Fluent in Subtitles

Making Plans for Lena. (Non ma fille tu n’iras pas danser) Director Christophe Honore. 105 min.

Le Refuge. Director Francois Ozon. 88 min.

Chiara Mastroianni in "Making Plans for Lena"

I was planning on giving Christophe Honore’s latest a pass. The buzz was bemused, at best, when I strolled in after the press screening to catch the next film (“a mess” was the general concensus). I had also found the filmmaker’s previous two  efforts  (“Dans Paris” and “Les Chansons d’Amour”) as irritating as often as they were intriguing. And then there is that title, which has been reinvented from the original (“No my daughter, you will not be going to the dance”) to the insipid “Making Plans for Lena,” which suggests a crisply illustrated children’s book about a little girl picking out her confirmation dress. When I eventually went to the follow-up screening at IFC, what excited me was the very section that seemed to have irked many of the film’s detractors: a mesmerizing and thematically pivotal 15-minute interlude, wherein a Breton folk tale is enacted, replete with the elaborately conceived bells and whistles of medieval costumes, music and dance. I found it a welcome vacation from the sundry abuses inflicted by the titular character (Chiara Mastroianni) on herself and her family. From the moment this malcontent mother of two stuffs a sickly magpie into her bag at the urgings of her kids (who want to rescue it from harm’s way at a busy train station), we get the sense that this is the kind of parent terrible who eviscerates everything she touches. Or at least she does at the moment the film enters her life, when she is still reeling from what one can only infer was a punishing separation from her husband. Lena spews hurt and bitterness 360 degrees: at her mother (who attempts, intrusively, to reuinte Lena with her husband), her pregnant sister, who is sputtering about with her own marital issues;  her estranged husband; her fatiguingly insouciant brother; his well-meaning girlfriend; and a would-be suitor (played by the omnipresent Louis Carrel, Honore’s resident Jean-Pierre Leaud).  Caught in the line of fire are a small daughter and a sensitive, bookish son who looks to have inherited his grandmother’s ethereal beauty. Human train wrecks  can be irresistible to watch, particularly one such as Lena who seems bent on tying everyone she loves down onto the tracks with herself; Mastroianni’s full-on commitment to Lena’s self-destructive impulses gives a gloomy propulsion to Honore’s ambling series of character sketches. Marie-Christine Barrault kicks in the necessary warmth as Lena’s unswervingly protective mother. As was the case with Hanna Schygulla’s portrait of a mourning matriarch in “The Edge of Heaven,” Barrault projects a luminosity and gravitas that only seems to deepen with the passing years.

Isabelle Carre and Louis-Ronan Choisy in "Le Refuge"

When I saw “Le Refuge” at the Toronto Festival in September, I thought it was Francois Ozon’s most satistying film in a spell. Given the intervening gap of six months, I would be reluctant to comment further, other than to recall the marvelous chemistry between  a genuinely pregnant Isabelle Carre and singer Louis-Ronan Choisy as a  pregnant ex-junkie in recovery and the gay brother of her late boyfriend,  who blows onto the scene and helps lift her out of her self-imposed isolation.

“Making Plans for Lena” public screenings: Mar. 18. 7 PM IFC Center; Mar. 19 8:45 PM and Mar. 20 1:30 PM, Walter Reade Theater. and 7 PM at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Christophe Honore and Chiara Mastroianni will attend screenings.

“Le Refuge” public screenings: Mar. 13, 7 PM, IFC Center, Mar. 20, 6:15 PM and Mar. 21, 8:45 PM Walter Reade Theater. Francois Ozon will attend screenings Mar. 20 & 21.

Firat Ayverdi and Vincent Lindon in "Welcome"

Welcome. Directed by Philippe Lioret. 110 m.

So, “A Prophet” has swept the Cesar awards, adding yet another feather to its plume-freighted cap. One day, perhaps in ten years, when I have added a bit more wisdom and enlarged my world view by another inch or two, I will return to Jacques Audiard’s orgasmically acclaimed prison drama (which I thought two-thirds of a very good film) and perhaps better understand what all of the cacaphony was about. This year’s Rendez-Vous series offers the opportunity to do a bit of comparison shopping between Cesar’s  favored child and three more of the seven films nominated for the top Cesar: “In the Beginning,” “Rapt” and “Welcome.” The latter title is the most foursquare of the batch in its calculable dramaturgy, but well worth the time spent.  Philippe Lioret’s finely performed and politically of-the-moment tear-jerker intertwines the frustrated efforts of  a 17-year-old Kurdish refugee named Bilal Bilal (Firat Ayverdi) to be reunited with his girlfriend in London, with the thwarted attempts of a Calais swimming instructor named Simon (*Vincent Lindon, a Jean Gabin for our times) to help the young man’s cause. Lioret underplays the more formulaic aspects of his narrative—the stirrings of Simon’s social consciousness, the surrogate father-son alliance that develops between Simon and Bilal, the rueful push and pull between Simon and his soon-to-be ex-wife Marion (Audrey Dana). Instead, Lioret turns up the flame on  the hardships and hostilities endured by political refugees as they struggle to pass from  an unwelcoming France and into a UK that has raised its drawbridge on the Bilals of the world . Lioret deflects some of the blame for their plight off the shoulders of  President Sarkozy ( who has set the nation’s boorish civic tone in the matter but is only glimpsed here oh-so-briefly on a TV set)  and onto  les flic and les citoyens: the regular Joes who don’t want to get involved, the soup-kitchen activists who dole out their charity in cautiously divided proportions, and the misanthropic patriots who would have denounced their Jewish neighbors had they been around during the Occupation. The American counterparts to this latter subsegment would probably have to be dragged to this film at gunpoint. But it would be worth the effort for the rare opportunity of seeing the end of the  barrel wagging back in their direction, even if only for the length of “Welcome”’s honorable 110 minutes.

Public screenings: Mar. 12, 1:15 PM and Mar. 14, 3:30 PM Walter Reade Theater

* A conversation with Vincent Lindon:  The rugged, multi-gifted star of “Welcome” and “Madeomoisell Chambon” will appear for a tete-a-tete with Film Society honcho and New York’s most eloquent cineaste, Richard Pena. Mar. 14, 6:15 PM Walter Reade Theater.

Valentin Vigourt, Valerie Benguigui, Francois Damiens and Leopoldine Serre in "The Family Wolberg"

The Family Wolberg (La Famille Wolberg). Director/writer Axelle Ropert. 80 m.

The Coen Brothers’ “A Serious Man” seemed so singular in its suburban-60s-midwest-Jewish-family specificity, it would never have occurred to me that there could be another film with like-minded ambitions released on the other side of the Atlantic, just months before. Axelle Ropert’s potent debut feature “The Family Wolberg” is the serious person’s “A Serious Man,” zooming in, sans ironic distance, on a Jewish father in freefall, a discontented wife who is seeing another man, a freeloading misfit uncle, a teenage daughter at periodic loggerheads with her dad and a young son grappling with growing pains. The parallels are arresting, but they more or less end there; the Wolbergs are very much a 21^st century clan and, as we know from our Russian Lit 101, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Simon Walberg (Francois Damiens) is a provincial-town mayor whose rulership style loses much of its benignity at home, where he passive/aggressively confronts his wife Marianne (Valerie Benguigui) about her not-so-secret infidelity, inhibits his son Benjamin’s (Valentin Vigourt) pop-artistic leanings and needles his 18-year-old daughter Delphine (Leopoldine Serre) about family loyalty as she quietly makes moves to abandon the nest for a boyfriend. Simon suffocates his family with benevolent intentions. If he sees himself as guilty of anything, it is in loving his wife and children too much; he lives in terror of their growing apart, an anxiety that is ratcheted up by a sudden reminder of his own mortality. In contrast with the Coen’s insular Gopniks, who zipper themselves up in a self-protective tent of Jewish doctors, lawyers and lovers, the Wolbergs pro-actively merge with the society around them: Marianne presses Simon’s tenderest buttons by cheating on him with a classic blond Thor type, while Simon infuses his civic speeches with his personal passion for 60s soul singers. Much as I loved the Coen’s film, I thought it suffered from the same paternalistic bias that informed the period and terrain it was depicting. The women characters, to the extent they surfaced, were either nagging shrews or temptresses. The Wolberg women are dynamic and nuanced to a degree that, with perhaps a few exceptions, only a woman filmmaker could get. Ropert packs into 80 minutes all the event and texture of an air-tight novella. It would not  surprise me if “The Family Wolberg” emerged as the sleeper hit of this year’s Rendez-Vous line-up.

Public screenings: Mar. 14, 9:15 PM, IFC Center; Mar. 20, 4 PM and Mar. 21, 6:30 PM, Walter Reade Theater. Director Axelle Ropert will attend screenings on the Mar. 20 & 21.

Farewell (L’Arraire Farewell). Director Christian Carion. 112 min.  (The Rendez-Vous with French Cinema opening night selection)

Guillaume Canet and Emir Kusturica in "Farewell"

Or, how to take the elements of a ripping espionage thriller and entirely suck the life out of them. Inspired by a true-life incident, it traces the alliance between a young French secret service agent and a KGB double agent funneling top secret information to President Mitterand. There is the usual contingent of pissed-off wives and an impersonation of President Reagan by Fred Ward worthy of “Saturday Night Live.” I found it so inert that I left  after 25 minutes to run an errand. When I returned 12 minutes later, it was still idling in place. The only fathomable explanation as to why this stilted exercise in Cold War nostalgia was chosen to open a French film festival in New York City is that it is the most American of the lot.

Mar. 11, 7 PM, Alice Tully Hall; Fri. Mar. 12, 9:30 PM, IFC Center. Director Christian Carion and actor Guillaume Canet will attend both screenings.

Francois Cluzet and Emmanuelle Devos in "In the Beginning"

In the Beginning (A l’origine). Director/writer Xavier Giannoli. 120 m.

Searching for a movie to watch the night before the press screening of “In the Beginning,” I  pullled Roberto Rossellini’s stunning “General Della Rovere” from a pile of DVDs . It was a serendipitous choice. Like that film’s con man of war-ravaged Genoa played by Vittorrio De Sica, “In the Beginning”’s Phillipe Miller (the able Francois Cluzet, bravely pushing against type) is a cagey opportunist who exploits the vulnerabilities  of people trying to survive during hard times. Unlike De Sica’s quick witted and smooth talking Grimaldi, however, Cluzet’s Miller (inspired by a real-life swindler) is charmless and a bit slow on the uptake: he’s not much of an improviser. But he finds that his silences have a power over his victims, and he uses that power to intimidate and get what he’s after. We know little about Miller at the outset of “In the Beginning,” when he is laying the groundwork for a very ambitious, not to say oddball, flimflam. Impersonating a project manager, he plays on the economic misfortunes of a small industrial town to initiate and then commandeer a highway construction plan that will put some 50 unemployed locals to work; in turn, he will reap a sizeable take from suppliers who are so starved for business that they are willing to skim 15% .of their expenses to put in Miller’s pockets. Along the way, he unintentionally stirs the affections of the town’s single mayor (the peerless Emmanuelle Devos) and the loyalties of a young petty thief and his wife, who is charged with the unenviable job of trafficking the non-existant purse strings of Miller’s road to nowhere. (Vincent Rottiers and newcomer Soko, who dayjobs as a musician and poet, are sensational as the  troubled couple). “In the Beginning” is unquestionably a compelling ride, albeit with one or two strategic hitches. In contrast with De Sica’s Grimaldi, who doesn’t tap into his humanity until the eleventh hour, Miller takes a redemptive turn rather early in the game. While I was willing to go with the gratuitous romantic sublot and Miller’s sudden moral awakening, I thought Giannoli had a few difficulties getting him there. Intellectually, one can buy into the persuasive allure of keeping the customer in the dark by maintaining a tight lip, but Miller’s stumble-bum shyness in the early stages of the flim-flam seemed a bit too withholding personality to snow and seduce the entire bureaucratic substructure of a town, including its perceptive mayor. Devos herself presents an audience obstacle similar to that of the mis-cast Judy Davis in “A Passage to India”: she’s simply too intelligent and forceful a screen presence to convince us her character could be putty in Miller’s hands. Speaking of forceful presences, Gerard Depardieu turns up twice as the picture’s house slimeball. It’s always a pleasure to see him, even as he increasingly begins to resemble a Henry Moore bronze statue of Balzac.

“In the Beginning” public screenings: Mar.13, 1:30 PM IFC Center; Mar. 17, 9 PM and Mar. 18, 3:45 PM at the Walter Reade Theater.

Yvan Attal in "Rapt"

Rapt. Director/writer Lucas Belvaux. 125 min.

The Law (Le Loi).  Directed by Jules Dassin. 122 min.

The Rendez-Vous press screenings picked up considerable steam yesterday with a dream double-bill: an exemplary thriller in a class with the stalwarts of the genre and a revival of a heady 1959 melodrama from Jules Dassin that showcases a cast from European cinema heaven. Pulling into Lincoln Center with a satchel-full of deserved Cesar nominations, “Rapt” puts Yvan Attal front and center in a punishing role that requires his character to deteriorate from a cosseted, well-fed  CEO to a mangy wastrel of skin and bones. Fittingly, there isn’t an ounce of fat on Lucas Belvaux tightly wrought script, which charts the harrowing play-by-play of a profligate corporate chairman whose human value is held up for measure when he is brutally kidnapped for an impossibly high ransom. While Attal’s Stanislas Graff is being tortured mentally and physically by his abductors, his board members dicker over his continued worth to the company, the police debate the merits of meeting the kidnappers’ demands, the press go to town with front-page accounts of his multiple mistresses and towering gambling debts, while his wife Francoise endures the slings and arrows fired with galling insensitivity by them all.  Anne Consigny (who was as affecting in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” as she was irritating in “A Christmas Tale”) conveys both pent-up fury and compromised anguish with commendable transparency. Belvaux interprets his own script with an austerity that works: Pierre Milon’s itinerant camera is always perfectly situated without ever indulging in the show-off, while Riccardo del Faz’ scoring is a model of restraint for this brand of nail-biter. This is not material that cries out for Hitchcockian visual fluorishes, but it could do with just a soupcon of the master’s comic verve.

In 1959, Gina Lollabrigida was enough of a superstar to command star billing above the likes of Yves Montand, Marcello Mastroianni and Melina Mercouri (who was just a year away from her signature film “Never on Sunday). They make a powerhouse constellation of actors for Jules Dassin’s “The Law,” which was released here at the time in a dubbed version under the sultrier name, “Where the Hot Wind Blows.”  (In the late ‘50s,  Hollywood producers would grab any chance they could to throw the word “hot” into a title). La Lollo brings much of the heat to this startlingly tough-skinned melodrama, set in a languorous Mediterranean fishing village where the unemployed menfolk loll the daytime away kibbitzing on the town square steps and the evenings trying to outmanouevre one another in sadistic drinking games at a local bistro.  Not surprisingly, this soporific burg is a hotbed of intrigue. Just about all the guys want to rip the dress off Lollobrigida’s character, Mariette,  a mischievous and rebellious servant’s daughter who uses her formidable will to keep them at bay, including the town’s malevolent  crime boss Francesco (a pencil-mustached Montand, who has never been oiler).  In other words, she’s quintessential Lollobrigida: a total babe, but nobody’s plaything. The exception is the new meat in town, a sexy agronomist named Enrico (Mastroianni) who has blown in from God-knows-where to flush out the area’s marshes. (Really, I’m not making any of this up). Mercouri? She’s the Tennesse Williams character, the geek-judge’s gorgeous wife, oozing with sexual frustration while plotting behind her husband’s back to run off with Francesco’s impressionable 22-year-old son. It doesn’t take a lingering shot on a copy of “Anna Karenina” in her boudoir to signal that nothing good is going to come of her efforts. It is to the credit of of Dassin that he was able to take the florid elements of Roger Vailland’s novel and work them into a vivacious melodrama that throws a credibly harsh lens on the sundry cruelties of a provincial populace (both its men  women). While Lollobrigida more than earns her top-rank billing, Dassin saves the best for last: a genuinely Lear-like turn by Pierre Brasseur as the town’s dying major domo, endeavoring (with Marietta’s self-interested assistance) to parcel out his kingdom before he exits.

A series of dyspeptic commentaries on the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center.

Julie Gayet in "Eight Times Up"

8 Times Up (Huit fois debout). Director/writer Xabi Molia  103 m.

The Hedgehog (Le herisson). Director/writer Mona Achache. 100 m.

Manny Farber, my brilliantly contrary grad-school film professor, used to tell our class that film scores were entirely unnecessary, with the possible exception of those by Bernard Hermann. (Farber was also a visual artist, which explains a lot). While I thought at the time that he was erring on the side of, er, the extreme, I often come around to his point of view, as I did yesterday after seeing two otherwise worthy pictures that were almost done in by their music soundtracks. “8 Times Up” is the feature directing and writing debut of Xabi Molia, who thanks Buster Keaton and God (“if he exists”) in the end titles. There isn’t much in the way of Keaton-esque physical shtick knocking about “8 Times Up,” nor does God seem to be very present in the quotidian existence of Elsa, its down-at-the-heels protagonist (played by the estimable Julie Gayet). Homeless, emotionally unstable and estranged from her young son (who is in the custody of her divorced husband), Elsa narrowly hangs in with a grab-bag of baby sitting and bus cleaning gigs, along with a now-and-then support system that consists of her welfare shrink and her married cousin Jean-Baptiste (Frederic Boucquet), a sweet-tmpered layabout who sings in his church choir and plays role-playing games with his buddies. When there is no readily available for sucor, she fakes fainting in public places to get some attention,, however impersonal (or, in one case, indifferent) the results). In between her failed attempts at finding permanent employment, Elsa finds a kindred spirit in Mathieu (Denis Palydes), an archer manque and fellow traveler in living on the margins. Molia charts Elsa’s travails in swift, episodic bursts that jerk the viewer here and there with a disorienting off-handedness that, I would guess, is intended to capture the unpredicatable, peripatetic quality of Elsa’s day-to-day. In the film’s one lapse into sentimentality, for instance, Elsa bunks up for a night in a hospital with a sympathetic American patient. In all honesty, I can’t quite recall how Elsa got there, but that’s part and parcel with the filmmaker’s idiosyncratic minimalism. This economy of means carries over into the contained performance of Gayet, whose withholding manner conveys a potent sense of Elsa’s fear of losing it altogether; just making it through to the other side of each day is a harrowing eggshell-walk .”8 Times Up” is a respectable and of-the-moment little picture that risks losing its tough edge altogether with a goopy overlay of songs by an English-language group called Hey Hey My My. (Neil Young fans, we might guess?) How many otherwise promising first-time directors have shot themselves in the foot with a fatal attraction to their playlist?

Garance Le Guillermic and Josiane Balasko in "The Hedgehog"

Another feature directing/writing debut, Mona Achache’s “The Hedgehog” is also a tale of kindred spirits, albeit one that wears its heart unashamedly on its sleeve. Based on a novel by Muriel Barbery, “The Hedgehog” is one of those oddly-matched-trio-of-outsiders scenarios in the vein of “The Station Agent,” although Achache’s threesome all live under the same luxury building roof: a wantonly wealthy and precocious 11-year-old bent on suicide named Paloma (Garance Le Guillermic), her well-heeled new Japanese neighbor Mr. Ozu (Togo Igawa) and their slovenly-but-uncommonly-cultivated concierge Renee (Josiane Balasko). They all have cats: the breeds say it all. While Paloma plots her demise and harasses her family documenting their every move with a Handicam, Mr. Ozu gallantly courts a very startled Renee with Raman noodle dinners, collector’s editions of Tolstoy and romantic evenings in his private screening rooms watching Ozu movies (no relation, he assures her). The Paloma sequences early in the film flirt with preciousness (the animation doesn’t help), but the cloying tone begins to recede as the edgier and far more interesting character of Renee takes over the narrative and we are allowed to revel in her Pygmailion-like transformation, as enacted by the wonderful Balasko. There was, as well, a canny directorial choice toward the end of the film (no spoiler here) when Paloma has her expected epiphany: Achache alters the lighting on the girl’s face in such a way that the adult in her face emerges for the first time. But then there is that overinsistent score by Gabriel Yared, whose plaintive, Satie-like tinkling and jocular, pulse-accelerating themes all but extort tears from the audience  at gunpoint. Manny Farber was fond of showing us snatches of movies with the sound turned off, so that we would become acutely attuned to what was going on in the camera frame. I watched “The Hedgehog” trying to separate out the music and shut it off: a genuinely eccentric and touching film came to life in my head.

“8 Times Up” public screenings: Mar. 16, 6:15 and Mar. 17, 3-30 P.M. Walter Reade Theater, Mar. 17, 8 PM, IFC Center. Actor Julie Gayet will attend all screenings.

“The Hedgehog” public screenings: Mar. 12, 3:50 PM and Mar. 14, 8:45 PM, Walter Reade Theater, Mar. 13, 4 PM. IFC. Director Mona Achache will attend all screenings.

A series of dyspeptic commentaries devoted to this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center.

Jean Dujardin in "OSS 117 - Lost in Rio"

OSS 117 – Lost in Rio (OSS 177-Rio ne répond plus); Director Michel Hazanavicius 100m

Part of the nutso appeal of film festivals is that you can be pleasuring in an elegantly spun silk hanky like “Mademoiselle Chambon” one moment and have a cache of stolen auto parts like “OSS 117 – Lost in Rio” thrown at you the next. I’m not sure what rock I was hiding under when the first one (“OSS-117: Cairo –Nest of Vipers”) was released, but it was apparently enough of a hit to prompt twice the usual number of press types to storm the barricades for this strident valentine to the pop-arty Pleistocene age of spy thrillers. The gag is that  secret agent Huaber Bonisseur de la Bath (aka OSS 117) is a pre-age-of-irony poster boy for the xenophobia, racism and sexism that informed the genre in the ‘60s. An equal opportunity offender, 117 tosses off anti-Semitic lines in front of his Massud colleagues and Nazi slurs in the lobby of the German Embassy. As 117, actor Jean Dujardin comes off as clueless as his character (“I had to forget the Sean Connery of the 50s,” he comments, anachronistically, in the press notes, “and look more towards a 60s Paul Newman”). For his part, director Michel Hazanavicius throws Newman’s Harper into the mix with Dean Martin’s Matt Helm, Belmondo’s “That Man From Rio” and the split-screen affectations of “The Thomas Crown Affiar,”  and comes out with a fusion of Russ Meyer and “Get Smart” that falls flat as a crepe. The crashing silence that emanated from the crowd at the Walter Reade Theatre in the wake of  117’s intendedly uproarious faux pas was far more embarrassing than any of the blunders themselves. I got the joke after ten minutes. I fled after twenty.

Public screenings: Mar. 15, 1 PM and Mar. 16, 8:45 PM Walter Reade Theatre, Mar. 17, 7 PM, IFC Center. Director Michel Haznavicius and actor Jean Dujardin will attend all screenings.

Michel and Suzette Gondry

The Thorn in the Heart (L’épine dans le Coeur); Director Michel Gondr8y.. 86 m.

Michel Gondry may be best known in these parts as the Oscar-winning co-writer (with Charlie Kaufman) of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” For my money, his epitaph will endure as The You Tube Guy Who Solved the Rubik’s Cube With His Feet. Gondry delves into a puzzle of a less gymnastic nature in his non-fictional “The Thorn in the Heart”: the mysterious love-hate tension that keep a mother and son tethered at the hip for life. The matriarch under Gondry’s microscope is his Aunt Suzette, a handsome, firm-jawed woman whose expansive glasses shield alert and self-reflecting eyes. Still vigorous in her (apparent) ‘70s, Suzette is never more at ease than when holding court before her extended family; at the outset, she is regaling (and sometimes fatiguing) three generations of Gondrys around the dinner table with a family anecdote that tickles her so to the bone, it is all she can do to push through her tears of laughter to reach the punch line. Flanking her to one side is Michel; to the other her  middle-aged son Jean-Yves, a portrait of damaged goods with taut wrinkles, stringy flower-child hair and the resigned smile of someone who has spent too many years registering amusement at his mother’s stories. In between excursions to the many country schools where Suzette taught, the filmmaker picks away at his aunt and his oddly infantilized cousin by way of unraveling the layers of their thorny relationship. What emerges is a vaguely provocative if unremarkable history of a once-closeted homosexual youth stifled by small-town expectations and clinging parents (he was home-schooled by his mother, then turned over to his father to work at the family sawmill for ten years).  Gondry pads their recollections with a plethora of home movie clips that don’t always serve his narrative and an overlay of angst-y songs by the group Spleen (evidence of his own years as a rock-band drummer and cobbler of Bjork videos). The film’s most poignant touch takes the form of chapter title cards utilizing an elaborate toy train set; the trains are later revealed to be the proud possession of Jean-Yves, who presumably turned to them as an escape hatch from his family on his road to a nervous breakdown. It’s moving at times, but the whole thing feels a bit like warmed-over “Tarnation,” and one can’t help but be a little suspicious of the filmmaker’s agenda: Why is he hanging his relatives’ soiled laundry out for public consumption.? What’s in it for him? When Suzette tells a curious neighbor that Michel is shooting a movie about all her old schools, one might be led to conclude either that she knows better and is colluding with her beloved nephew for vainglorious reasons, or else he is pulling the wool over auntie’s eyes to better finesse a documentarian’s favorite money shots:  the tears, the revelations, the disorientation of being caught with one’s guard down. Whatever his motives, “The Thorn in the Heart” left me with an admiration for its resilient leading lady,  whose fallibilities struck me as real and reasonable. The film obviously struck a nerve far beyond the borders of his film’s provincial French setting, if this  Imdb user review from one Mehmet in Istanbul is any indication: We discover what kind of mean, stubborn, tough and at times ruthless woman his aunt is. I felt sorry for his son [sic] and it is obvious why he became homosexual. It is known that homosexuality in man is often caused by tough, neurotic, ruthless mothers raising sensitive sons.

The movie is telling in that not every nice looking old lady is who she seems.

Public screenings: March 15, 6:15 Walter Reade Theatre, March 17, 9:30 PM IFC Center. “A conversation with Michel Gondry” to follow March 15 screening.

Hafsia Herzi and Ludovic Berthillot in "The King of Escape"

The King of Escape (Le roi de l’évasion) Directed by Alain Guiraudie. 97m

Years ago on a seaside veranda in Cannes, Francois Ozon reiterated to me his standard rap regarding the Americans’ need to limit and label sexual identity: you’re either straight or gay; states of in-between are too frightening or confusing to contemplate (so much for all those married guys on Craig’s List looking for an after-work splash of manhandling). There may be some truth to what Ozon says, although I find there to be something equally suffocating about the presentation of so-called fluid sexuality as served up in French cinema, wherein gay male sexual relations require either a complicating dalliance with an accomodating woman, a chorus line of straight hustlers or the distancing opiate of burlesque (l’ecole de Cage aux Folles). Sane, committed same-sex relationships rarely find their way into French multiplexes or cinematheques (although, admittedly, lesbians seem to fare a bit better then gay men, as witnessed by the domesticated yet crackling rapport between Marina Hands and Kristin Scott Thomas in “Tell No One”).

In Alain Guiraudie’s mortifying celebration of renegade sex, “The King of Escape,” we are asked to swallow that a corpulent, 40-year-old country salesman who has been seeking out trysts at the local queer cruising spot for most of his adult life should abruptly lose it to a comely 16-year-old girl and risk everything for the chance to spirit her away and make mad love. For all his frolics in and out of the bush with what would appear to be the entire gay male population of the region, Armand Lacourtade (a game Ludovic Berthillot) subscribes to an old-school notion of romantic love: as he puts it, if you’re not into the person to begin with, you shouldn’t need to do drugs to get you into them. Comfortable in his drooping skin and commensurately flabby personality, Armand transmogrifies into the big-bear answer to Jean Paul Belmondo after rescuing the rebellious young Curly (Hafsia Hersi) from an assailing gang of teenage boys, only to become the object of her hormonally-wired affections.  Curly’s white knight throws caution to the wind in the efforts to reciprocate her desires,  then finds himself being pursued from all sides by the omniscient morality police, Curly’s rifle-wielding paw and a Greek chorus of graying fuck-buddies, who reluctantly sacrifice an hour or two of al fresco sex to save Armand from his straying path.

“The King of Escape”  works overtime at disengaging the audience, who become all-too-familiar with the porcine folds of Ludovic Berthillot’s torso and are subjected to a cavalcade of remarkably unappealing blow jobs and circle-jerks. Guiraudie seems to revel in playing the class bad boy, but his boundary-pushing (thankfully) stops short of the hard-core; as a purveyor of the New French Extremity, he’s small potatoes next to the icicle-sharp provocations of Catherine Breillat. Guiruadie’s ribald strategems ultimately peel away to reveal the sentimental agenda beneath: Armand is so busy trying to escape  the confines of prevailing social dictates that he doesn’t realize, till a fade-out embrace with a randy septuagerian gent, he has been running from his heart’s desire. As an elderly lady sitting across the aisle from me at Michael Winterbottom’s “9 Songs” exclaimed to her girlfriends after Kieran O’Brien shot an impressive load for the camera, “Oy vey.”

Public screenings: March 13, 9 PM and March 15, 3:45 PM Walter Reade Theatre; March 16, 9:30 PM. Director Alain Guiraudie will attend all screenings.

Mademoiselle Chambon, Directed by Stéphane Brizé, 2009, 101 min.

Today I take my hat off of Sandrine Kiberlain, a gossamer figure with a stretchy, Modigliani neck and more freckles than Isabelle Huppert and the Mickey Mosue Club combined. In “Alias Betty,” the chameleonic actor confidently negotiated a Hamlet-ian obstacle course of mood swings. In “Mademoiselle Chambon,” a gorgeously watchful (not so say watchable) film, it’s all about stillness. Kiberlain’s character is a creature of stillnesses, if only deceptively so. Veronique Chambon is a school marm from Paris who never stays in one town long enough to know just how starved for contact she really is. Perhaps she is fleeing from the very possibility for love. Or, perhaps she is on the run from her mother, who has a dragon-mom’s instinct for phoning at the wrong time to torture her daughter passive/aggressively with news of her sister’s career success and burgeoining family. Whatever the reason, Veronique is very open and receptive when the father of one of her young charges comes to her class to field questions about what he does for a living. Jean (*Vincent Lindon, magnificent) is a construction worker, a tactile, big bear of a guy who is at ease whether washing his father’s feet, keeping the fort going while his factory-worker wife recovers from a back injury or stumbling through a grammar book to help his boy out with direct objects and transitive verbs. He’s a man of few words, until he comes to Mlle. Chambon’s classroom, when he takes to his new role as if to the manor born. He’s a natural with the children, and you can almost see Kiberlain’s eyes begin to dilate with pleasure as Chambon adjusts herself to his easy charisma. Cinematographer Antoine Heberle keeps his camera on the two of them steady, in place, as we watch her watch him. The movie is full of such attentive moments. When Jean comes over to Veronique’s flat to repair a window, she rewards him (after considerable prodding on his part) by playing a lilting waltz on her violin. One senses that Jean knows as much about string instruments as he does direct objects, but he is entranced by what he is seeing and hearing; he can’t take his eyes off of her, and we cannot take our eyes off of him. The mating dance that director Stephane Brize and his co-screenwriter Florence Vignon have choreographed to Veronique’s ¾ time melodies (a little Elgar here, a little Von Vecsey there) is heartstopping in its cautiousness and delicacy; the scene leading up to her first kiss with Jean is a little miracle of awkward silences and averted glances. What faces these two actors have; what a pleasure it is to watch them watching each other. Given the emphasis on facial composure and repressed emotion, one cannot say enough in praise of cameraman Heberle, who uses the wide screen with unfailing eloquence to convey states of solitude, distance, intimacy and finality. The hard nuts in the press audience sat raptly till the last end credit rolled and disappeared into that mysterious place where end credits go above the top of the screen.

Did I say how much I loved this movie?

Public screenings: Mar. 15, 7 PM IFC Center,  Mar. 19, 6:15 PM and Mar.21, 1:30 PM  Walter Reade Theatre. Vincent Lindon will attend screening on Mar. 15 and director Stephane Brize will attend screenings on Mar. 19 and 21.

* A conversation with Vincent Lindon: Mar. 14, 6:15 PM Walter Reade Theater. The rugged, multi-gifted actor will be on hand for a tete-a-tete with Film Society honcho and New York’s most eloquent cineaste, Richard Pena.

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Yvan Attal

Regrets (Les Regrets), Directed by Cédric Kahn, 2009, 105 min.

Philip Glass may be God’s gift to l ‘amour fou. Filmdom’s favorite minimalist music man has written a neurotically undulating score for Kahn’s “Regrets” that does for Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Yvan Attal more or less what his overcooked contributions to “Notes on a Scandal” did for Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench. Bruni-Tedeschi and Attal are seductive actors, and their sucked-in passion pulls “Regrets” a notch or two the realm of the been-there-done-that. The simmering French stars play Maya and Mathieu, one-time lovers whose flame clearly has not been dampened by the passing of years or the intermim acquisition of spouses. Their consequential reunion is prompted when Mathieu returns to his hometown to attend to the hospital deathbed of his mother, and spots Maya on the street, talking with palpable upset on a cellphone. From the worried look on Maya’s face, she seems to have an intuitive notion of trouble ‘round the corner. We share her concern: once the former couple toss caution to the wind and reignite their sex-happy relationship of yore, we know they’re in for a bumpy ride. There is much backing and forthing as Maya flees from temptation time and again, only to fly back into Mathieu’s arms with boomerang speed. In between acts of coitus on wooden staircases and king-sized chateau beds, there is much public airing of dirty laundry, as Maya tries to get Mathieu to explain why he abruptly parachuted out of the relationship years back; Matthieu, for his part, dissembles and shifts into automatic self-destruct. Since the film is observed from Mathieu’s point of view, blame would initially appear to fall in the lap of Maya, who is portrayed as fickle and indecisive in a borderline scary fashion. By the film’s craftily ambigous fadeout, however, one might surmise that Mathieu had bailed for another woman, a conclusion that is amplified by his Janus-faced behavior in the film’s final minutes. Most of the film’s fun comes from watching Mathieu segue from family pillar to fool for love; Attal is such a good actor that he makes you think you’re seeing his beard tousel in slo-mo. As Mathieu’s impulses spin ot of control, the Philip Glass theme accelerates in kind. Every now and then, Glass steps aside for a little Nina Simone, America’s gift to hipper-than-thou European filmmakers.

Public screenings: Mar.12, 7 PM, IFC Center, Mar. 13, 6:15 PM and Mar. 14, 1 PM, Walter Reade Theatre. Director Cedric Kahn will attend all screenings and actor Yvan Attal will attend Mar. 13 and 14.

Pauline Etienne and Michel Piccoli

Restless (Le bel âge), Directed by Laurent Perreau, 2009, 97 min.

If they handed out a Sandrine Bonnaire prize for best sullen-faced performance by a rising French actress, this year’s statue should go to Pauline Etienne, who pouts and mopes with promising elan for the better part of “Restless.” Perreau’s title doesn’t begin to describe the alienation experienced by Etienne’s character, Claire Revedy, an 18-year-old school dropout and would-be swimming champ with some serious intimacy issues. When Claire is not giving her swim coach headaches, she’s giving the runaround to the guys on her swim team and a sweet-faced casino-security worker whom she gloms onto at a bar. The oddest man out in Claire’s radius is her composer grandfather Maurice, who has been looking after the recalcitrant teenager with little success since the death of her mother. Claire rewards Maurice’s well-meaning efforts by hiding under the bed whenever he comes home and leaving his dog outside to rot after she accidentally (and fatally) runs over him with her bicycle. Nice kid. It’s hard to work up much empathy for Claire, even with a dead mother and a grandfather who has an unfortunate habit of leaving the door ajar whenever he’s entertaining a prostitute. Especially when the father is played by the redoubtable Michel Piccoli who, at 85, is more huggy-bear adorable than every before. I mean, like, what kind of girl could give attitude to Michel Piccoli? Who wants to know her? Director Laurent Perreau isn’t angling for our sympathy, far as I can tell, and for the greater part of the way he keeps his movie from falling into the traps of easy sentimentality. For all that, the movie’s brightest moments flirt with the sentimental: the radiant smile that momentarily escapes from Claire’s face after a triumphant swim meet (she quickly dives under the water lest anyone catch her out) and the heartstopping melancholy that sweeps across Maurice’s eyes when he realizes that he wasn’t around to see it.

Public screenings: Mar. 16, 7 PM, IFC Center. Mar. 17, 1 PM and Mar.18, 8:45 PM Walter Reade Theatre. Director Laurent Perreau will attend all screenings.