The beauty and richness of French cinema will be spotlighted in the 22nd French Film Festival, which begins on March 20 at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and a few days later at the Jerusalem, Haifa, Holon, Herzliya, Rosh Pina, and Sderot cinematheques, the Ennis Cultural Center in Jaffa, and the Cultural Center in Dimona.
The festival will feature the best of recent French cinema, as well as classics. One highlight will be the latest Three Musketeers movies, The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan and The Three Musketeers: Milady, the first installments of a new trilogy of movies based on the beloved Alexandre Dumas novels.
Movies about these swash-buckling characters have a timeless appeal, and this version, directed by Martin Bourboulon, who made Eiffel, comes along just when we could use an action-packed period piece with a likable hero, played by Francois Civil (Call My Agent!, Back to Burgundy, Love at Second Sight and so many other movies).
The supporting cast has many of France’s top stars, including Romain Duris, Vincent Cassel, Louis Garrel, and Eva Green. The films will be opening in theaters in April.
The festival will open with The Marching Band by Emmanuel Courcol, which is a music-infused family drama about an orchestra conductor (Benjamin Lavernhe) who is diagnosed with leukemia and discovers that he is adopted and has a brother, Jimmy (Pierre Lottin), a factory worker and musician, who may be able to donate blood marrow to save his life.
The two brothers bond and help each other in a story that has won critical and popular acclaim. Lavernhe is a distinctive actor who has recently appeared in Jeanne du Barry and The Sixth Child.
Lottin also stars in When Fall is Coming, directed by Francois Ozon (Swimming Pool, The Crime is Mine).
It tells the story of a Burgundy retiree, Michelle (Helene Vincent, who was in The Specials), her daughter (Ludivine Sagnier, who starred in Swimming Pool, A Secret, Moliere and so many other films), her friend (Josiane Balasko), and her friend’s grandson, who has just been released from prison, played by Lottin.
Like all of Ozon’s films, it’s a character-driven story, and actors tend to give their best performances in them.
ISABELLE HUPPERT, one of France’s most beloved actors, stars in Visiting Hours, Patricia Mazuy’s drama about a well-off woman whose husband is in prison and who bonds with another wife (Hafsia Herzi of the recent film The Rapture), whose husband is an inmate in the same facility.
Jim’s Story, by the brother-directing duo, Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu, tells the story of a family that is torn apart when the son’s biological father returns.
Well represented emerging directors
There are new directors as well represented in the festival, among them Helene Merlin, an actress making her directorial debut with Cassandre, the story of a teen girl struggling with issues related to her sexuality, who begins to find herself at a riding center in the 1990s.
Laetitia Dosch is another actress making her first feature film as director and her movie, Dog on Trial, will be in the festival. She also stars as a lawyer who finds herself doing all she can to defend the life of a canine serial biter, a movie that generated a great deal of buzz when it was shown at Cannes last year.
This year’s festival will feature a tribute to Claude Sautet, a director whose 40-plus year career featured quiet, moving dramas and who made some of his best films in the last years of his life, such as his final movie, Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (1995), which won’t be included in the tribute.
The festival will concentrate instead on several of his best-known movies from the 1970s, among them The Things of Life, about a man (Michel Piccoli) whose life flashes before his eyes after he is in a car crash, and which features Romy Schneider.
The huge international hit, Cesar and Rosalie, is included and it also stars Schneider, at her most hypnotically beautiful, as the wife of a well-off man (Yves Montand), whose marriage gets shaken up when her ex-lover (Sami Frey) comes back into her life.
Vincent, Francois, Paul et les Autres stars Piccoli and Montand again, along with a young Gerard Depardieu, as friends who meet for food, drink, and male bonding. Sautet’s name may not be as recognizable as some of his contemporaries, such as Claude Lelouch, but his films were consistently memorable.
The festival is produced by Eden Cinema Ltd. and its CEO, Carolyn Boneh, in collaboration with the Institut Francais, and with the support of Unifrance and the French Embassy in Israel. Boneh works alongside Guillaume Mainguet, the attaché for cinema and audiovisual affairs at the Institut Francais in Tel Aviv, to program the festival.
The full program can be found on the individual theaters’ websites.
