Cinéma et écriture/Film and Writing
Here I post informal reviews of films I see, whether in the cinema, on TV, or online.
I became a cinephile in my mid 20s when I first lived in France. I got my film education at the Eldorado cinema in Dijon and the numerous independent studio cinemas of Paris! (Pictured is the screen in Tende, Alpes-Maritimes, near the French-Italian border).
Notre salut (Emmanuel Marre, 2026)
Tipped as a worthy Palme d'Or winner by Libération (in fact it won the Prix du Scénario or best screenplay award), Notre salut is an utterly absorbing film. Held together from start to finish by Swann Arlaud's brilliant performance as Henri Marre, only revealed to be the director's great-grandfather in the closing credits, it charts the Second World War experience of a Vichy official from September 1940 to the final collapse of Maréchal Pétain's government in 1944, when he and his supporters left France for Sigmaringen, Germany. Henri is thus indisputably a 'collabo', as the French term it, but one who wins our empathy through his principled and compassionate service to the Vichy régime as regional director of the anti-unemployment department based in the Limousin region. Securing this post separates him from his wife and their three children for almost a year, but we learn about their enduring if disputatious marriage from the letters Paulette (Sandrine Blancke) writes him during this period, read aloud on the soundtrack, so that her sense of injustice at having sole care of their offspring for such an extended period comes across, along with her spirited and independent exercise of the roles of housewife, mother and life companion. (The film's most delightful scene is a socially important dinner at the regional Préfet's house where Paulette shows a capacity to relax and have fun Henri lacks by leading the dancing, to the anachronistic accompaniment of a version of that standard of electronic music, 'Popcorn'.) As the Vichy régime crumbles around Henri in 1944, Paulette ends their marriage with great affection, and the closing credits inform us that Marre never saw her or his children again, although he at least temporarily takes on the care of an 8 year-old boy abandoned by his mother as she seeks hastily to leave France. Henri is not a failed father, husband or public servant, and has no antisemitic impulses despite playing his part in Vichy's multiple roundups of French Jews during the summer of 1942, so to be left with nothing may seem cruel, but it is a fitting end to the over-idealistic patriotism that led him to support the collaborationist Vichy régime in the first place. The English title of Marre's film is A Man of HIs Time, which is a fair alternative but lacks the hope and fervour conveyed by the title of Henri's self-published manuscript Notre salut [Our Salvation]. There are many more such singular stories to be told about France between 1940s and 1944, but few will be as expertly directed and acted as A Man of His Time.
Histoires de la nuit (Léa Mysius, 2026)
Compared by one critic who viewed its Cannes screening to the cinema of Jacques Audiard, Histoires de la nuit does indeed play with genre(s) - the 'home invasion' sub-genre of horror, and film noir's frequent exploration of a malevolent past returning to haunt a life rebuilt by moving on from it. Nora (Hafsia Herzi) lives with her husband Tom (Bastien Bouillon) and rebellious daughter Ida on an isolated farm where artist Cristina (Monica Bellucci) is their only neighbour: Nora works long hours in a career in which she is steadily rising despite her lack of confidence, while Ida, who habitually calls in to see Cristina on her way home from school, regularly challenges her mother's strict control of her mobile phone usage. Tom and Ida are preparing for Nora's 40th birthday party that evening when a stranger turns up in the hamlet allegedly wanting to view the house that is for sale, which Cristina, instantly suspicious, refuses to show him. Very soon the stranger and his 'little brother' are holding her hostage in the elegant warehouse-style home where she paints and constantly listens to music, in preparation for the arrival of Franck (Benoît Magimel), Nora's lover in a past life she has never revealed to her husband and daughter, because it involved both murder and working as a prostitute for Franck. Tellingly, it is a video of the family enjoying themselves posted by Ida on social media that has enabled Franck to track Nora (known to him as Leïla) down: her mother ordered Ida to delete it just the evening before. As Nora's concealed past comes out, Tom reacts with predictable anger and disugst while Ida, wide-eyed yet riveted, obeys Franck's orders far more readily than either of her parents until the point at which his real motive - reclaiming Nora and her daughter (he has no children) - becomes clear. The acute tension of this most miserable of birthday parties is broken when Cristina attempts unsuccessfully to free herself by stabbing the 'little brother' in the neck and herself ends up in a pool of blood in front of the one painting she has withheld from exhibition because she could not finish it - until now, under duress. As the violence spreads to the farmhouse, Tom is shot by Franck in his side but is able to dispatch Franck's primary henchman before collapsing, while Ida and Nora are pursued into the farm's outbuildings, taking the rifle Tom loaded and used with them. But Nora is (literally) disarmed by Franck unexpectedly pulling a gun on her as she surrenders, and it is not she but Ida (who has presumably never used firearms before) who picks up the rifle and kills Franck with a single bullet - as sure a shot as her mother in her previous life, if in very different circumstances. Histoires de la nuit is an adaptation of Laurent Mauvignier's 2020 novel of the same name, a gripping and violent thriller whose English title The Birthday Party unfortunately excludes Cristina's essential role in the narrative, with its theme of forces of darkness that threaten to submerge us and can only be defeated by extraordinary grit and determination. The family of Tom, Nora and Ida survives, exhausted but the stronger for being tested to its core, and although Cristina does not, she has at least vanquished her creative demons and completed a huge painting we sense may turn out to be her finest.