Before the Winter Chill.

Writer Phillippe Claudel’s latest outing as a film director is an enjoyable well made French drama. Claudel was responsible for the BAFFTA winning I’ve Loved You So Much (2008), which featured the talents of actress Kristin Scott Thomas, as does Before the Winter Chill (2013).  But this newest outing is nowhere near as convincing a film, with its rather strange twist towards the end!

 

The minimalist existence of French middle class can be lonely for a brain surgeon's wife....

....occasionally spending time  with someone who does appreciate her....

The title of the movie refers to a man being on the threshold of old age and therefore easily up for a little flattery from a mysterious good looking young woman. The man in question is Paul (Daniel Auteuil) a brain surgeon, who leads a busy life married to Lucie (Scott Thomas), lives in a beautiful house where Lucie spends most of her day tending a very large and well laid out garden and looking after her grandchildren. Into Paul's middle class life comes a young waitress Lou (Leila Bekhti) and turns his routine existence upside down when the brain surgeon finds himself unable to resist her charms.

 

....while husband Paul's infatuation with a beautiful young women could lead to circumstances beyond his control?

Now separated from her French husband it has been alleged that Kristin Scott Thomas will no longer be making films in France. Although I would rate her acting skills very highly, the parts she has been offered lately do not extend her as an actress and Before the Winter Chill is a case in point. We all know what she is capable of. Sample such delights as her investigative journalist in Sarah’s Key (2011), the power hungry Christine in 2010’s Love Crime and how could anyone passably forget the sexy evil incestuous mother from hell in the very underrated Only God Forgives (2012). Lets hope if she moves back to the UK she is not relegated to dreadful boring films like Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011) and is offered parts that can extend her.

Looking for Hortense.

Sometimes its nice to indulge one’s self in a simple traditional bourgeois French comedy. Directed and co-written by Pascal Bonitzer and set in Paris. Looking for Hortense (2012) is a story of a man that appears to have the weight of the world placed firmly upon his shoulders.

Damien Hauer, played by Jean-Pierre Bacri, has a four-day growth and hang dog air. He is a lecturer who teaches Asian culture to businessmen one day a week. His marriage to Iva, played by the ever-dependable Kristin Scott Thomas, is on the rocks. She is very rarely at home. Her work involves directing and adapting a play for the theatre that seems to include becoming emotionally attached to her leading man and getting home in the early hours of the morning. They have an adolescent son, Noe; whose relationship with his father is on a sounder footing than with his mother, so when Damien final turns his wife out, the boy stays with his father in their spacious apartment. Damien’s own father Sebastien is a judge and one of the highest-ranking civil servants in France - and bi-sexual. Before Iva moved in with her young actor she had asked her husband to approach her father in law to get a work permit for a Serbian female friend of Iva’s brothers girlfriend. But what Damien does not realise is that a young woman he has met quite by accident Aurore (Isabelle Carre) and has fallen in love with, is really the visa less immigrant girl Zorica.

A relationship drama that’s enjoyable and one that puts a smile on your face, well directed with some fine acting and as customary with modern French films great to look at.  

Only God Forgives.

Having seen this Bangkok set crime thriller twice since its release in August 2013 I can now say with some certainty that the bulk of the critics that booed Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest movie at Cannes press screening were wrong. Only God Forgives (2012) is a brilliant antidote to all these ‘feel good movies’ that the cinema going public are accused of clambering after. It’s that slap across the face that French director Mathieu Kassovitze was talking about in a Guardian newspaper interview about his film Rebellion (2011). It’s strikingly menacing, brutally violent and its climatic fight scene is as beautifully choreographed as any thing you would have seen on the big screen. The colour hue totally enhances the narrative, the darkness of Refn’s story is totally mesmerising.

 

The sexy evil mother from hell!

As is the acting, with Ryan Gosling following up on his role as Driver in Drive (2011) as the uncommunicative Julian Thompson, an American expatriate living in Bangkok who runs a Muay Thai gym as a front for his dealings in the Thai criminal underworld.  His brother Billy (Tom Burke) is beaten to death, sanctioned by the police Lieutenant, Chang, (Vithaya Pansringarm) known as the angel of vengeance, by the pimp father of a sixteen-year-old prostitute that Billy has just killed. Its when the brothers domineering mother Crystal arrives from America to extract vengeance for the killing of her first born that things start to get very messy. Kristin Scott Thomas plays Crystal, the sexy evil mother from hell whose relationship with her sons borders the incestuous, a role that’s different from what we have come to expect from this wonderfully versatile actress.

 

The man who thinks he is God.

It’s a modern day film noir, an hallucinatory fable, that brings to mind the work of Wong Kar Wai (As Tears Go By 1988 and Fallen Angels 1995) and the Argentinian director Gasper Noe whose Tokyo set Enter the Void (2009) is similar in its ambiance. Bizarre set pieces litter the movie, where at times the violence is almost unwatchable especially when karaoke enthusiast Chang is involved. Cinematography Larry Smith shoots mainly at night highlighting the neon splendour of Bangkok.  Refn dedicates his film Alejandro Jodorowsky whose Santa Sangre (1989) was also infamous for scenes of mutilation of human body parts. As Philip French opined ‘Only God Forgives is a provocative oddity that like Lars von Triers recent movies looks back nostalgically to a time when it was still possible to stir up jaded audiences and shock the bourgeois’[1].

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[1] The New Review 4^th August 2013.

Love Crime.

Sadly the last film directed by Alain Corneau was released in France the same week he died from cancer. Love Crime (2010) is the story of a worm that turned and her quasi-sexual relationship with her female boss.

Isabelle is a hard working junior executive always trying to impress her superior Christine, who is the head of an international corporation with main offices in New York. She unashamedly takes advantage of Isabelle and claims her work as her own. When Christine sends Isabelle to negotiate a deal in Cairo her junior falls in love with Christine’s lover Philippe. On there return things start to change with Christine getting more and more jealous of her young employee.

Although the critics do not generally agree I found the movie a pleasurable evenings entertainment with its sexual undercurrent playing an important part in the story. It actually borders on black comedy rather than a fully-fledged psychological suspense thriller and the narrative is at times a little obvious but that makes it none the less enjoyable. The film features the talents of Ludivine Sagnier as Isabelle Guerin previously seen in three François Ozon films including Swimming Pool (2003) as well as A secret (2007), Mesrine (2008) and The Devils Double (2011).  Kristin Scott Thomas is marvellous as usual as the power hungry Christine.

 

Ludivine Sagnier.

Kristin Scott Thomas.

Believe it or not Corneau’s film has already been remade as Passion (2012), directed by Brian De Palma and staring Rachel McAdam (To the Wonder 2013) and Noomi Rapace (Baby Call 2011). 

In the House.

 

Husband and wife Jeanne and Germain.

There are two things that are fairly certain. Firstly that Francois Ozon always makes interesting and challenging movies. Films like Under the Sand (2000) 8 Women (2002), Swimming Pool (2003), 5x2 (2004), Time To Leave (2005) and Potiche (2010). Secondly Kristin Scott Thomas has rarely made a bad French language film, interchanging between the posh English stereotypical roles in which she seems to be cast while working in Britain or America. In fact her career goes from strength to strength even as the 'older women', she turned 50 in 2010, with France offering her roles that are constantly giving her the opportunity to stretch her impeccable skills as an actress. Films like I've Loved You So Long (2008) Leaving (2009), Sarah’s Key (2011), In Your Hands (2010) and the recent The Woman in the Fifth (2012).

 

Claude develops his obsession with Esther.....

....via tuition from Germain.

What do you get when you mix these two formidable movie talents together? A witty, and somewhat underlyingly sinister thriller that brings to mind the invasion of one’s private space seen in Pasolini's Theorem (1968) and perhaps even Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997). In the House (2012) is a film where your never quite sure if what you see is fact or fiction! Based on a Spanish play The Boy in the Last Row by Juan Mayorga, it opens with French literature teacher and failed writer, Germain (veteran actor Fabrice Luchini last seen as Catherine Deneuve’s husband in Ozon’s Potiche) giving his High School students an essay to write about their activities at the weekend. While marking the normal boring dross he comes across a piece of work that catches his eye composed by the 16 year old, quietly clever but puzzling, Claude Garcia (played by new comer Ernst Umhauer) it tells about his weekend in the house of a fellow student where under the guise of assisting him with ‘math’s’ he attempts to integrate with Rapha’s family mainly we suspect because he has developed an infatuation with his friends beautiful but bored mother Esther (actress, singer and the latest Mrs. Polanski, Emmanuelle Seigner). Germain encourages Claude to continue with his visits to the house and encourages him to go to even further lengths in the hope that it will improve his writing and produce a grand piece of text. The childless Germain is married to Jeanne (Scott Thomas) who runs an art gallery called Minotaur’s Labyrinth on behalf of two identical twins, which includes some strangely bizarre and sexually explicit objects including blow up dolls adorned with masks of political tyrants and dictators!

 

Will Jeanne fall for the charms of the budding young writer? 

A film about story telling where ‘life and literature become indistinguishable’.[1] A French middle class satire that deals with voyeurism and sexual desires of both sexes giving the viewer an incite into repressed bourgeois family life. Again we have a French film that outclasses many English language movies from both sides of the Atlantic with its adult story and some first rate acting from all concerned, but I most give a special mention to Ernst Umhauer whose role as the budding young writer is intoxicating. Not to be missed.

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[1] Philip French The Observer