Deux au cinéma

I'm generally not a fan of French films. I've seen many and some I thought were excellent (Blue is the Warmest Color; Portrait of a Lady on Fire) but many others have left me generally unimpressed or detached. I don't find the appeal in the way I do Japanese or Mexican films, by and large. But the last two films we've seen at the Michigan/State have, indeed, been French. We saw one based on creator and the other based on topic and they again hit the range of my experience with French cinema, as one was well-done but underwhelming and the other was great and not easily forgettable.

The first was Petite Maman, a film written and directed by Céline Sciamma, who also wrote and directed Portrait. It's a quite simple but still fantastical story about dealing with grief, the scars of childhood, and the life experiences that shape one both as a child and an adult. It's a thoughtful film and Sciamma's style seems to be to minimize dialogue in favor of physical expression. That's a fine method and there are many films down through the years that probably could have benefited from that approach. I think it's a great way to convey emotion without overburdening scenes and Portrait was a fine example of that. But inasmuch as simple stories can sometimes have excellent depth, Petite Maman failed to deliver. While it remained interesting to watch the development of Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) and Marion (Gabrielle Sanz) and the film didn't feel overlong, it also never felt like any of the dramatic moments conveyed the emotion that a film like Portrait does. In a way, I kept waiting for it to reach a peak of some kind, but the whole time it pretty much stayed in its place, not disturbing anything around it and not driving the audience to feel anything except a form of blasé morbidity about what was happening and what the two girls were experiencing. In a sense, given that we start in the future-present of the characters' lives and interact with the past-present, we end up knowing everything that's going to happen. Sometimes that's a fine thing, as it is with rewatching a favorite film, as you get to pick out the little moments that are highlights and which compel you to watch again. But there weren't really any of those moments in this film and the emotion that could have been delivered was left wanting. I don't think it was a failure by Sciamma, as I think avoiding high emotion was her intent in delivering the story. But it simply didn't resonate with me and was one of those moments of detachment where I could have been half-watching and still would've gotten the same effect.

In contrast, Happening is a film that really can't be ignored or experienced without being drawn in to what's transpiring on the screen. It certainly doesn't hurt that the subject of the film, a young woman trying to deal with an unwanted pregnancy at a time when ending that condition in France was illegal, is unfortunately quite timely here in the medieval United States. Director and co-writer Audrey Diwan spares no visuals whatsoever, as the more enlightened European attitudes toward nudity (In a film about sex! Horrors.) are used to good effect to show the reality of what Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) is experiencing, physically and emotionally. Indeed, it's the focus on her inner feelings that keeps us enraptured to the screen during every second of this piece, even when she's doing something as commonplace as walking down a rural road to her parents' tavern. As an aspiring university student, she feels as if there's no way that she can have a child, socially or economically, and she tries to find every possible method to change her circumstances. There's a quite pointed scene where she discovers that she's been deceived by a doctor who pretends to help her and instead hinders her goal because he "feels it isn't a woman's choice." I had instant flashbacks to the pictures of Fox News assembling a panel to discuss the topic, made up exclusively of older, White males.

Among the visuals unsparingly presented are those of both the procedure she finally secures and its unfortunate aftereffects. I mentioned afterwards that one of my lasting memories of the film are going to be of both Tricia and Jaime squirming on either side of me in the theater watching those scenes. But this was the reality of women at that time and will, of course, soon be the reality for even more women here in the States. I appreciated that Diwan not only told a moving and human story conveyed through Vartolomei's eyes of obvious mental anguish, but also of the harsh reality that making a personal choice about one's self and one's life resulted in because others sought to deny those decisions. As Jean (Kasey Mottet Klein) attempts to mock Anne about whether she enjoyed the sex that now might eliminate her university aspirations and tied the noose of social stigma around her neck, she responds that it was "None of your business!", which is exactly the truth. Like Maman, Happening is also not a complicated story. But it's one of great depth that brings significant impact to the viewer and one that I'd recommend to everyone; French cinéma enthusiast or no.