Eight films from the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema will screen at the Uptown between Friday, March 16 and Sunday, March 18. “This smorgasbord of Gallic screen fare has been an annual event since its inception in 1996,” explains Richard T. Jameson. “SIFF is one of 50 exhibitors nationwide to be offered a touring version of the 2012 edition, a weekend’s worth of feature films representing about a third of the festival…”
Jameson surveys the films at Straight Shooting and offers recommendations on two in particular: The Well-Digger’s Daughter, which screens 5:30 p.m. Sunday, March 18 “[Director Daniel] Auteuil honors the maître’s decision to open his earthy storytelling to the sun, wind, and ripeness of Provence: one’s eyes virtually breathe this movie”) and the new 4K digital restoration of Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert’s 1945 Children of Paradise, screening 2:15 p.m. Sunday, March 18 (“one of the most splendiferous movies ever made”). Schedule and details here.
The 2012 Seattle Jewish Film Festival, which opens Thursday, March 15 with the film Mabul (The Flood) at Cinerama, begins in earnest over the weekend with screenings at Pacific Place on Saturday and Sunday and then moves to the Uptown. The program includes features, documentaries and short programs, including what is being called the first slasher films from Israel: Rabies. Schedule, showtimes and descriptions are here.
The Rural Route Film Festival is, in the words of the organizers, the only film fest devoted to rural people and places. Grand Illusion presents highlights from the 2011 incarnation throughout the week: a collection of narrative shorts, a program of short documentaries, and the documentary feature Truckfarm, from the makes of King Corn. The programs play through Thursday, March 22. Showtimes and schedule here.
Among the best reasons for feeling optimistic about the expanded reach of SIFF Cinema—the new facilities at Seattle Center and the acquisition of the three Uptown screens nearby—is that it increases Seattleites’ chances of getting access to institutional film programming from elsewhere in the movie universe.
Astrid Bergès-Frisbey in ‘The Well-Digger’s Daughter’
Case in point: the imminent sampling of “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema,” from UniFrance and New York City’s Film Society of Lincoln Center. This smorgasbord of Gallic screen fare has been an annual event since its inception in 1996. SIFF is one of 50 exhibitors nationwide to be offered a touring version of the 2012 edition, a weekend’s worth of feature films representing about a third of the festival that concluded March 11 in New York City. The eight movies will show Friday-Sunday, March 16-18, at the Uptown.
As a showcase, “Rendez-Vous” has developed something of a split identity. One of its missions is to highlight the sort of commercial French moviemaking that exerts widespread box-office appeal back home, yet rarely gets picked up by U.S. distributors for art-house play. At the same time, without giving itself whiplash, the festival also has reached out to and supported such ambitious and challenging film artists as Philippe Garrel, André Téchiné, Catherine Breillat and Benoît Jacquot, often playing a crucial role in opening the U.S. market to them.
The offerings at the Uptown will be a mixed bag. Alain Cavalier, a veteran director best known for his 1986 hagiography Thérèse, has contributed Pater (5:15 p.m. Saturday, March 17), a largely improvised political satire. Cavalier himself steps in front of the camera to play a mythical French President sizing up his new Prime Minister—which is to say, sparring with the unpredictable actor Vincent Lindon. For The Screen Illusion (7 p.m. Friday, March 16 and 2:15 p.m. Saturday, March 17), actor-turned-director Mathieu Amalric updates a 17th-century play by Corneille to the video age. (On the basis of it and the SIFF 2011 offering On Tour, I recommend Amalric keep his day job, at which he is invariably superb.)
Smuggler’sSongs (12 noon Saturday, March 17) is reportedly a jazzed-up period piece about (per the Lincoln Center website) “Louis Mandrin, a notorious, Robin Hood–like bandit in the years before the French Revolution.” 17 Girls (9:30 p.m. Friday, March 16, and 8 p.m. Sunday, March 18), a first film by sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin, spins an unlikely-sounding tale with a real-life basis: a village confronted with the willful decision of 17 local teenagers to get pregnant simultaneously. MoonChild (7:30 p.m. Saturday) offers Vincent Lindon again, costarring with Arnaud Desplechin’s favorite actress Emmanuelle Devos (Kings & Queen) in a story centered on a man with a rare disorder that condemns him to a life bereft of sunlight.
I had advance looks at two other “Rendez-Vous” entries. The Last Screening (10:15 p.m. Saturday, March 17) posits a small-town movie projectionist who divides his time between serving up the visual and aural splendors of Jean Renoir’s FrenchCancanand stalking local females for a grisly shrine to his late, quite mad mom. Laurent Achard’s film invokes no end of distinguished forebears, most notably Psycho and Claude Chabrol’s LeBoucher, but its psychology is absurdly reductive and it stumbles over more implausibilities than even Hitchcock could have got away with.
But even if everything else in the schedule made you go pfui, “Rendez-Vous” would redeem itself with The Well-Digger’s Daughter (5:30 p.m. Sunday, March 18). This remake of the 1940 Marcel Pagnol classic marks the directing debut of Daniel Auteuil, who won a César playing Yves Montand’s nephew in the 1986 Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring. Those, too, were Pagnol remakes, and like Claude Berri before him, Auteuil honors the maître’s decision to open his earthy storytelling to the sun, wind, and ripeness of Provence: one’s eyes virtually breathe this movie. The tale is both elemental and rich, and in addition to giving a masterclass in screen acting as a patriarch at most one generation removed from peasantry, Auteuil is generous with opportunities for his fellow players, especially Astrid Bergès-Frisbey (in the title role), Kad Merad, Sabine Azéma and the ineffable Jean-Pierre Darroussin (the Inspector in Le Havre).
If that doesn’t seal the deal for you, how about the 4K digital restoration of one of the most splendiferous movies ever made? That would be Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert’s 1945 Children of Paradise (2:15 p.m. Sunday, March 18), often described as “the French Gone With the Wind“—except that this movie isn’t kitsch, and its artistic excellence and superb production values were achieved under the Nazi Occupation, with key creative personnel obliged to work clandestinely. The setting is Paris’ Boulevard of Crime in 1840, with the denizens of the theater and the underworld conspiring to make art of life, life into art. Never seen it? Your life is seriously incomplete. But don’t worry. We can fix that.
Tickets are at the regular Uptown prices; series pass $50 general, $30 for SIFF members.
