For three decades, France has celebrated the art of film every summer with La Fête du Cinéma, and now London’s Ciné Lumière joins the 30th-anniversary party with a four-day offering of recent French movies.
Thomas Bidegain’s Les Cowboys comes trailing enthusiastic notices from US critics, perhaps not so surprising given that he’s better known as the co-writer of Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, Rust and Bone and Dheepan. Inspired by John Ford’s classic The Searchers, this ambitious, gripping and timely film chronicles the obsessive, years-long search undertaken by a man and his son for a teenage daughter who suddenly disappeared. Their desperate investigations take them from the tranquil familiarity of eastern France to what, to them, is the unsettling strangeness of the Middle East.
Writer-directors are more numerous in France than in the UK, and The Student and Mister Henri finds Ivan Calbérac directing a script he adapted from his own stage play. It’s a touching comedy about an elderly curmudgeon forced by failing health to let a room to an impoverished student, rent-free on condition that she participates in his plot to wreck his son’s marriage. Claude Brasseur, famous for his role in Godard’s Bande à Part, eschews sentimentality and revels in Henri’s comic misanthropy.
French Cuisine, meanwhile, has Florent Siri directing his own script, an updating of a 1963 vehicle for the then hugely popular comedians Fernandel and Bourvil. A married couple running a gourmet restaurant, already at odds over their dreams – she wants a child, he a Michelin star – face a new challenge when her ex-husband, long believed dead, reappears out of the blue. Siri, who is best known for My Way, about composer-singer Claude François, elicits fine performances from an engaging cast.
Five boasts an actor-writer-director. A fast-moving American-style youth comedy with sex, hip-hop and below-the-belt gags, it sees Igor Gotesman directing himself as one of five flatmates whose penury leads to drug dealing and unforeseen dangers.
Finally, there’s a new film playing at the Ciné Lumière until 30 June, though not part of La Fête du Cinéma itself, that’s well worth your attention. Down By Love, adapted by director Pierre Godeau from a book about a real-life relationship, is a prison movie with a difference: instead of the usual focus on escape attempts, criminal hierarchies and violence, it tells of the ill-starred amour fou of a hitherto happily married prison governor and one of his inmates. Guillaume Gallienne of the Comédie-Française and Adèle Exarchopoulos (who made a sensational debut in Blue Is the Warmest Colour) do the honours as the illicit lovers.
La Fête du Cinéma is at the Ciné Lumière 26-29 June. For more information, and to book tickets, visit http://www.institut-francais.org.uk/cine-lumiere/whats-on/festivals-series/la-fete-du-cinema/
