. Across the Channel, there is a paranoid fixation that France is going to create a new 'Sangatte' -- this being the name of the holding centre for migrants that became a kind of operational HQ for the people-smugglers. Sangatte was closed in 2002 by the then interior minister -- one Nicolas Sarkozy -- but the same humanitarian arguments that led to its creation in the first place (i.e. the crying disgrace of hundreds of men living under tarpaulin) continue to apply today.

This is the backdrop to the film, which is about how a swimming instructor -- played by the very watchable Vincent Lindon -- befriends a young Kurd who wants to swim across to England to be with his girlfriend. Unlike so many French films, 'Welcome' is well-constructed and has enough dramatic tension to keep the viewer engaged. It also sheds much-needed light on the plight of so many stranded migrants, living in abject misery on one side of the Channel with the white cliffs of their eldorado visible just 20 miles away.

However I certainly do not consider it a great film -- not least because the moral message is so unsubtle. Lioret has openly compared the attitude of police and some locals towards the migrants with those of the French population towards Jews during World War II. Specifically his film targets a law, which is indeed on the statute books, that makes it a criminal offence to give aid to illegal immigrants. In the film, the Vincent Lindon character is prosecuted because he puts the Kurd up in his flat.

But I am not convinced. That law is obviously not intended to stop people making humanitarian gestures towards the migrants, but to stop the lucrative trade run by the so-called 'passeurs' -- the ones who organise the clandestine migrations. Though he claims to be portraying events which have indeed been documented, Lioret has not produced evidence that the law has been used against the compassion of ordinary citizens. One case is often evoked of a woman who was held for questioning after she re-charged the mobile phones of some migrants -- but surely this could have been part of a legitimate investigation into people-smuggling. There is an interesting discussion on this at the following blog at Le Monde. http://moreas.blog.lemonde.fr/2009/03/14/migrants-de-calais-delit-d’assistance/">http://moreas.blog.lemonde.fr/2009/03/14/migrants-de-calais-delit-d’assistance/

Les Enfants du P.

Funny how tastes change, or maybe it's just that I am a freak. I saw Les Enfants du Paradis last night in a bid to educate myself about French film. In the latest edition of Champs-Elysees there is an item on Jacques Prevert, who wrote the screen-play. Apparently the film is regarded as so monumental that it is on UNESCO's world heritage list (whatever that is). What is wrong with me? I watched it, and I loathed it. OK -- I can see that it was an amazing achievement, put together in the war and all that, and the street scenes are certainly bursting with life. I dare say the camera work is extraordinary, and that at the time it was a groundbreaking piece of work, France's answer -- so they said -- to Gone with the Wind. Surely one has to be honest though, and admit that at 60 years distance this kind of film may be a historical curiosity, but it is virtually unwatchable. The so-called poetic script seems stilted and self-conscious. It may be Prevert's finest, but it did nothing for me. The delivery of the actors is ludicrously over-the-top, every sentence ending in a sententious drawn-out vowel. This is how classical actors spoke (the equivalent of the clipped English tones of Brief Encounter). It was admired at the time, but now it is simply unnatural. Equally lacking in any passing connection to real life are the plot and the characters. Their behaviour is utterly unbelievable. The love and the passion are obviously matters of life or death, because that is what they keep telling us, but their actions feel artificial. The true cinema critic will say I am missing the point. Of course it is not meant to be naturalistic. This was cinema born of classical theatre, and the conventions had to be observed. Fair enough -- but the awful stiffness of it all is not just in my imagining. A few years after Les Enfants du Paradis was made, the film world was in rebellion against what I have just described. The Nouvelle Vague was a reaction to precisely this kind of parodic classicism. Perhaps I am just a cultureless yob, but I really think this is emperor's new clothes territory.

Jacques Tati in "Jour de Fete"

This year is the centenary of the birth of Laurence Olivier and John Wayne, but let us not forget another cinema great who -- for those who love him -- did every bit as much to brighten our lives. Jacques Tatischeff wisely chopped off the second half of his surname when he became a music-hall act in pre-war Paris. After the war he had a vision of transferring his talents to celluloid, and set about what was to be France's first ever colour feature -- "Jour de Fete" or The Big Day. It was made 60 years ago this summer in the painfully lovely village of Sainte-Severe-sur-Indre, which I would urge the world to go and visit but for the knowledge that it would thereby be automatically ruined. Tati (for it is he) played the postman Francois, who is inspired by a travelling film-show on the wondrous exploits of the US postal service. Determined to emulate the Americans' speed and efficiency, he takes his trusty bike on a helter-skelter race around the village -- ending of course in the duck-pond. The moral is clear -- modernity is fine, but life has its rhythms, and don't muck with them. The same message pervaded Tati's later films "Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot", "Mon Oncle" and "Playtime". If you haven't sampled them, it is well worth it. They are intriguing rather than hilarious. Poignant more than uproarious. But in their way, rather brilliant. Anyway -- I was in Sainte-Severe last week for the 60th anniversary festivities. Several of the children who were extras in the film are still about -- now in their 60s and 70s. They had great memories of the summer of 47 -- a particularly hot one, they said, which was just as well because filming could only take place when the sun was out. I also met a wonderful chap called Andre Pierdel, the last survivor of Tati's inner circle. Now aged 85, he is a diminutive magician: almost a dwarf but not quite, he was performing on the Paris stage in the 1930s! Tati met him in the war -- when they were both holed up near Sainte-Severe -- and then took him on as his master-of-tricks. It was Pierdel who had to devise all the gadgets that feature in Tati's films -- like the bike that goes by itself in "Jour de Fete". What a guy.

Let me be the first to tell you -- go and see La Mome. I know I am not the biggest fan of French film, far too much of which is self-indulgent nonsense performed by a nepotistic clique. But this is different. Marion Cotillard is surely up for multiple awards for her breathtaking performance as Edith Piaf. She take Piaf from the gangling teenager singing for pennies on the streets of Montm,arte to the shrivelled hag who dies in 1963. In between comes the alcohol and the drugs; her love affair with the boxer Marcel Cerdan -- and above all the concerts. These are done to perfection in the film, and I found myself transported. So did the rest of the audience in the cinema where I saw it. There was one woman sobbing vociferously. I am not saying it is the best-constructed film in the world. But it does what cinema is supposed to do -- it takes you to another place. I loved it.

Number one DVD hit over the Chrismas holiday here was the old-fashioned but highly amusing cinema hit of 2006 -- "Camping". Starring several familiar faces like Claude Brasseur and the comic Franck Dubosc, the film is a send-up of the French obsession with the annual camping holiday, in this case at "Les Flots Bleus" somewhere on the Atlantic coast. Gerard Lanvin plays a snooty Paris surgeon who ends up there by mistake, and finds himself falling for the rough, unpretentious charm of the campers. Best line: when Lanvin expresses amazement that the campers have been coming to the same place for the last 30 years and asks why they don't simply buy somewhere instead of having to schleck their tents and caravans down every August. Mais non! they retort, this way they have the choice of where to go. But you come here every year! cries Lanvin in exasperation. Oui, mais ça c'est le camping!! The film also cleared up one point which has puzzled me for years -- how to do the 'bise' -- the kiss of greeting indulged in by the French. Is it two kisses, three, four, more? The good news is that the French don't know any more than we do. At one point a group of campers greet each other. One starts a double 'bise' with a man, who stops her and says - Non - in Melun we only do the one. She then does a single bise to the woman standing beside him, who says "Mais non! En Loire-Atlantique (the department around Nantes) c'est quatre!"

Look out at the end of this year (if you are in France) or next (if you are not) for a major disaster drama-doc called La Grande Inondation. It's about a flood hitting Paris after the Seine bursts its banks, and should include lots of lovely computer-generated imagery of the Eiffel Tower under water, Louvre masterpieces floating with the stream etc. It's being made by Bonne Pioche productions, who are the same people who made the Oscar-winning March of the Emperors, so it should be good. More to the point, it also features (in a very minor role) a certain Hugh Schofield -- playing his jounrnalistic self in a series of sequences in which the mayor of Paris is assailed by the press pack. I had a great day filming last week in the town hall of the 2nd arrondissement, which doubled pretty effectively as the Hotel de Ville. Fun - but tiring. There were about 25 extras in addition to the main actors, and for each shot we had to be minutely arranged in order to convey an impression of the largest possible number of people. On top of that every sequence was filmed twice -- first in French and then in English. Apparently this is highly unusual, and a bit of a gamble. A lot of French films are made with a second version in which the actors mouth the English, and the sound is dubbed in by native-speakers afterwards. Here the cast actually spoke the English script. As the French say, c'est pas evident. One mispronounced word, one garbled emphasis, and the spell is broken. But Bonne Pioche provided a very diligent voice-coach, an African-American lady, who got the cast to speak ver...y ... slow...ly. It was the only way, and it might work. I had to act out a piece-to-camera as if I was reporting live from the scene. No problem n English, but not a few takes in the French.

Michael Lonsdale

Just saw Munich, Spielberg's thriller about the Israeli assassination squad that avenged the murder of Olympic athletes in 72. I don't rate film very highly. But what I want to do here is draw attention to one of the secondary actors. He has one of those faces that you instantly recognise because you have seen him a dozen times. The trouble is you can't remember where. I refer to Michael, or sometimes Michel, Lonsdale, who plays the quintessentially amoral Frenchman named in the film only "Papa". The scene in which he presides over a extended family luncheon with millions of adoring grandchildren is utter tosh of course, as is the whole notion of his empire of information. I was just happy to see his jowly face again, and try to recall its previous outings. Two come to mind straight away. He was the baddy Hugo Drax in one of the great Roger Moore James Bonds, Moonraker. And in the 1972 Day of the Jackal, he played Claude Lebel, the detective whose inspired work foils James Fox's assassination bid on de Gaulle. In that film he has a moustache and no beard but the big cheeks are a giveaway. Further research reminds me that he was the abbot in The Name of the Rose, and Anton Grigoriev -- the Russian consul in Berne -- in the TV series Smiley's People. Actually he'd been in scores of films, most of them French, since the 1960s. He is half-and-half. His father was English and his mother French, and he was born in Paris in 1931. Interesting character.

Brice de Nice

There are three types of French film. First, the films that do sufficiently well that they travel abroad and form part of the general image of what constitutes French cinema. Second, the vast majority of films that flop at home and end up as late-night television repeats. And third, those films which will never be seen outside of France because their reference-points are too franco-français, but which are somehow perfect for the domestic market. A classic example of this last category is the new hit Brice de Nice. No-one will ever hear of it outside of France (and maybe Belgium and Switzerland) but it is a huge success at the box-office here -- arguably therefore a far better cultural insight than the normal "auteur" fodder. Brice de Nice (pronounced to rhyme with 'vice' for some reason) is an undemanding romp about a long-haired surf dude living on the Riviera. That is the first joke, because of course there are no waves in the Mediterranean. He wears a yellow T-shirt and black baggy trousers, and is obsessed by the Patrick Swayze film Point Break. Jean Dujardin, the actor who plays Brice, created the character on the stand-up circuit, and it was via the Internet that word of the film got about. Since it was released a couple of months ago it has achieved cult status among the school-going public. I went with my two eldest (aged 11 and 9) and they had to explain half the jokes. Brice's trademark is a downward chopping motion with the right arm, conducted to the word "Cassé!" Apparently this is what you chant in the playground when you beat someone in an argument. Everyone is doing it now, I'm told. Highly immature -- but good fun.
http://www.bricedenice.com/