Events

Le Théâtre Français

Friday, May 7, 2010
Saturday, May 8, 2010
6:30pm
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TOURNEES: 8th Annual French Film Festival    

March 17, 18 and 19
All films presented with English subtitles.
Screened in the Little Theater (LT 161)
Free!

March 17, Thursday 7:00 pm
L'Ennemi intime / Intimate Enemies (2007)
Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri

Set in 1959, Siri’s film is a harrowing depiction of Algeria’s war for independence. The contradictory title refers to the fact that less than ten years after French and Algerian soldiers fought together against the Nazis, they were battling each other. Arriving after an incident of “friendly fire” kills the original commanding officer, Lieutenant Terrien, who vainly tries to remain principled, instantly clashes with Sergeant Dougnac, an amoral combat veteran who stopped caring about doing the right thing years ago. As the film traces Terrien’s slow disintegration, it also unsparingly depicts the absolute viciousness and madness of this war, one in which torture is regularly deployed and women and children massacred. Skillfully using jump cuts and a brown-gray color palette that conveys the brutal conditions of the desert, Siri has shown meticulous care in crafting the combat scenes. But his filmmaking finesse never detracts from Intimate Enemies’ deeper significance as an unforgettable statement on the absolute futility of war—a message that powerfully resonates today.

March 18, Friday 7:00 pm
L’Heure d’été / Summer Hours (2008)
Dir. Olivier Assayas

After the globe-spanning settings of his last three films, Olivier Assayas returns home for the mournful Summer Hours, examining a bourgeois French family trying to negotiate the past, present, and future. Assembled for the birthday of their widowed mother, Hélène, three siblings—Frédéric (Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier)—celebrate what will be their last family gathering at their once-beloved, magic ancestral home in the Île-de-France. Hélène dies, off-screen, a few months after this reunion, leaving her children to struggle with the best way to honor the past. Frédéric, the eldest, and the one who agonizes the most over the questions of legacy and heritage, finally agrees with his siblings to put the house on the market and sell their mother’s impressive art collection to the Musée d’Orsay. Assayas’s sincere, complex concern about cultural amnesia—the eroding of a nation’s heritage by the demands of the international economy—is rendered so deftly that the theme becomes one of larger importance. Summer Hours is also an impeccably observed family study, unimaginable without the remarkable ensemble of actors. Cinematographer Eric Gautier beautifully captures, in the two scenes that bookend Summer Hours, the very look and feel of what the film’s title evokes: sun-dappled, pastoral scenes of indolence and pleasure.

March 19 --- Saturday Film Marathon!!!

2:00 pm
35 Rhum / 35 Shots of Rum (2008)
Dir. Claire Denis

Films about families and their complications all too often pierce eardrums with shrieks of dysfunction. Amid the din, Claire Denis’s sublime film stands out all the more for its soothing quiet, conveying the easy, frequently nonverbal intimacy between a widowed father, Lionel, and his university-student daughter, Joséphine. An homage to Yasujiro Ozu’s similarly themed Late Spring (1949), 35 Shots is Denis’s warmest, most radiant work, honoring a family of two’s extreme closeness while suggesting its potential for suffocation. 35 Shots is firmly rooted in place, several scenes unfolding in an apartment building in a run-down section of Paris’s 18th arrondissement, home to Lionel and Joséphine; Gabrielle, an ex of Lionel’s who still aches for him; and Noé, nursing a crush on Joséphine. Dyads align, shift, break, and regroup among the four, jealousy simmering during an unforgettable scene at a café, in which Noé cuts in on a sweetly dancing Lionel and Joséphine as the Commodores’ “Night Shift” plays. Nonsexual filial devotion is immediately supplanted by heat and desire. Father and daughter’s comfortable life together will need to end—an inevitability that even Lionel recognizes as necessary, no matter how painful.

4:00 pm
Le Chant des mariées / The Wedding Song (2008)
Dir. Karin Albou

In her follow-up to her 2005 debut, Little Jerusalem, Karin Albou reveals herself to be a highly gifted, sensitive chronicler of both the complex lives of young women and religious differences. Set in Nazi-occupied Tunis in 1942, The Wedding Song focuses on the friendship between teenagers Nour, a devout Muslim celebrating her engagement to Khaled, and her neighbor Myriam, a secular Jew living with her widowed mother, Tita. Nour’s wedding to Khaled must be postponed until he can secure financial stability; hired as an informer by the Nazis, Khaled will soon threaten to destroy the bonds between the two heroines. The brasher and more independent Myriam finds herself forced into an arranged marriage to a wealthy older man, a union that will enable Tita to pay off the huge fines levied against Jewish residents. Though their lives are certainly circumscribed, Albou’s protagonists aren’t portrayed as helpless victims; instead, Nour and Myriam are committed to taking control, exercising their own formidable will whenever they can. The Wedding Song also plays close attention to the social and cultural spaces women carved out for themselves in restrictive societies, like the hammams.

6:00 pm
36 Vues du pic Saint-Louis / Around a Small Mountain (2009)
Dir. Jacques Rivette

Master filmmaker Jacques Rivette, now 82, returns to one of his favorite themes—life versus performance—in this elegant work, which begins with a chance encounter on a mountain road. After a 15-year absence, Kate returns to the town where her late father ran a small circus. When her car breaks down, she’s assisted by helpful stranger Vittorio; Kate thanks him by inviting him to attend a circus show. This is no Ringling Bros. extravaganza: Rivette’s circus takes place in a tiny, bare-bones setting, with clowns who haven’t quite mastered their acts. But Vittorio is immediately enchanted, following the troupe as they move from hamlet to hamlet. He’s also equally fascinated with the melancholy Kate and begins to slowly unravel the reasons why she stayed away for so long. The source of Kate’s sadness is presented in a series of monologues about secret histories and buried truths, flawlessly performed by Jane Birkin. Though it deals with pain and despair, “Around a Small Mountain” is undeniably a buoyant film, filled with a sense of hope and wonder. As Vittorio reminds us, the circus is a place “where everything is possible.”

8:00 pm
La France (2007)
Dir. Serge Bozon

Serge Bozon’s singular, extraordinary La France, co-written with Axelle Ropert, is a drama about the horrors, loneliness, and camaraderie of World War I that intermittently (four times, to be specific) blooms into a delirious musical. Liberty, equality, fraternity: Gaul’s motto is dissected throughout Bozon’s movie, which laments the folly of nationalism. Joining the simple, straightforward title of the film are the songs themselves: “England,” “Italy,” “Germany” and “Poland,” all of which begin with the line “I, the blind girl…,” sung by weary soldiers who come to life with their handcrafted string instruments, made from cans and other everyday detritus. Sylvie Testud plays Camille, a soldier’s wife who goes in search of her husband, posing as a man to join ten combatants led by Pascal Greggory. Testud has repeatedly proven herself to be one of the greatest actresses working today; in La France, that skill is evident in the look of pure enchantment on Camille’s face the first time her comrades break into anachronistic song—creamy, harmonious nuggets that sound like Beach Boys’ singles or other pop hits from the mid-1960s. Fittingly, Bozon ends his one-of-a-kind war story with a scene that takes us to another world.