Carol Morley's Return Trip (2001)

 

This twenty-four minute short is a reconstruction of a trip to India which the teenage Carol Morley made with her friend Catherine Corcoran (or 'Corky').  There are a great number of impressionistic shots here – including a very irritating sequence when the ping-pong background 'music' almost drowns the comment – although the film soon settles into the real subject of the film: trauma. During the original visit Corky had fallen into a well-like structure, had to receive hospital treatment, and in fact almost died.  Both mothers comment on the event, and Corky reveals that she still hasn't completely recovered after all the years, but Morley is obviously trying to put an old ghost to sleep.

Carol Morley's Everyday Something (2001)

 

From Carol Morley's collection of newspaper cuttings of unusual events comes this film reconstructing often obsessive forms of behaviour: a man makes hooting sounds and thinks an owl is returning calls, although it's just his neighbour playing games; a man is hit by a double-decker bus while stepping into the road eating a pastie; a man 'saved' from drowning is annoyed because he was attempting suicide; a shopper is punched and kicked in a supermarket; a woman stabs her husband six times (but not fatally) because he obsessively made her take exercises because she was overweight; a man is granted a divorce after 38 years of living with his wife who can't stop herself moving furniture around the house; after four unsuccessful attempts at repairing her washing machine, a woman holds the fifth man prisoner for three hours; a man obsessed with the model Claudia Schiffer forces his parents to answer questions about her and hits them if they give the wrong answers; a woman hides her mother in the kitchen for three years after she died of natural causes.

A very strange fifteen-minute short.

Carol Morley's The Week Elvis Died (1997)

 

Elvis Presley died the year this film was released, although this film is nothing to do with him: even the opening song 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?', well-known as a Presley one, is sung by Russell Churney. No, The Week Elvis Died really refers not to the singer, but to the name of the beloved pet rabbit of Karen (Jennifer Williams).

Karen lives in a working-class world where the Elvis-figure father seems to be missing, where the rest of her family seem not to understand her, and of course they don't realise that she is being bullied by three awful girls who are obviously jealous of her academic achievements, particularly that she has been chosen to represent the school in the musical group and is to have the privilege of speaking to Tony Blackburn, DJ.

But Elvis dies, and it appears that her school enemies are responsible. On the night of the radio programme, the great occasion when she meets her DJ hero, she answers that her favourite book is the Wombles, but when Blackburn asks her if she has any friends she freezes, and continues to freeze through the following questions, which include if she has a pet: in the end she grabs the mike and lets out a huge scream of horror, all across the airwaves.

Carol Morley's I'm Not Here (1984)

The title of this short from Carol Morley comes from a shameful ranting letter by Alex Guinness which was published in The Times in January 1970, in which he complained about the lack of attention shop assistants paid to customers: it's 'I'm Not Here' that was chosen as the title. Morley collects news items, and the initial mention in this of Linda Sheridan ('Miss London Stores 1970) was found in the nineties in a scrapbook found in a skip in Finsbury Park.

Edith here mentions the film 'Full Metal Jacket' as a criticism of the fascist behaviour of the management, although I particulary note the obvious influence of Jean-Luc Godard's Tout va bien, with its long tracking shot of supermarket counters, as a tribute to the great director. This is so glaringly a political film, no matter what the original intention.

Carol Morley's Secondhand Daylight (1983)

 

Secondhand Daylight is Carol Morley's second graduation film, and is set in a fastfood restaurant. Against a backdrop of the restaurant's wares, young people (normally in the bottom right corner of the screen) talk about their problems, mainly their problems in (or out of) relationships. We are only party to some of what is said by the interviewees, it is clear that there is some confusion in their minds, although nothing specific is mentioned: as so frequently with Morley's films, something is missing.

Carol Morley's Girl (1983)

 

Girl is one of two of Carol Morley's graduation shorts, and is about loss. Through suicide. Suicide is devastating because it's not a natural occurrence through illness or age, but something very often inexplicable, even if there's a death note: narrators are very often unreliable even in reality. If suicide itself is caused by truama, it in itself causes trauma to those living, and this trauma can last for the rest of the lives of the people concerned. My first cousin Charles Pembleton killed himself in 1990 at about the age of forty, by carbon monoxide poisoning. I was told that he left no death note, just a brief collection of self-published poems under the title Living in a Timewarp from sixteen years before. I occasionally read a few of these poems, and although the meaning in these often opaque abstractions eludes the reader, the obvious existential anguish is written large, and the suggestion of suicide as an end can't be written off.

Suicide haunts the Manchester Morley family, and did so long before the journalist Paul Morley wrote a book about his father who killed himself by carbon monoxide poisoning: Nothing (2000). The first short of two of Paul's younger sister Carol's graduation films was released as Girl in 1993, lasts just seven minutes and reconstructs the relationship she had with her father, the initial mystery of his death to her, and attempts to relive the time in memory.

This reconstruction is done in shots of her father taking her to school, shots of the staircase, and the bizarre background sound of a sketch from television's 'The Morecombe and Wise Show', involving the 'singing' of 'Boom Oo Yata-Ta-Ta' to 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?': this partly serves as a background to part of the film, and the viewer understands the memory of the young girl too. Interestingly, the shots often reveal only a partial shot of the whole object, as if to underline that this is only a partial memory, and memory can only ever be partial. Significantly, 'Are you Lonesome Tognight' – a song of yearning and loss – is the opening song to another short by Morley: 'The Week Elvis Died'.

A good start.

Éric Rohmer Les Nuits de la pleine lune | Full Moon in Paris (1984)

 

Les Nuits de la plein lune is Éric Rohmer's fourth episode in his Comédies et Proverbes series, and is set in the new development of Lognes and central Paris. The 'proverb' 'Qui a deux femmes perd son âme, qui a deux maisons perd sa raison' ('The person who has two women loses his soul, the person who has two houses loses his reason') was is fact invented by Rohmer himself.

This being a Rohmer film, it's about love, although of course seen from a different angle. In a nutshell, the designer (of lamps, as in moonlight) Louise (Pascale Ogier) is living in the Parisian suburbs with the possessive and older Rémi (Tchéky Karyo), who isn't interested in partying as Louise is. He's annoyed when she returns for some of the week to her flat in central Paris because she wants some space, to be on her own. She tells him that she loves him deeply and that their relationship will in fact benefit from the new arrangement. In reality though she spends a lot of time with Octave (Fabrice Luchini) with whom she has a platonic relationship. But at a party she meets Bastien (Christian Vadim), to whom she's sexually attracted and with whom she sleeps on one occasion, slipping from his flat in the early hours to return to Rémi. But Rémi isn't there, he's on his way back from a friend of a friend of  Louise's, who's the love of his life. Louise returns to her Paris flat in tears.

Jealousy plays a large part in this film: Rémi's jealousy of men Louise sees, jealousy too perhaps of her youth and vitality; Octave's jealousy of Bastien; Louise's jealousy of Rémi, who she thinks is having an affair with her friend Camille (Virginie Thévenet); etc.

This is a film of the clash of egos, and no one's ego is as monstrous as Octave's. Octave is married but lusts after Louise, who only wants to be his friend. He is a writer, and can interrupt a conversation just because of something he's said that he thinks is of sparkling intellect and that he has to jot down in his note book. He's also a liar, trying to stir things up between Louise and Rémi: when Louise says she's seen Rémi in a café, Octave says he's seen Camille too, planting seeds of doubt in Louise's mind about Rémi's fidelity. And what of Louise herself, who wants to be in a relationship but to be free at the same time: what kind of ego is that? Both Octave and Louise want to have their cake and eat it.

This is the self-deception: Octave, in spite of being told several times that Louise doesn't want the kind of relationship he wants, insists on pawing her, at one stage taking things a little too far and threatening the friendship. Louise is really deceiving herself if she thinks that Rémi is going to fall for her every whim. And for someone who wants to be alone some of the time, the only time she seems to spend in her flat is when she's on the phone trying to go out with someone.

Like an entomologist of the mind, Rohmer examines all aspects of love, its transience, its automatic assumptions, the borders between sexual desire and love itself, the questions, the torment, and so on.

Destiny Ekaragha’s Gone Too Far! (2013)

 

This is Destiny Ekaragha's first feature, only the third feature made by a black woman, and is set as her impressive Tight Jeans short was in Peckham, London. Adapted by the director from Bola Egbaje's eponymous play (2007), Gone Too Far! toys with the petty rivalry between various non-whites in the community, but displays it in an essentially humorous way.

Yemi (Malachi Kirby) meets his older brother Iku (OC Uyeke), whom he's not seen for many years and doesn't even recognise. What's worse, Iku dresses in an uncool way, such as wearing socks with sandals, and speaking a mixture of English and Yoruba. Obviously, Yami is embarrassed, all the more so as he's sent by his mother to go with Iku to buy okra.

On the way they meet many characters, including the half-Jamaican girl Armani (Shanika Warren-Markland) Yami has the hots for, but who isn't interested in Yami and makes a fool of  him: she's a prick teaser. In fact she's the girlfriend of Razer (Tosin Cole), who likes to think he's the main man of the neighbourhood: cue for fights, misunderstandings, etc.

I winced a few times – when the comedy tilted towards farce, and when the acting let things down a bit – but this is a hugely promising debut feature, probably introducing issues which British cinema hasn't touched on before.

Destiny Ekaragha’s Tight Jeans (2008)

Destiny Ekaragha’s first short feature Tight Jeans, set in Peckham, London, caused considerable interest, and led to Ekaragha becoming the third black woman to direct a feature film in England. This eight-minute film has a surprising amount to say. Three young black guys sit on a wall in a housing estate waiting for a lift to Battersea. A young white guy in tight trousers walks past and one of the guys on the wall asks why he hasn't got tight trousers. The answer? Because black guys' dicks are too big. Is this true? Well, you can go back to when the white man raided Africa and had to get rid of the black guys as the white guys' women would be too fond of them. Uh? Black guys populated the world, five continents! Then a white guy in a tee-shirt goes by, and... oh, shut the fuck up.

A quietly brilliant short with lots of playful jokes about racial stereotyping: a great debut.

Rebecca Lighieri’s Les Garçons de l'été (2017)

 

The writer Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam writes her romans noirs, of which this is an example, under the pseudonym Rebecca Lighieri. Les Garçons de l'été is essentially about multiple trauma and revenge, and might initially seem overloaded at 440 pages. But it's not, and this is a very powerful and highly readable book told by several narrators.

Thadée and Zachée are brothers of almost the same age, 21 and 20 respectively, both are academically brilliant, and both are huge enthusiasts of surfing. Their girlfriends – Jasmine and Cindy – are devoted young women. The brothers' parents are the chemists Mylène and Jérôme (who is having an affair with Maud), and have a young daughter, Ysé.

It's Thadée who is the problem, although the readers don't know this when he is forced to return home from La Réunion, cutting his one year stay short: he's been chewed by a bulldog shark, and will have to have a leg amputated. Thadée believes that Jasmine will no longer be interested in him, changes personality, broods and spends a long time just staying in bed doing a different kind of surfing: the internet.

Mylène is obviously devastated, and all the more so when Zachée too becomes a victim of the surf. Or rather, he's a victim of the tremendous ego of Thadée, a person whose hatred and egocentricity knows no bounds: he is responsible for the death of his brother Zachée, and although several people suspect this there's not a shred of evidence to prove it, and certainly Mylène doesn't even suspect what a monster her son is.

The beautiful Anouk, though, the girlfriend of a friend of the brothers, is well aware of what kind of person Thadée is, and has always been: before Thadée's accident, she chose at a party one evening to take a piss in the woods, and unbeknown to her Thadée was lustfully watching: he tried to rape her, and at the same time almost strangled her. She said nothing, but the trauma remained.

Cindy is inconsolable when Zachée, the one love of her life, is dead, and she knows Thadée is guilty of his death. One day, she gets talking to Anouk and learns that she hates him too. Although Thadée has left home, Cindy gains access – via the pre-pubescent Ysé – to his computer, and works out where Thadée is. With Anouk, Cindy goes to Thadée's hideout and tatoos his face, irreparably disfiguring him.

And the final word is with the very intellectually advanced Ysé, whose only friend – her mother being traumatised by the death of Zachée and the disappearance of Thadée – is the slightly backward (in comparison to Ysé) Jordy. Troubled by a 'poltergeist' for some months, Ysé discovers that it's Thadée, and orders him to leave: the result of which is that Mylène becomes permanently psychiatrically disturbed, Maud moves in with Jérôme and Ysé becomes more attached to Jordy, acknowledging that he's making considerable progress.

Reading this back, the book sounds like a pile of bullshit, and yet it's not at all: Lighieri writes in an almost graphic language which is attuned to different varieties of French, notably verlan. A joy to read.

Jean Becker’s L'Été meurtrier (1983)

Jean Becker’s L'Été meurtrier is based on Sébastien Japrisot's novel L'Été meurtrier (1977), and is a complex and powerful psychological work, a superior revenge thriller. Isabelle Adjani (Elaine/Elle) won a César for best female actor, and although she initially turned down the role because of the nude scenes she would have to play, she changed her mind and cinema is the better for this decision: this is a significant film in the history of French movies.

L'Été meurtrier at first perhaps seems a conventional enough love story, although a series of flashbacks to some extent explain the reasons for the movie turning around a strange bend. The very sexy 19-year-old Elle flounces around the village in Provence she and her parents – Paula Wieck Devigne (Maria Machado), or 'Eva Braun'* as some villagers call her, and her disabled husband Gabriel (Michel Galabru) – have moved to, and she causes quite a stir. She particularly stirs Fiorimondo Montechiari (Alain Souchon), nicknamed Pin-Pon, and the feeling is mutual: Elle swiftly moves into Pin-Pon's family home, causing quite a stir there. Pin-Pon can't believe his luck, although Elle's open nudity and insulting behaviour and comments hardly have the same effect on Pin-Pon's mother (Jenny Clève), but the almost deaf aunt 'Cognata' (Suzanne Flon) understands more than many give her credit for.

But then, many things here are only half or not at all understood, and (for instance) Elle's literal and figurative short-sightedness is only an indication of the misunderstandings that surround the events in this film. Elle is the product of an especially brutal rape of her mother by three overgrown yobs, a fact of which she is aware, and as the film progresses it is evident that the balance of her mind – already greatly disturbed – becomes increasingly so when she learns  the truth. The man who has been her true father tells her that he killed the rapists, that he no longer has an interest in his own fate, and Elle understands that her years of research have been in vain.

Elle goes mad and has to be institutionalised, although Pin-Pon thinks (as Elle originally did) that the two are still living. So he has to kill two innocent (if contemptible) men. This has a sniff of Greek tragedy: a brilliant film.

* The film is set in the late seventies: Paula is German by origin, and at the time the French hadn't forgotten the Nazi atrocities, so Franco-German racism was still the order of the day with some people. 

Jessica Hausner's’s Amour fou (2014)

Interestingly, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) and his work has received a wealth of attention from film makers, notably Miloš Forman's Ragtime (1981) based Michael Kohlhaas, and Éric Rohmer's La Marquise d'O... (1976) based on Die Marquise von O.... 

Heinrich (Christian Friedel), in despair with life, first tries to get Marie (Sandra Hüller) to join him in a loving suicide pact, although she politely refuses. And then, when Henriette (Birte Schnöink), wife of Voglel (Stephan Grossmann), discovers that she is terminally ill, she agrees to the pact. And so Heinrich first shoots her dead, and then killed himself at the age of thirty-four. Unlike the way things actually happened, though, in the film it is later discovered that Henriette had been incorrectly diagnosed, and that she in fact was perfectly healthy.

A very strange, yet very enthralling film.

Lucie Borleteau’s Fidelio, l'Odyssée d'Alice | Fidelio: Alice's Odyssey (2014)

 

Fidelio, l'Odyssée d'Alice, Lucie Borleteau's first feature, is an unusual film in that conventional gender roles are reversed. Here we have an old cargo ship in which the highly attractive Alice (Ariane Labed) starts working. She leaves behind her Norwegian boyfriend, graphic novelist Félix (Anders Danielsen Lie) and discovers that the captain Gaël  (Melvil Poupaud) is her first love from some years before when she was a trainee.

The inevitable happens and Alice and Gaël get together again sexually, although for a clearly intelligent young woman Alice is stupid enough to take a selfie of them both in an uncompromising position, which when they return to dry land Félix discovers on checking Alice's photos. 

Odyssey? Well, Alice may have covered a number of places, but she's no female Ulysses, just as Félix is no faithful cat: he's been out on the tiles and in spite of Alice wanting him back he's not too sure about that.

Fyzal Boulifa's Lynn + Lucy (2020)

 

This film concerns two young women – Lynn (Roxanne Scrimshaw) and Lucy (Nichola Burley) – who live in Harlow, Essex, and have been friends since they were very young: at school there were suggestions made that they were lesbians. They now live oppoosite each other on a new housing estate. 

They are opposites in a number of ways – Lynn is introverted, wears dull clothing, and married young with a daughter Lola (Tia Nelson); Lucy is the partying kind, wears her hair blue and usually has a silver Puffa jacket. Lucy lives with her boyfriend Clark (Samson Cox-Vinell), and doesn't seem too happy to be the mother of baby boy Harrison.

Lynn sweeps the floor and makes tea for the customers in a hairdresser's, although her loyalty to Lucy will soon be severely tested when Harrison (actually her godson) is shaken to death: Clark or Lucy? Locals paint their opinion of the couple in huge letters – on Clark and Lucy's front door: 'FUCK OFF', on their car: 'SEE YOU IN HELL'. The hairdresser gives Lynn her first opportunity to cut someone's hair when Lucy walks in the salon: she hacks it off, and the shorn Lucy goes home to kill herself.

A startlingly realistic film of a working-class community, which is Fyzal Boutifa's first feature.

Kieran Evans's Kelly + Victor (2012)

In 2000 Niall Griffiths published Grits, a powerful novel of marginals in Aberystwyth, and this was followed the year after by Sheepshagger, also a very powerful story, written in the vernacular, of marginals in Wales. One of Griffiths's influences is Ron Berry, although I'd guess that there is also an attempt to write like James Kelman in another locality. It seemed that a very promising, very talented new novelist was immerging, and then Kelly + Victor, set in Liverpool, was published in 2002. I found this very disappointing compared with the previous two novels, but then Griffiths was writing at the pace of a novel a year. His friend Kieran Evans chose to make a feature film of the third novel.

This is certainly an improvement on the book, although there are inevitably many differences. Kelly meets Victor at a club, they go to her place, snort coke and have sex, during which Kelly bites Victor. But Victor can't get Kelly out of his mind and when they next meet they go to Sefton Park,  the Walker Art Gallery, and seem like a perfectly normal love-struck couple.

But then there's the next sex session, in which Kelly displays her sadistic tendencies by drawing 'K + V' glass on his back with a piece of broken glass. It's hardly surprising that he breaks off with her, although with great difficulty for Victor, who even tries out his own masochistic tendencies by practising auto-erotic asphyxiation.

It's when Victor finds Kelly in the street after being beaten up by a former boyfriend that he rushes her to hospital and they briefly become partners again. Briefly, that is, because during sex she keeps half-strangling him, which is a great pleasure for them both until she reaches the moment of no return and accidentally kills him. I was wondering how Victor would die in the film, as I couldn't imagine Kelly playing with his internal organs by fisting, as in the book.

As I said above, the film is an improvement on the novel, although billing this stuff as a modern love story seems to being going way too far.

Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe (2019)

Alice (Emily Beecham) is a London scientist working in a laboratory creating new plants and, working in particular with Chris (Ben Whishaw) and Bella (Kerry Fox). Separated from her partner Ivan (Sebastian Hülk), she is a single parent who lives with her adolescent son Joe (Kit Connor), who sees his father who lives in the country.

Alice has named her new 'child' – a remarkable plant – after her son and called it Little Joe. Little Joe is a plant which gives off oxytocin, and as such can make people happy. The possibilities for the success of this plant are self-evident, although tests must be carried out to ensure it is safe and doesn't produce unpleasant side effects. She does, though, act against protocol and take one of the plants home for Joe.

Bella is an older member of the laboratory team with a history of mental illness from which she has occasional relapses for which she self-medicates. Bella lives for her dog which comes into contact with Little Joe and which Bella perceives as behaving strangely. So strangely, in fact, that Bella claims the dog has changed to such an extent that she no long recogises it: she has it put down. And what's more, she believes the change was caused by Little Joe, which Alice thinks is absurd.

Until, that is, she starts to look at an article in Nature magazine which makes Bella's theory look slightly less improbable. Furthermore, Bella gives Alice a USB key of unedited examples of the people who the plant was tested on, and they have noticed behavioural changes. Joe too seems to be registering changes – which of course (as Chris reminds her) are normal in an adolescent – but Alice no longer seems to recognise him, and she's becoming certain that Bella is right: there's something sinister about Little Joe.

In spite of initial scepticism, the boss Karl (David Wilmot) is convinced that it is safe to show Little Joe to the public. Alice tries to sabotage her own creation but Chris violently stops her, and the result is that Little Joe is such a success that countries all over the world want to buy it, even, says the Irish-accented Karl – and no doubt with a critical wink from Austrian co-screenwriter Hausner – from EU countries!

An intelligent film, rather surprisingly in the thriller genre.

Jean-Pierre Melville's Les Enfants Terribles (1969)

Les Enfants Terribles is a very faithful filmic adaptation of Jean Cocteau's 1929 novel of the same name, and Cocteau worked in very close collaboration with Melville, providing the dream-like voiceover. There are very strong intimations of incest and homosexuality in the film, although nothing specific.

Paul becomes ill due to fellow pupil Dargelos (Renée Cosima) throwing a snowball at him, although he doesn't denounce him, it is evident that Dargelos¹ holds some homoerotic power over him. After the death of their mother, the adolescent brother and sister Paul (Édouard Dermit)² and Élisabeth (Nicole Stéphane) live together in intimate isolation, developing a kind of secret language. They are reluctant to shed their youth.

Although Élisabeth marries the rich Michaël, there is no consummation as he dies the next day. Along with his money, Élisabeth inherits a large hôtel particulier and Paul goes to live with her. They are joined by Paul's friend Gérard and Élisabeth's friend Agathe, who loks very much like Dargelos, so much in fact that Paul comes to fall in love with her, and vice versa. This is the beginning of the real problems, and the film has something of a Greek tragedy about it.

It's easy to see why the novel appealed to Melville: his second film has many of the ingredients of the néo-noir works he become so popular for later, such as friendhship, loyalty and betrayal, etc.

¹ In Cocteau's Le Livre Blanc (1930) he reveals that Dargelos is based on a real person who had a great effect on him.

² Dermit was Cocteau's ideal in physical beauty, whom he nicknamed 'Doudou', and who also played in Cocteau's films from L'Aigle à deux têtes (1948) to Le Testament d'Orphée (1960). He lived with Cocteau, became his heir, and is buried with him in the Chapelle Saint-Blaise-des-Simples in Milly-la-Forêt.

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Doulos (1969)

 

This film was made in 1969, although the word 'doulos' doesn't appear in a modern edition of Le Petit Robert because the word is old-fashioned slang for 'indic', or 'indicateur', meaning 'nark', or to be more up-to-date: 'grass' (as in informant). In Jean-Pierre Melville's world anyone can be a grass and people (well, men, usually) have to tread carefully. Oddly, Maurice Faugel (Serge Reggiani) treads very carefully when entering the house of Gilbert Varove (René Lefèvre) and even wipes his shoes on the mat. What's odd about that is that Maurice will then shoot Gilbert dead after Gilbert (his friend, supposedly) has lent him the gun to use (but not hurt anyone) in a forthcoming robbery.

Maurice will believe that Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is his friend until proved otherwise, but then when a robbery is interrupted by Inspector Salignari (Daniel Crohem), a friend of Silien's, and when Maurice's accomplice Rémy (Philippe Nahon) is killed and Maurice himself wounded (after killing Salignari) it becomes clear that Silien is in fact a grass. Or not.

This film is a convoluted mystery trip in which nothing will be revealed to the viewer until the last twenty minutes or so, and it's therefore no surprise that this is one of Quentin Tarentino's favourite films, particularly in regard to Reservoir Dogs. OK, this is néo-noir Melville again, but this film is not only an honour to the genre, but a profound work concerning the value of friendship, the value of money, conflict of interests, the nature of trust, outsiders, greed, desire, even the wish to have done with the lot and live in peace for the rest of your life.  Just watch your back.

Éric Chevillard: L'Œuvre posthume de Thomas Pilaster (1999)

L'Œuvre posthume de Thomas Pilaster is Éric Chevillard's ninth novel and was perhaps in part inspired by Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962). Like a number of Chevillard novels, writing and the absurd hold a major place here.

The back cover contains a tongue-in-cheek illustration of what is in this book: seven previously unpublished texts by the well-loved, much lamented writer Thomas Pilaster (1934-97), whose life was brought a a brutal end. The book is edited and annotated by Pilaster's (only) friend, the poet Marc-Antoine Marson, who doesn't allow himself to lapse into hagiography. Also mentioned is that the books contains a few revelations about the role of Pilaster's wife Lise in his life and work. (Needless to say, both Thomas Pilaster and Marc-Antoine Marson are ficticious characters.)

Marson says he has known the frail Pilaster since his youth, and that the collected unpublished works here span forty-five years. Each text is prefaced by Marson's comments on them, and by the time he's more than halfway through it's obvious that he thinks they're all rubbish. In fact, Marson's friendship with Pilaster seems a very strange one because not only are his footnotes often (increasingly) critical of Pilaster, but he thinks he was a coward, heartless, greedy and possessed by an unbelievable vanity: 'Pilaster asleep, awake, he could only dream of glory'.

Marson was obviously in love with his wife Lise, who died tragically in a fall fifteen years before Pilaster died, and he was incapable of writing anything worthwhile after his wife's death. In fact, Lise (in Marson's résumé of Pilaster's life) is discovered to be rather more than Pilaster's muse at the end, and the impotent and reclusive 'writer' kills himself with his paper knife.

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle rouge | The Red Circle (1970)

Old photos play a part in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle rouge. Take the photos Corey (Alain Delon) has of his former girlfriend. Initially Corey intended to leave the photos behind on the prison desk as he departs with his possessions, although a guard gives the photos back to him. Which in fact is a good thing as it happens, as Corey can leave them in the empty safe of his former boss Rico (André Ekyan): as Corey takes the now slightly less rich Rico's money the photographic symbolism is telling: Corey's just exchanged one thing for another. We'll later see a final view of her when Corey re-visits the cobwebbed flat he's not seen since he was sent to prison, and he throws the photo of her in the bin. The girl remains nameless and about the only sight we see of her is her naked body in the bedroom of Rico's flat. Later, we'll see a very different angle on the memories of a couple, when there's a brief shot of a framed photo of the presumably dead wife of the cop Mattei (André Bourvil) on his desk at home; Mattei also shows the reluctant grass Santi (François Périer) a photo of Santi and Vogel together, proving that they do know each other. Significantly, close to the spot where Corey is to meet his future friend in crime Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté), we get a full shot of the huge wall at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes near Chalon-sur-Saône, which annouces where Nicéphore Niépce invented photography in 1822.

Just released from prison in Marseille, Corey collects money from Rico and buys a second-hand car – an American model, of course – and picks up an anauthorised traveller in this boot in Bourgogne, Vogel, who's just jumped from the train to Paris where he has escaped from the handcuffs Mattei tied him to in the sleeping compartment. The main thing is that this coincidence – two crooks by chance in the same car – brings them together.

Before buying the car Corey initially plays billiards by himself to while the time away until the showroom opens, his chalking of the cue tip designing a red circle, and the title of the film alludes to a quotation by Rama Krishna shown at the beginning of the film, about people being drawn together in this circle, even if they come from different paths, even if they have different aims. The third member of the 'circle' is to be Jansen (Yves Montand), a retired élite cop now suffering from the DTs: no one is innocent, as Mattei's boss repeatedly says.

The climax of the story is in a very long, almost silent, psychologically gripping heist in which the extraordinary skills of the three crooks are tested to their utmost when they rob a high-class jewellery store: Jansen has overcome his alcoholism, is making high-spec bullets from moulds, has even practiced his rifle accuracy to open an electronic door, and when the job is accomplished he feels redeemed, he isn't even interested in his cut. The absurdity of the situation – that the jewellery robbery of the century means that no receiver will touch such highly expensive booty is of no importance: it's the psychology, the craftsmanship, that matters.

This is néo-noir, this is about fatality, and everyone knows that the three robbers will be brought dead together in a pool of blood, much like the red circle that brought them together. For that matter, just as photos bring people together, even if they're separated from each other. A superb film.

René Allio's Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère... | I, Pierre Rivière... (1976)

 

'I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother...' is how one DVD renders the translation of Pierre Rivière's words, although this doesn't convey the gruesomeness of the slitting of the throats of his relatives. Gruesome, though, this re-creation of the twenty-year-old Rivière's actions this film is certainly is not. This is in fact a documentary-style study of the murderer's actions, based on documents put together by Michel Foucault.

In 1835 the agricultural worker Rivière (1815-40) carried out the murders in a small village in Calvados (14), Normandy, where he was born. He was sent to Beaulieu prison in Caen, where he killed himself in 1840.

Pierre's mother had shown little interest in him after the birth of his sister Victoire, and his parents – living in Aunay-sur-Odon – split up when he was four years old, which had a strong mental effect on him. Inexplicably, his mother then gained custody of Pierre, who was very attached to his father. The couple continued to meet and have children.

When Pierre was ten his mother (described by Pierre as 'hysterical') threw him and his sister Aimée out of the house and they went to live with the father. In 1934 Pierre's mother, who was financially bleeding her husband, violently threatened the father in front of her son. Wanting to defend his father, on 3 June of that year Pierre took a billhook and slit the throats of his mother (who ws pregnant at the time), his sister Victoire, and his young brother Jules. He spent a month wandering about 600 km living on grasses and roots until he was discovered.

Pierre didn't tell any lies, told those examining him that he had wished to protect his father, and his very well-written forty-page 'autobiography' is a highly remarkable piece work. Pierre's lawyer gathered doctors together, who came to the conclusion that the balance of his mind had been disturbed since he was four. On 12 November 1835 Pierre was found guilty of murder, although the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

This is a remarkable film, and Allio's assistant Nicolas Philibert, now well known for his documentary film Être et Avoir (2002), revisited it thirty years later in his film Retour en Normandie (Return to Normandy) in 2007.

Jacques Audiard's Dheepan (2015)

 

Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan) is a Tamil Tiger forced to flee Sri Lanka. With two strangers, Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and the nine-year-old Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), they pose as a family in order to escape to France, to end up in a grim HLM where the fake husband and wife become caretakers in their block. Much of the dialogue is in Tamil and the film charts the 'family's' progress in their new language.

Not only does their knowledge of the French language develop, but slowly a real family will immerge based on love and loyalty. The problem is that the gang rivalry, based around drugs, will become increasingly violent and this cité in Paris, full of ex-convicts, drug addicts, etc, and will turn into a war zone which resembles the country they've left, and Yalini yearns to leave for London, where she has a relative.

Dheepan will have to use his fighterly skills to quell the escalating violence, and this is where a story of learning to live in a completely different society and adapting to its standards swings very quickly into a blood-soaked thriller. To top it off, presumably the concluding scene of Dheepan, Yalini, Illayaal and the couple's young child living in a kind of utopia in England is just another of Dheepan's dreams?

Coming after the developments in Europe over the past five years that the film was made, it comes across as a very poor joke today. And this is such a pity, because what up to its mid-point seemed to be an extremely promising movie – especially with Antonythasan Jesuthasan's superlative acting – just disintegrated into nothingness. Palme d'Or 2015? Was there really nothing better to choose from?

Jean-Luc Lagarce: Juste la fin du monde (1990)

 

Jean-Luc Lagarce (1957-95) came from a working-class background, his parents working at the Peugeot factory in Valentigney, Doubs. He moved away from his roots to become a playwright, creating many works before his untimely death from AIDS at the age of 38. Watching a Lagarce play is not to everyone's delight, yet there are wonders to be found there. Lagarce is now recognised as a major modern playwright, being studied not only at university but (over a long period) for the Bac. His Juste la fin du monde is certainly his best known play. This Théâtre à la table interpretation is quite brilliant.

Amélie Vioux's introduction to the play at Bac level is interesting. She begins by saying that Juste la fin du monde (which of course is a strange title: we're only talking about the end of the world?) is a play like no other. Well yes, but then Bernard-Marie Koltès's plays are in some ways similar, and it's not for nothing that publishers initially found Lagarce's attempts to write plays derivative of Ionesco and Beckett, but certainly he soon developed an unmistakable style.

Vioux speaks of the play as being about a personal and familial crisis, but much more interestingly that the speech in the play is used in place of action, which is a useful tool to understand it. But to get down to basics this is a huis clos, everything taking place in one room and with just five people: the unnamed mother in the room of the property where the play is set, her sons Louis and Antoine, her daughter Suzanne, and Antoine's wife Catherine.

Louis is a writer who has not seen his relatives for twelve years; Suzanne still lives with her mother; Antoine works in a local factory; this is the first and last time Louis has seen Catherine, and indeed the final time he will see any other members of his family. Louis has come to tell them all that he (at the age of almost 34) is dying, although he doesn't manage to say this, because paradoxically words get in the way and prevent him from saying what his intentions are.

Words are intended to express things, and Vioux's little exposé about Juste la fin du monde uses such words as 'chiasmus' and 'epanorthosis' to describe Lagarce's use of language. This isn't a space to talk about rhetorical devices, but Lagarce's use of language is fascinating: the characters find it virtually impossible to communicate, they repeat themselves, usually not by using the same words, but by revising, correcting, making additions often several times. And they get frustrated by what they fail to communicate, verbally attack the person they're addressing for their own communicative impotence, they often (particularly in Antoine's case) adopt an unprovoked and strongly aggressive tone, but there's no resolution. In certain respects this resembles a Greek tragedy, conforming to unities (here of place and time), although here there's no tragic ending  onstage. Or is there? The tragedy is perhaps in the (lack of) speech, the unspoken.

Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour (1967)

 

It's a little difficult to imagine the effect that Buñuel's Belle de jour, based on Joseph Kessel's 1928 novel of the same name, could have had back in 1967, although an article in the Los Angeles Times of the day heralded it as his biggest success yet, and a masterpiece, if 'less than a masterpiece [compared to some of his earlier films], but sexy. And in color.' Catherine Deneuve plays the newly married Séverine, with the doctor Pierre (Jean Sorel) as her husband. 

The paper calls it a 'study in female sexuality', which I find too much to take. Séverine was sexually abused as a child, and the general diagnoses are that the Bovaryish Séverine is bored with her tedious doctor husband and becomes a high-class prostitute ('Belle de jour') because it satisfies her masochistic imagination, thus priming her for a 'normal' sex life with Pierre. This is how I viewed it the first time I saw the film some years ago, although now I'm not so sure. Séverine enjoys her life as a prostitute, the thrill of non-conventional sex, and then she grows to like the unhinged Marcel (Pierre Clementi), who becomes so besotted that he gets his gets his mate Hippolyte (Francisco Rabel) to follow Séverine, then in jealousy Marcel shoots Pierre, who ends up paralysed with Séverine looking after him?

OK, the coachmen taking her into the woods, whipping her and probably raping her are fantasy, as is the mud thrown at her, but how much of this are we supposed to read as fantasy and how much reality? Buñuel leaves it to us to decide, but my guess is that there's a hell of a lot more surrealism going on here than Séverine and Husson (Michel Piccoli) disappearing under the dinner table together.

Apart from the fantasy, there are some interesting pieces relating to other films here: the appearance of Buñuel himself in the film, like Hitchcock in his own films (or, principally, Truffaut in his in homages to Hitchcock), but there are also references to Godard's À bout de souffle in the selling of Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées, and of course the shooting in the back of Marcel by a cop echoes Michel Poiccard being shot in the back in Godard's film.

Most of all, perhaps, this is a big, stiff middle finger up to the bourgeoisie, as are many of Buñuel's films.

Christophe Honoré's La Belle personne | The Beautiful Person (2008)

I've no idea if France has ever had such an uncultured president as Sarkozy, but in Febrary 2006 the leader-to-be spouted out about Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678), ludicrously asking if people had ever thought to ask a guichetière (female ticket clerk) what they thought of the book. The underlying idea behind this was that La Princesse de Clèves belonged to a long gone era. Little did Sarko realise that his very odd remark would dog him for his whole rule, that the book would as a result of his vituperative remarks become a best seller, that groups would hold outside readings of it, or even wear badges announcing that they were reading it.

It even provoked director Chistophe Honoré to make a film based on it in the present day, showing just how relevant La Princesse de Clèves still is. The main characters, with Madame de Lafayette's names first, followed by their modern character names, then their real names: La princesse de Clèves is Junie de Chartres (Léa Seydoux), Le duc de Nemours is Jacques Nemours (Louis Garrel), Le prince de Clèves is Otto (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) and Le vidame de Chartres is Matthias de Chartres (Esteban Carvajal Alegria). The main setting is in a lycée.

Junie's mother has died so she goes to live with her aunt and uncle and their offspring, Matthias being her cousin. At the new school she causes quite an attraction and soon bonds with Otto, who is madly in love with her. Also, though, the local Lothario, Jacques, the teacher of Italian, falls for her in such a way that he forsakes his other lovers. The problem: Junie feels the same about Jacques, although she is determined to remain faithful to Otto.

One very testing time is when Jacques is seen to let fall a letter which goes the rounds of the school and eventually ends up in Junie's hands: it's a love letter from a girl. Obviously Junie is heartbroken, although things are a little more complicated than they seem initially, and Honoré has of course changed the original book in a few places, including giving it a gay update. Matthias is concerned that the true story of the letter will come out as he, not Jacques, dropped it and it's from his boyfriend Martin: he reveals this information to Jacques, who passes it on to Junie.

Junie doesn't believe him, and although she's torn the letter up she suddenly remembers the final word in it is 'amoureux', not 'amoureuse': for some reason she's omitted to notice the sex of the writer. So Jacques is back in her good books, although she can't reciprocate his love because she can't break with Otto.

But Otto suspects she's two-timing him and in class sends out a spy to find out what Junie's doing, although the spy misconstrues her behaviour and believes Junie is secretly seeing Jacques. Of course the original Prince de Clèves wasted away, but the modern Otto throws himself from the school balcony into the courtyard. When a suitable time has elapsed after the suicide the ever-smitten Jacques continues trying to court Junie, but with no success. And Junie doesn't retreat to a convent as her seventeenth century counterpart did, but goes away on a ship, and by the appearance of the expanse of the sea she's going a very long way away.

Christophe Honoré has proved the relevance today of this very old novel, and also proved the stupidity of Sarko. Chapeau ! 

Agnès Jaoui's Le Goût des autres | The Taste of Others (2000)

Le Goût des autres is Agnès Jaoui's first film, written by her and her partner Jean-Pierre Bacri, who died at the age of 69 last week. There is no sex, virtually no violence, no high dramatic scenes, the movie can only with difficulty be called a comedy, and yet this film is constantly engrossing.

Jean-Jacques Castella (Bacri) is the successful owner of a canning(?) factory in Rouen. He is seemingly permanently bad-tempered and highly uncultured (let's call him almost tasteless), but wealthy. He lives with his wife Angélique (Christiane Millet), a former interior designer who has turned their home into a kitschy palace full of furniture with flowery designs: it's looks like hell to live in.

Is it surprising that Jean-Jacques looks for an escape route, even if he's not aware of it? Or even that his escape route could come from his temporary English teacher Clara Devaux (Anne Alvaro)? He has an important Iranian contract to fulfill, and it might be a good idea if he learns at least a little English to please his potential buyers, even if he's relying on his far better educated second-in-command Weber (Xavier de Guillbon) to spare him the chore of doing the real business. So along comes Clara Devaux (Anne Alvaro) to teach him, although she's swiftly dismissed by the macho Jean-Jacques.

However, much to Jean-Jacques's disgust (and much in life is to his disgust), that evening he and his wife have agreed to see Racine's Bérénice at the theatre, where Angélique's niece is playing a minor role. And who should be playing the main role? Clara of course. And from whining 'Putain !' about having to see the performance, from at the beginning being horrified that the play is in verse (well, we knew Jean-Jacques was uncultured), he's transfixed — smitten is a more exact word — by Clara's performance.

So transfixed that he'll see the play again, renew English lessons with Clara, and visit her in her dressing room. He tries to get involved with the people who mix with her, but they just make fun of his lack of culture: they claim that Ibsen and Strindberg are comic playwrights! But, little by little, Jean-Jacques is discovering culture and might stike a hit with Clara: after all, he's left his tiresome wife and perhaps grown to love Hedda Gabler.

The question of the barmaid and cannabis dealer Manie (Agnès Jaoui), with her relationship with Jean-Jacques's chauffeur Bruno (Alain chabet) and bodyguard Franck (Gérard Lanvin), is a complicated subplot I won't go into. Fascinating film.

Zed Nelson's The Street (2019)

This is Zed Nelson's first feature film, about just one street close to central London, Hoxton Street. Nelson says it's about gentrification, austerity, Brexit. It's a wake-up call, not intended as a poke at the new people moving into the street, just a reflection of a moment taken over three years.

All the same, it's a picture of a dying community forced out by rising prices, of increasing pressure being put on the original working-class people to move out of the area not only in which they may well have been born but their parents too before them, and so on. There's the pie and mash shop now opposite a craft beer shop, a 'Buzz Shop' for building web sites, advertising, copy writing, numerous other things, there's even a gallery. The older people can't understand, or can only understand that they're on the way out: even the priest has to move out of the church at the age of seventy, and he can no longer afford to live in London.

There's a feeling by the older residents that they've been conned by Brexit: some have voted for it as they thought too much money was spent being in the EU, but now maybe too much is being spent on leaving it? There's confusion everywhere. We see a bunch of youths waving flags around, demanding 'their' country back, but what country?

There's racist talk that wouldn't be seen by the locals as racist: the blacks have been there for decades, but they're not happy with the fact that they used to know everyone but now don't, some people can't speak English, and one reckons that they're being given priority over the locals in the council flat queues.

Certainly flats are around, but they belong to private companies and we all know about their breaking rules: the Grenfell Tower tragedy broke out during the filming, and 72 people were killed due to combustible cladding: the ensuing mess continues. Aviva, the insurance company, has bought most of Hoxton Square. Where can these people go now they've been forced out of their homes? Errol sold his garage and the demolition squad are moving in, but at least he's accepted the offer. For those who rent, well there's always the street of course.

I found it most enlightening that the guy who sleeps rough under a bridge and who was the victim of mindless yobs burning what little property he had had an East European accent. Most significant of all though, he was much more cultured than any of the others we see on the street: he quotes from Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black), and we see a charred copy of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightnesss of Being. The books were written in different centuries, but both from writers living in France, although Kundera is a now nationalised Czech immigrant.

I think Nelson's right in suggesting that this film could serve as a witness to a particular historical period in British history.

Éric Rohmer's Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon | The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007)

 

Astrée (1601-27), by Honoré d'Urfé (1567-1625), is the first roman-fleuve in the French language and contains 5399 pages. D'Urfé's secretary Balthazar Baro concluded the fourth part of it after d'Urfé's death, and added an extra section (1632-33). For some time it was held as a masterpiece, and greatly admired by many prominent writers, Madame de Sévigné among them, along with Jean-Jacques Rousseau who made a journey to La Forez to visit the area where the novel is set. Rohmer's film version of it is inevitably very loosely based on the novel. The main difference between the novel and the film is that d'Urfé's was set in the fifth century, Rohmer's film at the time of d'Urfe.

Astrée (Stéphanie Crayencour) and Céladon (Andy Gillet) are both young shepherds very much in love until Astrée is deceived into believing that Céladon has another lover, whereupon she tells him that she is finished with him and never wants to see him again.

Céladon then throws himself into the nearby River Lignon, although he is saved by the nymphs Galathée (Véronique Reymond), Léonide (Cécile Cassel) and Sylvie (Rosette) and taken to Galathée's castle to recuperate. Galathée has taken a romantic liking too him, although he insists that he's in love with Astrée, who now believes he's dead, although he can't communicate with her as she's told him she no longer wants to see him.

Céladon stubbornly goes into the woods to live a primitive existence, although he's frequently visited by Adamas (Serge Renko), the druid priest at the castle who is planning to help Céladon. Rohmer is given to Shakespearian influences, and this film – particularly with its hard-to-swallow mistaken identity – is perhaps his most Shakespearian. Nevertheless, with its theme of love and mistaken behaviour, coincidences, etc, it's very much in the vein of to many of Rohmer's former works, albeit set in a different period. Rohmer made this between the age of 87-8, and it was his final work.

Le Château de la Bâtie d'Urfé in Le Forez in Saint-Étienne-le-Molard is now a museum.

Stéphane Riethauser's Madame (2019)

Madame is Stéphane Riethauser's first feature and covers family film footage and photos over three generations, the two central interests being Stéphane's relationship with his grandmother Caroline, and his realisation that he is gay.

The family is a wealthy Swiss one, Stéphane growing with his parents in Geneva, although is it apparent that he has always related far more to his late grandmother, who died fifteen minutes before the film was made. Caroline detests convention: her first marriage was more of less a forced one in her mid-teens, she considers that her husband raped her, and she soon divorced him. She became a business woman, trying a few different kinds of business before owning a top restaurant. She married a second time but this too ended in divorce, and she was wary of men being after her for her money. She was the second moman to have a driving licence, and she had a large villa on the Côte d’Azur.

We learn of Stéphane growing up much impressed by reading Le Prince Éric by Serge Dalens, in which he associates one of the characters from his school with the hero. He develops a heterosexual alter ego, Riton, who does all the 'masculine' things that men do, he becomes friends with one of the less savoury young men in the area, smokes cannabis with him, but breaks with him when he is for a joke locked him in with a much older man who tries to molest him. Stéphane has a girlfriend with whom he has sex, but there's still something missing.

Listening to Charles Aznavour's song 'Ils disent' — a song about a gay transvestite — is something of an epiphanic moment, Stéphane working strongly towards the realisation of the fact that he's a homosexual. And then the inevitable coming out, which is of course saying at the same time that there will be no children. Caroline is at first slow to register the news, although she becomes a huge supporter of the gay cause, further cementing the relationship between the two. A joy to watch.

Sébastien Lifshitz’s Adolescentes (2020)

Adolescentes is an amazing documentary film, being the result of regularly filming the development of two adolescents, Emma and Anaïs, from the age of thirteen to eighteen, when they finished their Bac. It took a great deal of editing because the resulting 130-film comes from 500 hours of material. The teenagers are filmed at school, in their families, and together or apart in the outside world in Brive-la-Gaillarde (Corrèze): Lifshitz chose this town because he wanted time to be clearly registered by the change of seasons.

Emma and Anaïs were already friends, which is somewhat unusual in that they are so different from each other: Emma comes from a more financially privileged background whereas Anaïs is from a more modest one; Emma is shy and has a melancholy personality whereas Anaïs is far more outgoing. The film has the outstanding characteristic in that the director has been able to film the two not as actors but as 'real' people who have become so used to the presence of the camera that they no long notice it. Intimate discussions such as the right time to lost their virginity, then talking about losing their virginity, are a matter of course. So too are the tears when, say, Anaïs loses her grandmother, or Emma strongly argues with her mother, and so on.

We follow the pair in school lessons, discussing quotations from Madame Bovary, Emma reciting from Anouilh's Antigone, or Anaïs learning mnemonic devices such as 'Me Voici Tout Mignon Je Suis Un Nuage' for remembering the relation between the planets and the sun, and incidentally the absurdly stupid error that she made in her understanding of the use of this nonsense phrase: few embarrassing scenes, it appears, have been left out.

This film is also a record of the historical events which appeared over this period, such as the Charlie Hebdo killings and the Bataclan massacre, after which the school head assembled the students in the yard to give a speech and the students held up copies of a drawing that was a cross between the CND symbol and the Tour Eiffel. On discovering that Macron has become president Emma isn't impressed, but then she isn't impressed by politics; Anaïs, on the other hand, is very disappointed that Macron has won and seems (the horror!) to have wanted Marine Le Pen to win. In the end they go their separate ways, Anaïs to Limoges to be an auxiliary nurse, Emma to univeristy in Paris.

Hafsia Herzi’s Tu mérites un amour (2019)

Hafsia Herzi first came to fame as an actor in Abdellatif Kechiche's La Graine et le mulet (2007). This is her first feature-length film as director, in which she also plays the lead role as Lila.

Lila has an abusive boyfriend, Rémi (Jérémie Laheurte), who is playing around with other women but still doesn't want to lose her and phones her to tell her he loves her. Lila, on the other hand, is in two minds: she needs some assurance that Rémi is being straight with her, and at the same time she feels that she should break away from his toxic influence. She has a one-night-stand with the affectionate Jonathan (Jonathan Eap), although this doesn't stop her thinking about Rémi. And nor does the brief sex episode at the bottom of the block of flats with a handsome and wealthy Sergio (Alexander Ferrario) she met at a party. She even joins in a threesome with Rachelle (Sophie Garagnon) and Bruno (Brice Dulin).

In the end it's Charly (Anthony Bajon), the budding young photographer who reluctantly also works in his uncle's café, who performs the exorcism. Charly has taken photos of her which have met with commercial approval: he gives Lila one of the framed photos. Lila reminds him of Frida Kahlo, and he recites a poem attributed to her which gives the film its title: the poem's original title is 'Mereces un amor que te quiera despeinada'. When she's in her flat with Charly and Rémi calls, she summons up her courage and repeatedly tells him to get out, saying Charly is her lover. This is untrue, although it could well be a prediction of the very near future.

Sophie Letourneur’s Énorme (2020)

 

I could simply say that this is one of the worst films I've ever seen: it's a comedy that is in no respect funny, it's wholly predictable, it's ridiculous to the point of idiocy, it's puerile, it's tedious, it has no depth and a single 'idea' is present – a man deciding that he wants a child so much that he in effect becomes a psychological proxy for his wife – and the film is so repetitive that it is nauseous. Instead I have to say that this totally irresponsible sexist junk, which would have us laugh at a criminal offence,* is the worse film I've ever seen.

The movie, starring Marina Foïs as Claire Girard and Jonathan Cohen as her husband Frédéric, concerns a couple who don't want a child until Fred assists in an unexpected birth delivery on a plane by a Spanish woman and goes gooey-eyed as a result. On his mother's suggestion, he substitutes his wife's birth pill for saccarine, ensures that Claire doesn't find out about her pregnancy until it's too late to have an abortion in France, and persuades her that it would be dangerous to have one in England, where the legal period is longer.

To a gobsmacked Marina Foïs on the TMC programme 'Quotidien' last September, the presenter Maïa Mazaurette held up a sign in block letters with 'two years' imprisonment' and 'fine of 30,000 euros' written on it: this is the maximum penalty for 'l'entrave de l'interruption volontaire de grossesse' (IVG), or causing an obstruction to the prevention of pregnancy.

Marina Foïs's response to this was that the film has 'un sujet tellement contemporain que tout le monde va le comprendre, voire en rire' ('such a modern subject that everyone will understand it, indeed laugh at it'): no indication of the slightest awareness that the most important decision in life – to have or not to have a child – is no laughing matter! Jonathan Cohen pointed out that a lawyer in the film calls Fred's meddling a serious action – certainly, although the viewer is supposed to laugh at this – and Cohen concludes 'Le film parle de lui-même' ('The film speaks for itself.'). Indeed, this utter trash certainly does speak for itself. Avoid if you don't want to be sick.

*In French this offence is a 'délit': the French use the word 'crime' for more serious actions such as murder or rape.

Boris Lojkine's’s Camille (2019)

 

Boris Lojkine began making documentary films of Vietnam – Ceux qui restent (2001), Les Chantiers de la coopération (2004), Les Âmes errantes (2005) – until he tired of a country which he saw was becoming more open, more westernised, resembling other countries too much. He turned to the Central African Republic, and Camille is a fictionalised account of a young French photographer there.

Camille Lepage (1988-2014) is a photojournalist who falls in love with the Central African Republic, where there is civil war. She goes there in October 2013. The film shows the kind of life she lived there, eating with the people, singing with them, giving them what little money she has, a rare white person in a poor black African country torn apart by violence. Many inhabitants think it's necessary to photograph the situation there, many can't understand her, see her as an outsider, while she is frustrated that the people in this country are destroying each other.

Her photos are published in Libération and her family welcomes her home for Christmas 2013 as a kind of hero. Libération want her to help cover Ukraine, but she says there are still problems in the Central African Republic which aren't being publicised. So she returns there, to the country she loves, to the friendhship, to the doubts about her presence, to the bush, and finally to a bullet in her head while on a motorbike in May 2014.

Aurel's’s Josep (2020)

 

This cartoon, which is Aurel's first feature-length film, is more manga than Disney and based on a true story. Following the victory of the fascist dictator Franco from February 1939, La Retirada began: nearly half a million republicans, communists and anarchists fled from Spain across the frontier to France. They were arrested and sent to a concentration camps, such as the one near the border in Argelès-sur-Mer, where they were subjected to filthy conditions, frequent mental and physical abuse, and racism. The story is told by a dying grandfather to his young grandchild.

The grandfather was a French policeman in the concentration camp and in spite of his colleagues' violence helped the artist Josep Bartolí (1910-95). Josep had been a member in Barcelona of POUM, a revolutionary organisation against the dictator. Aurel had for some years been interested in the Spanish Civil War, being particularly inspired by Ken Loach's film Land and Freedom (1995).

After 1943 Bartolí left for Mexico, where he became the lover of Frida Kahlo, whose huge image can be seen as a kind of watermark on the above poster. From Mexico Bartolí left for the United States, where he met a number of other artists, and where he died. The film is a remarkable achievement, and a hymn to the triumph of culture over barbarity.