Ah, to be in Manila when the French Film Festival hits. Despite my surname, I’m not French; my ancestry traces back to Nova Scotia. But once a year, it’s cool to get a chance to see how our Gallic cousins do things.
Held at the Shangri-La Plaza Cineplex, the 13th French Film Fest here drew large numbers to check out titles from the current Un Baiser S’il Vous Plait (Kiss Please Me) to older films like Olivier Assayas’ Clean with Maggie Cheung.
Other titles hitting the fest this year were Ah! Si J’etais Riche (If I Were a Rich Man), Qui M’aime Me Suive (If You Love Me), Ma Vie en L’Air (Love is in the Air), Changement d’Adresse (Change of Address), Je Crois Que Je L’Aime (I Think I’m in Love) and Chansons d’Amour (Love Songs). The yearly festival is organized by the French Embassy Philippines and Alliance Francaise de Manille.
And one of the greatest parts: this festival is absolutely free. That’s right: no price of admission, though the first-come, first-serve seats fill up very quickly. Zut alors!
But that’s the thing about film festivals: they’re like monsoons, blowing through town, stirring everything up, and gone before I can locate my rubber flood boots. I barely have time to attend more than a day or two (this festival ran from June 12 to 22) before it’s over. But when you actually do show up, it’s like a tin full of Pringles: you can’t eat just one.
La Vie En Rose (2007): French favorites from recent years included La Môme (The Kid), known to most viewers as La Vie En Rose (A Life in Pink), the story of French chanteuse Edith Piaf that earned an Oscar for Marion Cotillard. Meticulously detailed by director Olivier Dahan, the movie opens on a few agonized, backstage minutes before a performance by the well-loved French singer — she’s just one open, twitching nerve, seeking relief in morphine. The movie cuts back to Piaf’s beginnings in Belleville, Paris before World War II, accompanying her none-too-successful street magician dad during hard times. Running out of tricks, he tells Edith to sing, which she does, entrancing the passersby. In no time, she’s street singing for a living, until she’s approached by a string of “managers,” some who want to hustle her as a prostitute, others (like Gerard Diperdieu as Louis Leplée) who want to polish her act and showcase her before society, retaining the humble stage name of “the Little Sparrow.”
The question of art is raised here, not only in Cotillard’s wound-up, energy-ball performance (neurosis is physically manifested in every line and facial tic of her face), but also in the singer’s choice of French folk songs, interpreted in a voice so pure that Dahan had to stick to original Piaf recordings — nobody else matched her distinctive style. Another aspect of art is how the film glosses over certain parts of Piaf’s life — like her role in occupied Vichy France: was it as Nazi cabaret girl, or French resistance fighter, as her Pere-Lachaise tombstone would have it? Art doesn’t trouble itself with such questions, and La Vie En Rose mostly focuses on the pain and anxieties eating up this diminutive artist until her final “comeback” concert at the Paris Olympia in ‘61, showcasing Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (No, I Regret Nothing). Good film, great performance.
Roman de Gare (2007): Blink and you might have missed this Claude Lelouch oddity starring Dominque Pinon as ghostwriter to fabulously popular thriller writer Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant, playing a bitch on wheels). Roman de Gare (Crossed Tracks) delights in tossing us red herrings and miscues: we meet Pinon (Pierre) as he picks up a distraught young female (hairdresser Huguette, played by Audrey Dana) at a highway gas station. He offers her a ride, and we immediately start wondering if he’s the serial-killer-at-large that the radio broadcasters are warning us about. For one thing, he keeps dictating disturbing plot lines (involving dumped bodies and false identities) into his micro-recorder. Plus the music keeps shifting into serial-killer-at-large mode (ominous synth lines) that are indeed chilling. Instead, Huguette convinces Pierre to double as her fiancé on a weekend visit with her parents (it was her fiancé who dumped her at the gas station, you see). Implausible as it all sounds, we swallow up each bite with relish, including priceless showdowns between Pierre and his raging employer aboard her yacht. Ultimately, veteran Cannes winner Lelouch settles down into one genre — was it the right one? — and we simply come to enjoy Roman de Gare as that long-lost French film staple, the amusing trifle, filled with great scenery, delicious details and the kind of metaphysical conversations that could only take place in France.
Clean (2004): Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung pulls off a trifecta here, working in three languages (English, French, Chinese) as a junkie girlfriend of a fading rock star (think Yoko Ono crossed with Nancy Spungeon). When hubby Lee OD’s on heroin in Ontario, Cheung (as Emily Wang) is forced to come clean — she’s sent to prison for six months, weaned off drugs, and is eased out of the picture by Lee’s father (Nick Nolte), whose ailing wife doesn’t want Emily anywhere near the rock couple’s young son, Jay, whom they have been raising. Director Olivier Assayas jumps from Canada to Paris to London, where Emily works in a Chinese restaurant and tries to peddle the music demos she made in prison with a fellow inmate. The movie is mostly Cheung’s, charting her relapses and struggles to find an identity a decade after her star has faded. We must take it on faith that Emily’s motivation for cleaning up is to see her son Jay (she didn’t show a lot of maternal instinct at the beginning of the film). But her tentative reunions with Jay, recalling films like Wim Wenders’ Paris Texas, are worth the shaky moments. Nick Nolte is also key as a sympathetic conduit between Emily and her son (he also turns up in a short vignette from Paris, Je T’Aime, also directed by Assayas). Cheung —who was married to Assayas until 2001 — deserved her Cannes “Best Actress” award, whatever language she was nominated for. Also of note is the music, relying largely on Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois (whose otherworldly ambient music turns up in many a drug movie, including Trainspotting and Traffic), Metric and some junkie-paced ballads written by Mazzy Star member David Roback and sung by Cheung herself. A tale of possible redemption, redeemed mostly by Cheung’s dead-on performance.
