What makes good cinema? It’s a question of taste: something Carte Noire’s Film Collection will explore this summer with a series of special screenings of French films at Everyman cinemas, a season hand-picked to reflect the quality and intensity of Carte Noire.
The first event took place on 20 May at Everyman’s Screen on the Green in Islington,
and featured the premiere of premium coffee brand Carte Noire’s new short film Le Baiser, followed by director Olivier Assayas’s Clouds Of Sils Maria. Cédric Jimenez’s
The Connection was the main attraction at the second special screening, held on 28 May at Everyman Canary Wharf.
The selection of films, handpicked by Carte Noire, started life at last year’s Cannes film festival. It’s a measure of the importance of the 12-day event to the French film industry that of the 23 films nominated for two or more awards at the annual César awards in February – the Gallic Oscars – 10 made their debut in the south
of France last May.
One thing all these films have in common is style. The film with the most César nominations was Saint Laurent, an oblique but seductive study of the fashion visionary. Directed by Bertrand Bonello, this exquisitely mounted biopic was expected to sweep the board. Instead, that honour went to Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, a French-Mauritanian co-production telling the story of a Malian family whose lives are unsettled by jihadis in their community.
But chasing up Sissako’s seven nominations was a left-field gem that debuted to acclaim in Cannes, and will also form part of Carte Noire’s Film Collection. Directed by Thomas Cailley, Les Combattants (Love At First Fight) was the surprise French hit of the year, with three nominations. Cailley’s romantic comedy documents a battle of the sexes as a young man falls for a tomboy, going so far as to follow her to army boot camp. What follows is a witty, engaging and disarming meditation on the old slogan “make love not war”. The film won the César’s top acting honour for its female star Adèle Haenel, despite formidable competition from Juliette Binoche in Clouds Of Sils Maria. Binoche can’t have been too upset, having been nominated eight times (and won once) in the last 20 years.
In fact, it is the essence of her longevity that forms the cornerstone of Assayas’s multi-layered drama, in which she portrays a famous actor forced to confront the demons of her past and future in a new production of the play that first launched her to stardom. That both her assistant and the young bad-girl newcomer cast alongside her are American – Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz respectively – make Assayas’s film
a fascinating study of the creative process, both
in Europe and Hollywood.
Another underdog film that punched above its weight was Céline Sciamma’s Bande De Filles (Girlhood), the extraordinary story of an ordinary girl living in the housing projects that skirt the French capital. Using a non-professional cast, Girlhood tells the story of Marième, a 16-year-old outsider who falls in with a girl gang. It may sound gritty, but Sciamma’s big-hearted direction shows warmth and compassion to Marième’s plight, with a documentarist’s obsessive eye.
More playful is François Ozon’s The New Girlfriend, which gained a fifth César nomination for its popular star Romain Duris. As prolific and versatile as Assayas, Ozon here presents one of his nuanced psychological thrillers, as a woman makes a shocking discovery about her widowed best friend (Duris), something that leads her on an introspective journey.
The New Girlfriend debuted not in Cannes but at the more commercially minded Toronto International Film Festival, which also played host to the world premiere of The Connection. Jimenez’s powerhouse thriller scored two nominations for its period costume and production design, both crucial elements of this policier, starring The Artist’s Jean Dujardin in a rare straight role as real-life magistrate Pierre Michel. With its gunfights, car chases and tense scenes of psychotic powerplay in the Marseilles underworld of the 1970s, The Connection is proof that French cinema is alive, crucial and always evolving.
Carte Noire invites you to celebrate the intensity of French cinema by attending one of the many special screenings that will take place this summer. Next up is Les Combattants (Love At First Fight).
