French Film Festival Set To Get Up, Up And Away

The Age

Thursday March 6, 2008

Philippa Hawker

AT THIS year's French Film Festival, the image of a red balloon in Paris bridges half a century of cinema.

The festival is showing the new work from Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien, The Flight of the Red Balloon, which stars Juliette Binoche and was shot in the French capital. And in the children's program, there is the film that inspired Hou's new movie, Albert Lamorisse's much loved The Red Balloon - which won an Oscar in 1956, not for best short, curiously enough, but for best original screenplay.

The festival opens tonight, with Cedric Klapisch's Paris, and continues until March 19 at Palace Como, Westgarth and Balwyn.

While it is possible to note omissions, there are some singular and interesting films in the program of more than 30 features and documentaries.

As always, the mainstream movies, mostly comedies and thrillers, have a strong presence. And there are previews of films that will be released in theatres this year - The Flight of the Red Balloon among them, as well as Claude Miller's tale of family mysteries, A Secret, and Abdellatif Kechiche's moving The Secret of the Grain.

Then there are movies that are not likely to be seen in Australia outside this festival. To Each His Own Cinema, for example, almost demands to be seen on the big screen. Made for the 60th anniversary of Cannes, it is a feature composed of shorts, each about three minutes long, on the subject of the cinematic experience. Almost all of the 35 directors - ranging from Abbas Kiarostami to David Cronenberg - have set their films in a movie theatre of some kind, and while there are some surprising elements in common, there are also aspects that are distinctive and idiosyncratic.

In Anna M, Isabelle Carre gives a memorable performance as a young woman who becomes dangerously obsessed with a doctor, convinced that he loves her and that nothing should be allowed to keep them apart.

Florent Emilio Siri's Intimate Enemies is a bleak exploration of military ideals and harsh realities during the Algerian war, a subject that has some interesting contemporary resonances.

Writer-director Christophe Honore is represented this year with two films: he co-wrote Gael Morel's After Him, starring Catherine Deneuve, and he wrote and directed Love Songs. The first is an intriguing film about loss, with Deneuve as a mother whose son is killed in an accident and who turns all her emotional energies towards his friend. Love Songs deals, in a rather different way, with grief, and it's also about Honore's infatuation with the cinema of the New Wave. The pitch could have been "It's The Mother and the Whore meets Domicile Conjugale, but as a Jacques Demy musical": the result is slight, but disarming.

Isabelle Czajka's delicate, restrained The Year After is about grief that has little chance to express itself. Her central character is a quiet and reserved teenage girl who misses her late father, and whose mother is distant and self-absorbed. It's an undemonstrative, low-key highlight.

LINK

? frenchfilmfestival.org

© 2008 The Age

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