Top 5 Under the Radar Favorites

This month Franco-American actress Leslie Caron recommends a few of her favorite French films that international audiences might have missed.

FUNNIEST

Didier Alain Chabat, 1997

In this fantasy comedy written by and starring comedian and director Alain Chabat, soccer agent Jean-Pierre (Jean-Pierre Bacri) agrees to take in his journalist friend Annabelle’s Labrador, Didier, while she is away. Overnight, Didier morphs into human form (Chabat), but he’s still all dog—loping along, barking, eating muzzle-to-bowl, chasing cats. As Jean-Pierre struggles to deal with Didier’s human behavioral training while also coping with two star soccer players injured just before a major match, Didier lends a helping paw in finding replacement players, but his big Labrador heart is really set on reuniting Jean-Pierre with his estranged girlfriend Maria (Isabelle Gélinas). Chabat is “a clown, in almost a Chaplinesque way,” says Caron. “He’s a comic genius.”

 

STAR TURN

Place Vendôme Nicole Garcia, 1998

It’s Catherine Deneuve at her very best in the role for which she won a Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival: Marianne Malivert, the wife of a renowned Place Vendôme jeweler, spends most of her time drowning her ennui in drink. When her husband (Bernard Fresson) commits suicide, she tries to sober up and solve her financial problems by selling a mysterious stash of exceptionally beautiful diamonds she discovers hidden in their apartment. But the return to her former career as a gem broker and the dubious origin of the jewels force her to confront her past, the dark side of the diamond trade, cutthroat businessmen, the woman she suspects was her husband’s mistress (Emmanuelle Seigner) and a Russian-mafia-connected former lover (singer/songwriter Jacques Dutronc) who once stung her in a diamond deal. It’s a contemporary, sometimes complicated and confusing, update on a classic, suspenseful film noir, and it was nominated for Césars in 12 categories, but it’s Deneuve who carries it from boozy start to redemptive finish.

 

MOST CHILLING

L’Adversaire (The Adversary) Nicole Garcia, 2002

Based on the book of the same title by French author Emmanuel Carrère (see Rencontre: Emmanuel Carrère, France Today, May 2012), director Nicole Garcia worked with her favorite screenwriters, Jacques Fieschi and her son Frédéric Bélier-Garcia, to turn the grisly true-life tale into fiction while sticking closely to the basic facts: For nearly 20 years Jean-Marc Faure (Daniel Auteuil) has lived an elaborate lie, pretending to be a doctor working in a research center in Geneva, while in fact he never finished his medical studies and is unemployed, living on money friends entrust to him for investment. When his father-in-law wants his money back he dispenses with him in an “accident”. And when it seems his monumental deception will be discovered, he kills his wife, his children and his parents, then fails in suicide. The film received mixed reviews in France but won César nominations for Auteuil and supporting actor and actress François Cluzet and Emmanuelle Devos. Caron describes it as “very pure, very terse, very chilling”.

 

DESIGNING WOMAN

Coco Avant Chanel (Coco Before Chanel) Anne Fontaine, 2009

Audrey Tautou stars in the title role of the young Gabrielle Chanel before she made her name and fortune in fashion. This very good, mostly accurate film biography starts with her modest beginnings, deserted by her father and sent to an orphanage at the age of 10. After leaving the orphanage, she works as a seamstress and cabaret singer in the small provincial town of Moulins, in central France, already a chain-smoking, cynical and independent young woman who dreams of becoming an actress. She  meets the aristocratic playboy Etienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde), a military officer briefly stationed nearby, and eventually moves into his family château, where she begins to fabricate stories to disguise her past and to create the stylish hats that would lead to her future. Finally she meets one of Balsan’s friends, the wealthy English tycoon Arthur “Boy” Capel (Alessandro Nivola), her great love and the financial sponsor for her fledgling fashion house. When Capel is killed in an automobile accident, the business becomes her life.

 

LAUGHTER AND TEARS

Et Si On Vivait Tous Ensemble? (And If We All Lived Together) Stéphane Robelin, 2012

How do you make a feel-good comedy about a group of seventy-somethings facing the perils, sorrows, loneliness and indignities of old age? One answer is to fill it with an all-star cast of (old) pros who could charm a smile out of the Grim Reaper. The energetic Jeanne (a radiant Jane Fonda) is helpless as she watches her husband Albert (Pierre Richard) slowly lose his memory; the prickly political gadfly Jean (Guy Bedos) and his wife Annie (Geraldine Chaplin) live in a rambling family house their children and grandchildren never visit; Claude (Claude Rich) is a mischievous, frisky old ladies’ man still chasing young girls until he has a heart attack following one home to her six-flight walkup. When Claude’s son commits him to an old-age home, the friends rebel, whisk him out of the home in a madcap wheelchair escape and decide to try community living in Jean and Annie’s big empty nest. Young German sociology student Dirk (Daniel Brühl) makes them the focus of his thesis and moves in too. What follows is a sweet, tender, thoughtful and uproariously funny look at life on the short end.

Trailers of most of these films are on www.youtube.com

Find French films in our France Today bookstore. Other possible sources: www.amazon.ca, www.amazon.fr, www.facetsdvd.com, www.fnac.com. When you order DVDs from France, you’ll need a multiformat DVD player that can read Zone 2 DVDs.

Originally published in the September 2012 issue of France Today