OUTFEST 2014: SARAH PREFERS TO RUN

Sarah (Sophie Desmarais) in Sophie Prefers to Run.

That running and loneliness thing

By Miranda Inganni

Sarah (Sophie Desmarais) doesn’t just prefer to run, the 20-year-old lives to run in director Chloe Robichaud’s feature film debut, Sarah Prefers to Run.

Sarah’s mother (Hélène Florent) opposes her daughter’s plans on moving to Montreal to run at McGill University, pointing out that running will not pay the bills. Fortunately for Sarah, her coworker, Antoine (Jean-Sébastien Courchesne), has enough money to get both of them to Montreal and into an apartment. However, once there Antoine suggests they marry to take advantage of government grants. Affable Antoine gets more domestic and comfortable with his roommate/wife, but Sarah seems oblivious and continues to focus on running. 

One of her teammates, Zoey (Geneviève Boivin-Roussy), catches Sarah’s eye and a slightly awkward friendship begins. Once Sarah begins to explore, or at least acknowledge, her sexuality, it becomes clear that she is not running toward anything, but rather away from herself. Things are further complicated when Sarah develops a heart condition, but will it stop her from running?

Desmarais does an exceptional job portraying the titular character in all of her youthful innocence cum lack of mindfulness. Sarah seems so removed from everything other than running. She is obsessively focused, even to the potential detriment to her health. 

Robichaud creates an ambiance of dullness for Sarah to live in, replete with a beige- gray color scheme and little dialogue. Sarah Prefers to Run is more of a character study than a typical dramatic narrative, but Sarah (well acted by Desmarais) is an interesting enough character to take a close look at as she follows the course of her life.

FILM REVIEW: MY PIECE OF THE PIE

France (Karin Viard) in My Piece of the Pie.

Sliced

By Don Simpson

Writer-director Cédric Klapisch's My Piece of the Pie  (Ma part du gateau) begins in Dunkirk with a birthday cake yet amidst the celebration, France (Karin Viard) attempts suicide. The quite purposefully named France is a single mother of three who is suffering from depression after the unexpected closure of the factory she had worked at for two decades.

Meanwhile in London, we learn that an evil power broker named Steve (Gilles Lellouche) recently closed a deal that prompted the shuttering of France’s employer. As a bonus, Steve accepts a job transfer that delivers him to Paris.

Meanwhile in Dunkirk, France — who is still recovering from her suicide attempt — cannot find another job; that is until she abandons her fellow factory workers and enters a housekeeper training program in Paris. The training program is designed for immigrants, so France must pretend that she is a foreigner so the other students do not get suspicious of national favoritism. (This could easily be interpreted as an anti-immigrant stance on behalf of Klapisch, as he “proves” to us that French Nationals actually want and deserve the lower class jobs that immigrants are stealing.)

Fate then rears its ugly hand and France is hired as Steve’s housekeeper. France — our working class heroine — is blinded by her income, especially as her salary multiplies upon becoming the nanny for Steve’s son (Lunis Sakji). France quickly learns that the millionaire lifestyle, however subservient her role may be, is not all that bad. Steve’s life, on the other hand, is devoted to the endless pursuit of profit at the expense of less privileged people, as My Piece of the Pie unspools into a cock-eyed message about how seemingly harmless business decisions have broader consequences than anyone could ever imagine. (Themes of financial accountability in this dog-eat-dog capitalist world come up again and again and again.)

And though she constantly ridicules Steve for not spending enough quality time with his son, France has all but abandoned her daughters in Dunkirk at the home of her sister (Audrey Lamy) in favor of spending more time with Steve’s son and thus making a lot more money. Nonetheless, we are supposed to believe that France is a decent, hard working woman who just so happens to have hit a lucky-yet-reckless streak. When France eventually sacrifices herself for her comrades at the factory back in Dunkirk, it is too little too late.

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.

LAFF 2011: FAMILIAR GROUND

A scene from Familiar Ground.

Non-Firma future

By Don Simpson  

Familiar Ground takes the LAFF 2011 cinema-goers who have seen The Salesman to very familiar territory -- the wintry snow-blanketed environs of Quebec -- but Familiar Ground abides by a far more quirkier and absurd approach to cinema. Additionally, The Salesman and Familiar Ground both feature a lead character named Maryse and a car crash plays prominently in both stories.

Benoit (Francis La Haye) is frozen in a perpetual state of adolescence residing with his father (Michel Daigle) -- his mother died five years ago -- in his suburban childhood home. One possibility of snapping Benoit out of his stagnant situation: Nathalie (Suzanne Lemoine), a single mother with whom Benoit is smitten (though his “I Like Girls Who Like Girls” t-shirt sends a different message) and hopes to cohabitate. The main hurdle for this endeavor is Nathalie's son, who strongly disapproves of Benoit's presence.

A dinner accented with wayward shards of glass ends in a heated argument with Nathalie. Benoit then takes out his aggression on an unsuspecting snowman and winds up with frostbite. Chapped hands soon become the least of Benoit's concerns, as a mysterious car salesman (Denis Houle) from the not-so-distant future (September, to be precise) delivers a chilling prophesy of Benoit's next few months: a blizzard, the death of a relative and a pleasant summer.

All the while, Benoit's sister, Maryse (Fanny Mallette), and her husband, Alain (Sylvain Marcel), are desperate to sell a backhoe. Winter is not the season for backhoes, so it sits unused in their suburban front yard. Already on edge as the result of a co-worker's accident at the local paper factory (prompting Maryse's strange fascination with the preservation of dismembered appendages), Maryse is frustrated by the constant sight of the machine and irrationally decides to rent a car to pick-up a trailer from her family's cabin in order to haul the backhoe away.

The news received by Benoit from the future leaves him concerned about Maryse taking the trip to the cabin on her own. Maryse and Benoit have historically not gotten along with each other -- they have never even had coffee together -- so the sibling road trip will certainly test their familiar bonds and is destined to change the trajectory of their lives.

Once at the cabin, Benoit is incapable of getting the heater to function or find suitable firewood. Benoit's foibles with his father's snowmobile provide us with another glimpse of Benoit's emasculating inadequacies. The siblings venture to a party next door; it is someone's birthday and fireworks are anticipated, yet Benoit dislikes fireworks almost as much as he hates watching his married sister flirt with guys who use shovels to open their beer bottles.

Writer-director Stéphane Lafleur's Familiar Ground is a stylistic mash-up of science fiction, absurdly off-kilter humor and the mundanity of everyday reality. The complexity of the tone is exaggerated even further by the eerie electronic score (by Sagor & Swing and We Are Wolves) and it is Lafleur's knack for odd comedic timing that truly drives the borderline surreal narrative structure of Familiar Ground.

Lafleur's comedic ingenuity is sublimely highlighted in the opening and closing of Familiar Ground. By listing the character name “L'Homme du futur” (Man from the future) in the film's opening credits, Lafleur thus spurs our anticipation of the revealing of this ambiguously named character. The closing image of a towering blue blow-up stick figure blowing in the wind while synchronized with an inspired musical choice (“The Bells of the Night” by The Red Army Choirs) spreads a finishing coat of quirkiness on Familiar Ground.

LAFF 2011: TOMBOY

Laure (Zoé Héran) in Tomboy.

Gender bend-her

By Don Simpson

Upon returning from a summer retreat, Laure (Zoé Héran) joins her parents (Sophie Cattani and Mathieu Demy) and six-year-old sister, Jeanne (Malonn Lévana), at their new home. The new neighborhood means many things to Laure, including new friends, a new school, and a new identity.

From first glance, Laure’s gender is inconclusive. With her prepubescent, 10-year-old frame and short haircut, Laure can easily pass for a boy. From what we can gather, Laure has been a tomboy for quite a while. Laure prefers to dress like a boy and play with boys and her parents seem too distracted to notice -- Laure’s father is away at work for most of the film and her mother is practically bedridden by pregnancy.

Laure’s first friend in her new neighborhood is a girl named Lisa (Jeanne Disson). Laure introduces herself to Lisa as a boy -- Mikael -- totally naive to the fact that this charade cannot last forever. Lisa in turn introduces Mikael to the local kids and Mikael instantly blends right in with the other boys. We watch how Mikael learns by observing the other boys, co-opting their gender by mimicry. Soon, Mikael is playing soccer with her shirt off, getting into fisticuffs with other boys and kissing a girl. Mikael’s greatest hurdle is when she is invited to go swimming with the other kids because her makeshift pink swimsuit accentuates the fact that she does not have a penis. Luckily that is something a little green modeling clay can fix. As school registration approaches, it becomes increasingly obvious that Laure will not be able to maintain the facade of Mikael for much longer. The question remains: How badly is this going to end for Laure?

With Tomboy, writer-director Céline Sciamma delves much deeper into the taboo (at least on this side of the Atlantic) theme of childhood sexuality that she discussed all-so-eloquently in her 2007 feature-length debut, Water Lilies. Laure is five years younger than Water Lilies’ Marie (Pauline Acquart), Anne (Louise Blachère) and Floriane (Adèle Haenel); thus Laure is also significantly more innocent. The root of Laure’s deception is not about sexual attraction to girls -- though she does kiss a girl -- it is about wanting to play like a boy.

Tomboy thoughtfully discusses the prevailing pressure from society to conform to specific gender stereotypes -- even in acting like a boy, Laure abides by society’s predetermined definition of what a boy is. What is wrong with a 10-year old girl wanting to dress like a boy and play with boys? Why is that considered weird or abnormal? Is genitalia really the sole defining criteria for gender?

SFIFF 2011: CHILDREN OF THE PRINCESS OF CLEVES

A scene from Children of the Princess of Cleves.

Text-ing times

By Miranda Inganni

In director Régis Sauder’s documentary, The Children of the Princess of Clèves (Nous, Princesses De Clèves), teenagers from a Marseilles high school learn about life and love from the classic French novel, The Princess of Clèves. Using the students to read excerpts from the book, reenact selections and discuss the subject matter with their friends and families, Sauder brings the 17^th century book to life in the 21^st century.

Proving some things are timeless, this documentary is an age-old story of children growing up – testing their boundaries and their parents patience and exploring their own emotions. Instead of the 16^th century royal court of Henri II, the backdrop is a contemporary working class community, but the themes are the same: love, passion, duty, disappointment, jealousy, betrayal, angst, et cetera.

And when the parents get involved in the discussion, it is clear that the kids, being teenagers, are not used to having these issues talked about at home. It’s quite laudable that Sauder gets the conversation going between parent and child during a time when the child is less like to talk and more likely to walk away. There are raw and revealing scenes where it’s clear that some of these young adults still want their parents’ affection and attention, all the while reaching out on their own and rebuking their elders.

Enriched by the ensemble of students featured in the film, The Children of the Princess of Clèves, culminates in the results of their baccalaureate exams. Some pass, some fail, some skip the exam entirely (without his or her parent’s consent or knowledge). In the end, the mobile texting kids seem to have learned a little more about themselves through the exploration of this text -- disproving what French President Nicholas Sarkozy said about it.

THEATER REVIEW: TARTUFFE

A scene from Tartuffe.

French fried

By Ed Rampell

In this laugh-a-minute revival, Tartuffe gets the full Actors’ Gang and David Ball vaudevillean and slapstick treatment. One half expects a thespian to cry out: “Hey MO-liere!” or “pick two fingers” from the stage, as the French Shakespeare is channeled through the Trois Stooges and Marx Freres. Director Jon Kellam’s misanthropic mise-en-scene demolishes the sacrosanct notion of theatre’s “fourth wall” and the proscenium arch, as actors archly, directly address the audience and run around the entire playhouse like whirling dervishes crossed by the Flying Wallendas. For good measure, those Commedia dell’ Arte masks that the Gang’s artistic director, Tim Robbins, so adores adorns the punims of a couple of the players, while whiteface makeup is applied to the faces of other cast members. As the slide whistles sound, one could say: “The Gang’s all here.”

The devil-may-care troupe’s high voltage frenetic rendering of Moliere’s comic mess-terpiece is mostly good fun, and the players are anything but miserly when it comes to the yuks. But beneath the farcical façade is a serious message about religion that comes hard on the heels of the Gang’s April 5 "Satiristas" spoof lampooning traditional and fringe religions. In 1664 Tartuffe was considered to be so sacrilegious and scandalous it was banned, but the playwright’s razor sharp viewpoint remains as relevant today as it did in 17^th  century France. The eponymous Tartuffe (Pierre Adeli) is a guru who beguiles the wealthy, older Orgon (a masked P. Adam Walsh) and his elderly mother Madame Pernelle (Mary Eileen O’Donnell). They are spellbound by Tartuffe’s mumbo jumbo and piety, and Tartuffe’s religious reign over the household is enforced by his servant/spy Laurant (Gang stalwart Steven M. Porter, who also plays Loyal), a character more “Eavesdropping” Laurant than Yves St. Laurent.

However, the holy man turns out to be a pious poseur, a Freudian fraud who has lechery and larceny in his heart. Tartuffe conspires to seduce Orgon’s younger wife, Elmire (Vanessa Mizzone), and to rip off his posh castle, moat and all. Holy chateau!

Tartuffe’s religious hypocrisy will remind modern audiences of televangelist scam artists such as Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Jimmy Swaggert and more recently, Ted Haggard. Moliere’s suppressed Tartuffe finally saw the light of day and of the footlights in 1667, but a third of a millennium later, bedazzled holy rollers are still hoodwinked and bamboozled by preachers who turn out to be imposters. (Moliere’s play is alternatively entitled L’Imposteur, and gullible zealots eternally remain horse’s posteriors in the face of the promise of eternal life and all that opiate-of-the-masses razzmatazz.)

The well directed large, ensemble cast performs with much panache and tomfoolery. Standouts include Jeremie Locka, who plays the smitten suitor of Orgon’s daughter, Marianne (the delightfully delirious Hannah Chodos), like a cross between Steven Tyler and Mick Jagger, with all the glitz, glamour, ardor and moves of a 17^th century continental rock star. Sabra Williams provides mirth and eye candy as the housemaid Dorine, making ticket buyers grateful for those low-cut French fashions of the sizzling 1660s. As in subsequent productions by the French playwright Pierre Beaumarchais and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart about a certain Figaro, Sabra’s sparkling, spunky servant speaks volumes, if comically (and in a British accent), about the era’s class struggle.

This production is a revival of the Gang’s Kellam-directed 2005 version of Tartuffe, based on the adaptation by David Ball, which is arguably true to the spirit, if not the letter, of Moliere’s original. The sound effects and music by Jef Bek – who wears a cross between a Harpo hairpiece, fright wig and The Donald’s coiffure as he tickles the ivory – adds to the buffoonery. However, the same sounds and other effects are used repeatedly during the 75 or so minute first act, rendering about 10 or 15 minutes of it a bit tedious, due to this redundancy. But the around hour-long second act zips along faster than a speeding bullet at a dizzying pace, making this Tartuffe irresistible for those who delight in onstage drollery (and picking on the French).  

Tartuffe runs through April 30 at the Actors’ Gang at the Ivy Substation theatre, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232. For more info: 310/838-GANG; www.theactorsgang.com

      

FILM REVIEW: QUEEN TO PLAY

Dr. Kröger (Kevin Kline) and Hélène (Sandrine Bonnaire) in Queen to Play.

The diegesis of a chambermaid

By Don Simpson

Chess is often thought of -- quite wrongly, I might add -- as a man’s game, yet the most powerful and weakest pieces on the board are the queen and king, respectively. So with Queen to Play, writer-director Caroline Bottaro’s fixates on the power of the queen in order to create a female empowerment manifesto…of sorts.

Hélène (Sandrine Bonnaire) is a middle-aged chambermaid who works in a swank hotel on the island of Corsica. While cleaning an American couple’s (Jennifer Beals and Dominic Gould) guest room, she eyes the couple playing chess on the balcony. In their sophisticated hands the game is incredibly sensual -- and bourgeois to boot -- and Hélène visibly craves to be more like them.

Hélène’s husband, Ange (Francis Renaud), is a shipyard builder who is struggling in the current economic climate. (“The people who have money are not spending it.”) Hélène and Ange have a rather loveless marriage. Ange spends most of his non-working hours drinking and playing backgammon (a working man’s game) with friends, while Hélène is left to be bored alone at home…that is, until she discovers chess.

A curmudgeonly hermetic American widower Dr. Kröger (Kevin Kline), whose home Hélène cleans, reluctantly accepts Hélène as his chess mate. Dr. Kröger helps Hélène rediscover the meaning of passion -- what it means to care so intensely about one thing that it keeps you up all night. Despite the rumors around town, Hélène’s is a passion for chess -- although we can also sense a growing sexual tension between Hélène and Dr. Kröger. In an odd sort of way, Dr. Kröger helps Hélène develop back into a sensual being.

Chess is a game-changer for Hélène’s life. Suddenly she has a purpose and a skill and, intellectually at least, she is catapulted from the dregs of her working class status to the charming world of the bourgeoisie. It is when she discovers that her previously reluctant family, including her “chav” daughter, Lisa (Alexandra Gentil), is willing to make changes to adapt to Hélène’s passion for chess that Hélène falls back in love with Ange. Suddenly Hélène is in control of not only her own life, but she begins to play a more dominant role in her family’s development.

Adapted from Bertina Henrichs’ novel, La Joueuse d'échecs (The Chessplayer), Queen to Play takes the chess-as-a-metaphor-for-life as far as it can possibly go. Hélène flowers into a confident presence, towering over the much weaker males (Ange, Dr. Kröger) who once enjoyed a certain amount of power over her. Despite some assistance from Dr. Kröger, Hélène turns out to have a natural talent for chess. Therefore, she is able to achieve her own emancipation without relying on the chivalrous aid of males.

Bottaro’s tale is commendably class-conscious and she is able to clearly showcase the economic barriers related to female self-empowerment. For Hélène, intellectual development (by way of chess) is the key to class advancement, personal freedom and happiness.

Queen to Play is a good example of a film with a strong feminist perspective that seems unable to convey its socio-political commentary in the form of a cinematic narrative. The story sounds pretty wonderful on paper; I like chess, empowering female characters, class-conscious films, French cinema, and Kline (who does an admirable job with French dialogue, I might add), but I find Queen to Play to be a tediously paced film that is void of any true emotions. I feel completely detached from Hélène; I have no empathy for her, and I certainly have no desire to cheer her on. Despite Hélène’s metamorphosis on paper, Bonnaire continues to portray her with a stoic coldness that is impossible to connect. Bonnaire is obviously trying to make Hélène as ordinary as possible, but she seems to go too far. Additionally, the character of Dr. Kröger does not play to any of Kline’s strong suits (while another recent film, The Extra Man, showcased Kline’s talents quite well). He is far too brooding and boring for Kline’s talents, which lie more in the realm of the off beat and silly (usually with a dark edge).