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Volume
II
Issue 11 March 2000 |
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Love from France, in the Past and in the Future Previewed by Michael Nicolella Children hang throughout these two films as a great question without an answer. In Les Enfants du Marais the children of the title are at once an actual pre-adolescent boy and girl, and a metaphorical innocence shared by all of the characters. In Peut-être the decision whether to conceive a child is the great philosophical question of one couple's life. These films are part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Rendezvous with French Cinema 2000, which brings fifteen critical and popular hits to their New York premieres. The series runs from 10 March to 19 March 2000. A detailed schedule with descriptions of the films can be found in the Performance Schedules section of the Newsletter.
Les enfants du marais (The Children of the Marshland) Directed by Jean Becker, 1998 
photograph: Courtesy Lincoln Center Film Festival Les Enfants du Marais is a fond, romantic depiction of rural French life in the 1930's. The film takes place in a little town, in a marsh where squatters live, and throughout the surrounding countryside along the Loire River. Garris is a quiet veteran of the First World War who wanders into the swamp during a fierce winter storm and ends up living there. Next door is Riton, a bit of a drinker who lives in a shack with a surly wife and three children. There is rarely any mention of the world outside their valley. It is understood that Europe is on the edge of the second World War but any mention of politics is either oblique or so direct as to seem strange. Garris and Riton are rustics akin to those in Dutch paintings and Thomas Hardy novels, rubbing shoulders with ambitious local bankers and businessmen, haughty middle-class housewives, and rivals like a young soldier in a starched uniform. This pastoral setting is changing slowly and unexpectedly. Garris and Riton are an ideal comic duo - Garris is handsome, conscientious, polite, reserved and industrious, while Riton is lazy, wine-thirsty, raucous and crafty. Their friends are Tane, a train conductor who lets them ride out into the country, a shy dreamer and reader of classics who is named Amédée, and a local industrialist named Pépé who loves the marsh where Garris and Riton live. Garris's and Riton's encounters bring them to many situations and people in the small locale, from which the film departs only within the vague thoughts of a few characters. All of the minor roles in the film are done well, so the effect is of all of these people wandering in and out throughout the film for encounters in unexpected circumstances. Garris and Riton spend their time in romantically delightful ways: digging a rose garden, catching snails and frogs, serenading on spring evenings, selling their many harvests in the town market, thinking about women they love. Time's passage is uneven, defined mainly by the turning of the seasons, and the town hardly seems much different from Monet's landscapes of forty years earlier. Oddly, the film seems aimed at a French audience that is as distant from and nostalgic for this time as any non-French contemporary audience. The struggles that tore through Europe in the Twentieth Century are not ignored, but are hinted at respectfully in passing. Set amidst the current international fashions in storytelling through print and film, Les Enfants is remarkable for not attempting to be 'meta-fiction on the art and the meaning of reminiscence,' or some such tautological crumminess. The film touches on existentialist themes of Twentieth-Century life without wallowing in despair, and if it seems sentimental at times that may be because it is so enjoyable.
Peut-être (Maybe) Directed by Cédric Klapisch, 1999 Peut-être is a film about Arthur and Lucie, a couple at a party on the eve of the year 2000. Lucie wants to become pregnant but Arthur is worried about the responsibilities of fatherhood. It was an odd experience watching a popular film from France, full of stock comic situations and popular actors I've never seen before. It is with a similar sort of confusion that a frustrated Arthur wanders seventy years into the future to be met by an old man who claims to be his son. 
photograph: Courtesy Lincoln Center Film Festival The economy has gotten worse, and the old arrondisements of Paris in 2070 are covered with golden sand. The sand makes Paris sunny, bright, dry and unfamiliar. It is like a caricature of North African cities, with people tending flocks of turkeys, and camels pulling the back halves of small cars through the sand lanes, past odd-looking houses and bazaars made from the rooftops of old buildings. Arthur and Lucie go with friends to a wild New Year's party in a posh apartment in a conservative neighborhood. After a somewhat ominous warning from the parents of the host, who leave as the party begins, Arthur finds his portal to the future in the bathroom, and the film swings back and forth between the party and the sands of the future, where Arthur meets his son, Ako. Ako, himself a grandfather, is a distinguished old man with a comfortable household and a large family. Ako tries to convince Arthur to make him and his future sister, while sections of his limbs slowly begin to vanish into thin air. Arthur is left confused by this large group of people claiming to have descended from him, demanding with guile and force that he bring them into being. There are many obvious cues in the film, referring to contemporary French anxieties about change: unemployment, and cultural assimilation from television and immigration. Arthur is faced with these hidden anxieties, a low salary, and the temptations of other young women. Lucie has similar concerns, but wants to conceive on the eve of the millennium and bring a new life into the world. Some of the actors and actresses in this film are playing roles that either seem perfect for them or a surprise for the audience. Characters are well-drawn, but the film does not rely on characterization or dramatic tension as much as I expected it would. Resources: The Newsletter's Performance Schedules listings include all fifteen of the French films in the festival. Some of the films featured in the festival will be released in the United States and worldwide. Check local listings. The French film festival is a project of The Film Society of Lincoln Center, Unifrance and The French Film Office/Unifrance USA, together with the French Cultural Services, supported by Louis Vuitton and Interview Magazine with additional support provided by the Florence Gould Foundation, L.V.T. (Laser Video Titles) and Independent Film Channel. For more on the Film Society of Lincoln Center, consult http://www.filmlinc.com/
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