Israel’s cinematheques have been celebrating French cinema for 21 years now, and this year’s French Film Festival, which will run at the cinematheques in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Herzliya, and Holon starting on March 25, will mark this milestone with a strong mix of the best recent French movies and classics.
It’s hard to think where French cinema would be today without the emergence of the Oscar-winning Jean Dujardin in the movie The Artist more than a decade ago.
Dujardin has the soul of a character actor with the face of a leading man, a good combination, and his latest film, Sur Les Chemins Noirs, is the opening-night movie this year. In this film, which was directed by Dennis Imbert, he plays a writer who, after a night of drinking, gets into an accident and ends up in a coma. When he awakens, he decides to walk across France.
It sounds like a fun road movie, and, like many of the movies in the festival, it will be opening in theaters later this year.
Francois Ozon is one of France’s most acclaimed directors, known for such moody, atmospheric films as Swimming Pool, Double Lover, and 8 Women, and his latest movie, The Crime is Mine, will be shown in the festival this year. It’s a kind of French version of Chicago, which tells the story of a young actress accused of murder. It features a mix of some of France’s brightest stars, among them Isabelle Huppert, Dany Boon, and Fabrice Luchini, as well as newcomers Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Rebecca Marder.
Virginie Efira, one of France’s busiest actresses, often appears in comedy, but in Just the Two of Us, directed by Valerie Donzelli, she plays a woman who thinks she has found the man of her dreams but unwittingly walks into a relationship with a dangerous and possessive lover.
Robert Guédiguian features his usual, distinctive leading lady, his wife, Ariane Ascaride, in his new movie, The Party Goes On, which tells the story of a politically engaged nurse who is at the center of a close-knit Armenian family in Marseilles and who finds love when she least expects it.
Vincent Macaigne (Irma Vep, Diary of a Fleeting Affair) and Cecile de France (A Secret, The Kid with a Bike) costar in Bonnard: Pierre and Martha by Martin Provost, which explores the lives and the love story of Nabi painter Pierre Bonnard and his wife.
Jean-Baptiste Durand’s Junkyard Dog, a coming-of-age story set in rural France, tells the story of childhood friends living in a small village in the south of France who are torn apart by their jealousy over a woman who moves in.
Marguerite’s Theorem, directed by Anna Novion, tells the story of a young woman who is a brilliant mathematics student but who makes a mistake on the day she is supposed to present her thesis and decides to walk away from all her plans. The movie’s star, Ella Rumpf, recently won the Cesar Award (France’s Oscar equivalent) for the most promising actress.
Audiences around the world fell in love with Louane Emera in The Belier Family, and now, ten years later, she has an interesting role in another drama about a complicated family, Jean-Pierre Ameris’s Take a Chance on Me. She plays a young woman who supports her agoraphobic father and finds herself in trouble after losing her job, which leads her to form an unexpected bond with a by-the-book judge (Michel Blanc).
Quentin Dupieux’s Yannick is an unconventional movie about a security guard who goes to see a play and interrupts it by getting up on stage himself and taking over the performance. It stars Raphael Quenard in the title role and Pio Marmai, who was so good recently in the comedy A Difficult Year.
The Animal Kingdom, directed by Thomas Cailley and starring Romain Duris, is a horror sci-fi film that is not the kind of movie you associate with French cinema, but it was one of the biggest hits of the year there.
Set in France in the near future, it tells of a wave of mutations that hits without warning, turning humans into animals.
Duris plays a man fleeing Paris with his son after his wife has turned into a werewolf and is held in quarantine. After the mutants escape, their loved ones have to decide how to handle them.
Like the best sci-fi, the movie uses the mutant plot to examine questions of tolerance and prejudice.
Wide variety of films
The festival mixes classics with recent films, and this year, the classics include Agnes Varda’s tribute to her husband, Jacques Demy, Jacquot de Nantes.
Demy, like Varda, was one of France’s most celebrated directors, and he is best known for a film in which all the dialogue is sung, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, starring Catherine Deneuve.
This documentary features actors portraying the director when he was a child, and Demy himself reflecting on his life.
Another classic that will be shown is Alan Resnais’s Mon Oncle d’Amerique (1980). Gerard Depardieu, Nicole Garcia, and Roger Pierre star as three people whose lives intersect in ways that illustrate the theories of the human behavioral scientist Henri Laborit.
The festival was created by Eden Cinema Ltd. in collaboration with Unifrance, the French Embassy, and the Institut Francais. It is run by Eden’s CEO, Carolyn Boneh, and the artistic director of the festival is Guillaume Mainguet, the attaché for cinema and audiovisual affairs at the Institut Francais in Tel Aviv.
For the full program, visit the websites of the individual cinematheques.