LAFF 2012: THE FIRST MAN

Jean Cormery (Jacques Gamblin) The First Man.

The rebel

By Ed Rampell

I have many lead sentence ideas competing in my feverish noggin to launch this review with, so I’ll begin by declaring: writer-director Gianni Amelio’s adaptation of philosopher-writer Albert Camus’ The First Man is the best picture I’ve seen so far at the Los Angeles Film Festival 2012. It is sort of Francois Truffaut’s 1959 The 400 Blows meets Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers, with a little bit of Thomas Wolfe’s 1940 You Can’t Go Home Again tossed in for good measure.

Like Wolfe’s posthumously published book, Camus’ novel was autobiographical and unfinished when he died an untimely death at age 46 in a 1960 car accident. Shortly after The First Man opens Jean Cormery (Jacques Gamblin), a Camus-like prominent writer in France, returns to his hometown of Algiers. Just as Wolfe received a hostile reception at his hometown of Asheville after his tell all about these secretive North Carolinians’ sins, scandals, etc., Cormery is plunged into Algeria’s bitter division, as Arabs struggle for independence against the French settlers and state. Although Cormery is one of the “pied noir” (the so-called “dark foot” settlers of French origin) he speaks out in favor of a “just” and “equal” Algeria during his return visit -- much to the chagrin of some settlers. (This was a very brave if dangerous thing to do, even back in France, where French supporters of Algerian liberation, such as Camus’ fellow Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, faced death threats.)

Despite being warned for security reasons to lodge in a hotel, Cormery stays in the family apartment with his loving if illiterate mother, played as an old woman by Catherine Sola. As a solo mom whose husband -- like Camus’ actual father -- was killed during World War I when her son (Nino Jouglet) was an infant, Catherine (poignantly played as a young woman by Maya Sansa) raises little Jean with the help of her simpleminded laborer brother (Nicolas Giraud) and the strict family matriarch (Ulla Baugue). In real life, Camus’ mom was a deaf mute, but although Jean’s screen mother isn’t, the difficulties of his Algiers childhood are movingly evoked. And like all the troubled children depicted in French cinema, he grows up to become a great artiste (Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature) and, in that motion picture Parisian tradition, is shown going to the movies.

The First Man alternates between 1950s Algeria and Cormery’s 1920s childhood. There is a seaside scene reminiscent of the ending of The 400 Blows and checkpoint and café scenes suggestive of The Battle of Algiers. (By the way, it bears noting that Algeria has played a distinguished if little commented upon role in film history, from Pontecorvo’s revolutionary masterpiece to the 1969 Oscar-winner, Z, to 2006’s Days of Glory,2011’s Free Men, and now this stellar feature, etc.)

The film’s denouement may seem abrupt or even disorienting, but this may be the filmmaker’s way of indicating that the source work, Camus’ novel, was cut short and incomplete. In any case, The First Man is excellently acted and co-stars Denis Podalydes as young Jacques’ mentor. In 2011 Podalydes portrayed the recently and happily deposed French president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2011’s also superb, The Conquest (offscreen the activist actor campaigned for the Socialist candidates, including the contender who just beat Sarkozy, Francois Hollande). Gamblin is reflective as Camus’ adult alter ego, and he appeared in another recent great film, The Names of Love, a personal favorite, wherein Gamblin romanced a part-Algerian woman played by sexy Sara Forestier. Jouglet does excellent work, too.

Of course, the greatest existential question of all time is: Would you walk a mile for a Camus? Indeed, when it comes to The First Man, not even a plague should stop you -- strap on your shoes and run, don’t walk, to go see this beautifully shot (by cinematographer Yves Cape) Camus biopic of sorts about coming of age and dealing with revolutionary upheaval in a dignified, honorable way. Don’t’ be a stranger to a movie based on the last novel by and about the author who wrote The Stranger and The Plague.


The First Man screens at the Los Angeles Film Festival: June 23, 2 p.m., Regal Cinemas.

  

 

  

  

 

FILM REVIEW: The NAMES OF LOVE

Baya Benmahmoud (Sara Forestier) in The Names of Love.

A well laid plan

By Ed Rampell

George Carlin, that brilliant comic wordsmith, once quipped that if he had invented the slogan “make love, not war,” he would have gone to the beach for the rest of his life, presumably because he would have already made such an important contribution to humanity that his life would be justified and would no longer require any further contributions from him. 

In the daffy The Names of Love leftwinger Bahia Benmahmoud (the to-die-for Sara Forestier) takes this expression to its extreme, making love with reactionary men precisely so they won’t make war, and otherwise exploit, oppress, etc., their fellow human beings. This is only natural for this activist, a political extremist (although not of the bomb tossing variety -- despite the fact that she’s what used to be quaintly called a “sex bomb”), who calls people she disagrees with “fascists” with the frequency American teenagers say “like.”

Simply put, this lefty madcap comedy may very well be the best new movie your erstwhile reviewer has seen on the big screen in years. Michel Leclerc’s The Names of Love has everything Francophiles and those of us who fancy ourselves to be cinephiles -- instead of fans or buffs! – expect and love in French films: Sexual obsession, nudity, gauchiste (leftist) politics, visual panache, tenderness, poignancy, etc. It is a worthy successor to that venerable French film movement called “Nouvelle Vague,” sort of combining Francois Truffaut’s tender romantic sensibility with Jean-Luc Godard’s agitprop politicking with Jacques Tati’s zany drollery. (Although in the context of this sexy movie morsel, the title of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows would take on a completely different meaning.) Going further back in the French arts, I wouldn’t be surprised if Moliere himself might have felt that this was the type of play he would have written, sans censorship.

The Names of Love is about the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Algeria’s liberation struggle against French colonialism, being Arab in today’s France, sex, romance, the movement against French President Nicholas Sarkozy, but most of all it is about Bahia, a sexually emancipated half-Algerian beautiful young woman full of love (literally and figuratively) for all humanity. (Intriguingly, this is the second recent movie to depict a sexually free part-Algerian woman, the other being Now & Later, starring Shari Solanis.) Bahia is sort of the incarnation of that essential ingredient in French cinema: Joie de vivre. After her cute meets with the middle-aged Arthur Martin (Jacques Gamblin), the free spirited Bahia knows she cares about the animal-disease control government bureaucrat because she has sex with him, even though Arthur isn’t a rightwinger and he votes for the Socialists! (The Socialist party’s former presidential candidate, Lionel Jospin, has a very funny cameo.)

The Names of Love also deals with the post-traumatic stress disorders of Holocaust survivors and their offspring. Arthur’s mom Annette (the moving Michele Moretti) physically survived the Shoah, but she has never psychologically come to grips with the cost of losing her parents in Hitler’s death camps, a pain that has been passed down to Arthur. Similarly, Bahia’s father Mohamed still deals with surviving Algeria’s anti-colonial war for independence, and is thwarted from pursuing his true avocation, as a painter. (In the same way, a childhood trauma has affected Bahia, who sublimates her dream of playing piano into sexuality.)

This comedy is a laugh a minute and unlike most puritanical pictures in America, has lots of graphic nudity. (For instance, the U.S. documentary Orgasm Inc., about the quest for female Viagra, doesn’t reveal any nudity; a puppet is used as a stand in for vaginas. Good grief!) Bahia may be a bit ditzy, but this “political whore” (as Bahia calls herself) with a heart of gold and sexually liberated revolutionary may just be the Reichian dream girl, the ideal woman! Best of all, this sexually free woman isn’t made to “pay” for enjoying sex, which is one of the oldest, most tired clichés under the sun.

I have had some concerns about Bahia’s childhood incident and the treatment of it and of that other cliché – the older man with the much younger woman (no wonder Leclerc is such a Woody Allen fan!). But these are mere quibbles. Forestier deservedly won the Best Actress Cesar Award (France’s equivalent to the Oscars), while Leclerc and Baya Kasmi won the Best Original Screenplay Cesar. Leclerc says Love is autobiographical. If so, lucky him! And lucky you, dear viewer, if you go see this uplifting, lovely, lefty, French sex farce.