Through March 15, 2020
Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, New York, NY
filmlinc.org
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| The Truth |
At the 25th edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema—Film at Lincoln Center’s longest-running series—the most memorable film is by one of our best current directors: Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda. And if The Truth (opens this summer) isn’t up to the level of his greatest films (Like Father Like Son, Maborosi, Still Walking), it does have his profoundest qualities in abundance as he observes, with sympathy and not a little amusement, the ongoing power play between a past-her-prime superstar movie actress and her contentious screenwriter daughter, both played with zesty humor and real emotion by Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche.
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| Who You Think I Am |
Binoche also stars in Who You Think I Am (opens this summer), Safy Nebbou’s banal twist on the rom-com: despite her usual elegance, Binoche is unable to do much with Claire, a middle-aged professor who—after being dumped by her younger boyfriend—makes a fake Facebook account to spy on him and ends up ruining his roommate’s life. Deneuve’s daughter, Chiara Mastroianni somehow won best actress at Cannes for being her usual charmless self in On a Magical Night (opening March 27) (for once, the original French title, Chambre 212, is less evocative), Christophe Honoré’s slight fantasy about a long-married couple’s rocky relationship triggering visits by past lovers (mostly hers). Too bad neither film does much with fairly intriguing ideas.
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| Alice and the Mayor |
Alice and the Mayor’s Anaïs Demoustier just won the Cesar (France’s Oscar) for Best Actress for her beguiling portrayal of an aide to Lyon’s mayor who makes him rethink his approach to governing. Nicolas Pariser’s comic drama isn’t earthshattering by any means, but Demoustier and the always invaluable Fabrice Luchini have such undeniable intellectual chemistry in the title roles that they make this an entertaining battle of wits.
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| Deerskin |
Two of France’s most accomplished stars, Oscar winner Jean Dujardin and Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Adèle Haenel, team up for Deerskin (opening March 20), the latest piece of insane inanity from Quentin Dupieux, creator of earlier “gems” Rubber and Reality. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I found this brief (but still too long) satire of masculinity and midlife crisis—centered around a deerskin jacket and a lame parody of filmmaking—hamfisted and painfully unfunny, despite Dujardin and Haenel’s star wattage.
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| Perfect Nanny |
Based on the unnerving novel by Leïla Slimani, Lucie Borleteau’s Perfect Nanny slowly builds suspense as a well-to-do Parisian couple hires the so-called title character, but it loses something along the way with a lazy finale that recalls mindless slasher flicks more than sophisticated thrillers. As the nanny, the otherwise persuasive Karin Viard is undercut by Borleteau’s reliance on too many clichés. Burning Ghost, Stephane Batut’s enigmatic debut feature, follows Juste, a young man who leads the newly deceased into the afterlife, and how he reacts to Agathe, a long-ago acquaintance back in his life. Although Batut’s Paris is eerily mysterious, the director loses his grip and ends up awkwardly straddling reality and otherworldliness, like his protagonist.
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| Joan of Arc |
Two Rendez-Vous vets return with films that pale next to their earlier work. Bruno Dumont, whose last film, Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, was a misconceived heavy-metal musical biopic, has made a sequel, Joan of Arc, with the intense but miscast 10-year-old Lise Leplat Prudhomme in the title role, as she was in Jeannette. Dumont records Jean’s questioning by unsympathetic church investigators with dull literalness. In Someone, Somewhere, Cedric Klapisch’s limp shaggy-dog tale of near-romance, two neighbors go about their business separately without noticing each other until the very end. Ana Girardot and Francois Civil give this wispy entertainment more gravity than it deserves.
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| Papicha |
Finally, two female directors come to Rendez-Vous with impressive films on dicey subject matter. Sarah Suco’s The Dazzled is a sympathetic study of 12-year-old Camille (an indelible Celeste Brunnquell), who realizes that the closed religious sect her family belongs to is tearing them apart. Equally illuminating is Papicha, Mounia Meddour’s insightful dramatization of college student Nedjma (Lyna Khourdri, heartbreaking) and her brave display of resistance in a conservative religious world.
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