French Free-for-All
A new AFS series surveys the past decade of Gallic cinema
By Kimberley Jones, Fri., Nov. 1, 2002
Attempts to write about the Austin Film Society series prove to be, at first, a bit of a head scratcher. The program, which begins Nov. 12, offers a survey of French cinema from the Nineties from a host of filmmakers rarely seen stateside, with no across-the-board themes, no common threads. Huh.
Imagine this: It's the Nineties (let's keep it vague). You've got Wes Anderson, Curtis Hanson, Allison Anders, Spike Lee, Miguel Arteta, and Robert Zemeckis all in one room together. What do you get? Probably a rollicking good film history discussion, maybe some fisticuffs, but also something akin to this new AFS series: a disparate group of filmmakers with startlingly different backgrounds and ambitions -- some with experience who labored in the system for years before achieving critical and/or commercial acclaim, others just bursting on the scene. Most will continue to resonate in later years. Regardless, in their wildly different ways, each of those directors will put an imprint on American film in the last decade of the millennium.
The same might be said for the films and filmmakers displayed in "Les Enfants Terribles: A Brief Survey of French Cinema in the 90s," films and filmmakers who impacted their own industry in a similar vein. It's a grab-bag assemblage; some, but not all, address youth in turmoil. AFS programmer Salvatore Botti subdivides them into old-school filmmakers (André Téchiné, Philippe Garrel), new-school filmmakers (Alain Cavalier, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas), and first-time filmmakers (Karim Dridi, Sandrine Veysset). The diversity of their work is undeniable. Contrast the first two films in the series: Téchiné's César-winning Wild Reeds is a moving, lyrical look at confused sexuality among provincial teenagers in the Fifties; Dridi's Pigalle opens with a naked woman grinding a chair onstage in Paris' red-light district. They seemingly defy comparison, and yet -- Wild Reeds, set during the French-Algerian war, has some of the bitterness, the uneasiness you'd expect from Pigalle's strip clubs and underworld drug deals, while Pigalle has moments that rival the tenderness of Téchiné's portrait of sexual fumbling and first love.
More connect the dots: Téchiné and new-schooler Olivier Assayas (of Irma Vep cult fame) both began at Cahiers du Cinema, and Assayas has collaborated on several Téchiné scripts. Assayas is represented here with A New Life, about a working-class woman searching for her natural father. Nouvelle Vague poster boy and sometimes Assayas contributor (Irma Vep, Paris s'éveille) Jean-Pierre Léaud appears in The Birth of Love, from Philippe Garrel, screening Dec. 3 as part of a double feature. And a heady double feature it is: The Birth of Love is a Rohmer-esque dissertation on -- you got it -- love, and a remarkable, stirring work shot in grainy black and white. Léaud, bulky yet haggard and roiling from a love denied, is the picture of Gallic advancing age. In another stylistic leap, the evening's double header is capped with Alain Cavalier's Thérèse, about a different kind of love: a young woman's near-obsessive devotion to Christ. When she is denied admission to the convent, she decides to go straight to the top -- at least, as close to the top as possible when earthbound -- and begs the pope to pull a few strings. Thérèse (the only film in the series not from the Nineties) moves languidly, swimming in ocher whispers and frequent fades to black, like eyelids dreamily blinking open and closed.
The last two films are from women: the prolific Claire Denis and first-timer Sandrine Veysset. Will It Snow for Christmas?, Veysset's social-realist piece, is set on a farm where a mother raises her seven children single-handedly in a harsh landscape. Denis' comic film, Nénette et Boni, offers a different, yet similarly harsh landscape, one that is urban and ultramodern, in which a young man involved in smuggling clashes with his pregnant little sister.
Veysset has said that the story of Will It Snow for Christmas? could "only happen in the country," and it's a sentiment that applies to all the films here. Their particular stories, so distinct yet universal, could only happen on a ravaged farm, in the seedy red-light district, on the outskirts of a convent, looking in, and, possibly, only in France, just shy of a new century. 
