Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, March 6–16
23 new features make up the best highwire balancing act in Manhattan art cinema
Every winter/spring for 30 years, Film at Lincoln Center and its overseas curating partner, Unifrance, have offered a carefully balanced menu of debut features (some currently from Unifrance’s 10 To Watch program) and films by veteran directors. Unlike festivals that have expanded to unthinkable size, showing and streaming up to 200+ feature films in less than two weeks, Rendez-Vous has chosen to stay small, balancing novice directors with proven pros, and showing everything at the Walter Reade, Manhattan’s finest single-screen theater. Six features on this year’s slate already have distributors. Most were press-screened early, none with review embargoes’ (from filmmakers, distributors, fests and even individual theaters) that often prohibit long-form reviews, upfront. Rendez-Vous has mastered a highwire balancing act in Manhattan art cinema.
Here’s an added plus—something you rarely see at any fest in the New York area: Students from area high schools will attend free showings of nine of this year’s Rendez-Vous offerings. And a jury of six college students, who are working toward degrees in film or French studies at NYC colleges, will select their Best Emerging Filmmaker from among the pictures they’re invited to view. Imagine, a Manhattan fest actually training up international film fans, some still in their teens. It’s what this 16 year old (whose first movie date in the 1950s was a paralyzing double-bill of Wages of Fear and Diabolique on one of the few art theater screens in all of Indiana) dreamed of—growing up to watch ‘em all, then discovering there’s a new generation of 16-year-olds growing up doing much the same thing. What a pleasure to once again pick three must-see French features to love to pieces:
Winter in Sokcho: Koya Kamura: 2024: France, Korea: 94 minutes
Look below at the picture postcard cover, tipped on its side, of Elisa Shua Dusapin’s novel, Winter in Sokcho. The sticker identifies it as a 2021 National Book Award winner for its translation. But it’s the blurb at the bottom from Elle magazine that draws you in: “Spellbinding—I haven’t encountered a voice like this since Marguerite Duras.” Last fall the New York Film Festival honored the 1969 La Musica, the first film directed by Duras, long revered as the first lady of French letters.
You can read Dusapin’s slim novella in little more than the 94 minute running time of Koya Kamura’s exquisite debut movie, which is Rendez-Vous’ hidden gem. Not that either Dusapin’s book or Kamura’s movie, which are set in and filmed in a tiny fishing village perched on the border between North and South Korea, will make you change your 2025 vacation plans. But both the novella and its film will stir your thoughts about the infinitely mysterious ties–the six-degrees- of-separation–between different countries and their cultures.
Soo-ha (Bella Kim, radiant) is on vacation break from her studies in Seoul in French and Korean literature. She’s working as a cook and housekeeper for her native mom (Park Mi-hyeon), who provides the fish for a modest tourist home. Soo-ha has an amiable unemployed boyfriend (Gong Do-yu) she sleeps with, who dreams of fame and fortune as a model. Mom, whose French husband deserted her and Soo-ha at birth, thinks the youth is the best local catch her daughter will find. Soo-ha hopes for better. She has swirling animated dreams filled with body dysmorphia and the treacherous pufferfish her mother sells and prepares for guests.
We’re primed for the arrival of Kerrand (a perfectly cast Roschdy Zem), a bestselling graphic comic artist from Normandy. Grizzled and taciturn, an immediate cinematic blend of Jean Gabin and Gary Cooper, Kerrand wants only to be left alone to explore and sketch. Soo-ha is drawn to his Google credits and global fame. She cooks for him, helps him secure art supplies, coaxes him out to Sokcho’s beautiful vistas, walks him across the heavily guarded North Korean border to the DMZ and its historical markers. Soo-ha sees in Kerrand the teacher, the lover, even the missing father in her life. Is Kerrand more than a divorced dad looking only for solitude and inspiration for his sketchbook? Ah, there’s the heart and soul of Winter in Sokcho.
For her first feature, director and screenwriter Kamura (her co-adapter is Stéphane Ly-Cuong), has fashioned a drama those teenage film students coming to Rendez-Vous should study forever. Kamura’s chosen a novel close to her life and fashioned a movie close to her heart. And what a crew she’s put together: Fabrice Barbey and Agnés Patron’s black-and-white, nightmarish animation sequences, Élodie Tahtane’s sensitive cinematography, Delphine Malaussena’s uplifting score and Antoine Flandre’s exacting editing—all are as assured and crisply professional as any picture in Rendez-Vous. This is a first feature Marguerite Duras would have blessed.
Visiting Hours: Patricia Mazuy: 2024: France: 108 minutes
In her official Unifrance portrait photo, Patricia Mazuy might be mistaken for a newcomer. But Rendez-Vous has long admired this unsettling and unpredictable director. Six years ago Lincoln Center mounted a retrospective of her features going back to 1989, including Thick Skinned, a rural drama about a farmer imprisoned for starting a murderous fire, and The King’s Daughters (2000), in which Isabelle Huppert played the imperious head of a 17th century girls’ boarding school.
Fast forward to 2019 and Paul Sanchez Is Back!, a seriocomic romp scored by John Cale (Patti Smith’s old rocker) of a mass murderer teasing the local constable and her tagalong journalist crush. That one was a hoot. Mazuy’s next appearance was Saturn Bowling, a savage procedural whose protagonist is a psycho woman killer who inherits a bowling alley and is egged on by its clientele of ruthless animal slayers. Not your viewer’s favorite.
This year Mazuy ups her game while preserving a few cinematic broodings, with Visiting Hours. Here an older high society matron, Alma (Huppert), befriends a young working class mother, Mina (Hafsia Herzi), while they’re visiting their imprisoned husbands. The picture’s more enticing French title, The Prisoner of Bordeaux, underlines what happens when lonely Alma invites overworked Mina and her two children to move into her drop-dead mansion while they wait out their husbands’ releases. You can’t wait to see what loopy and mischievous tricks Mazuy will try to pull off this time around. There are a couple of whoppers.
The director spends considerable screen time making sure we understand Mina and her spouse (Lionel Dray, itchy and edgy) are eager to be reunited. He’s doing time for a bungled jewelry heist that may not have been fully recovered. The privileged Alma is married to an unfaithful brain surgeon and art collector (Magne-Håvard Brekke, weary and resigned) who’s serving six years for a drunken hit-and-run that killed one pedestrian and crippled another. Huppert as always has an arsenal of acting tools at her fingertips, and she lets slip tiny hints she may be no more than a trophy wife, waiting for its owner to reclaim and admire along with the wall hangings. Watch Isabelle carefully—there are few living actresses who do suffering-with-a-pedigree better, who can nail the weariness of privilege with a flick of an eyelid.
Director/writer Mazuy engineers a crisis for Mina’s live-in guest–the arrival of Yacine (William Edimo, frighteningly believable). He was Mina’s husband’s heist partner, and he wants his share of the cut he believes Mina has hidden away—or bad things will happen to mom and kids. Mina has nothing…but Alma has everything. Visiting Hours builds revelation on revelation, neither of which are dramatically believable, but both of which work, through the sheer acting prowess and skills of Mazuy’s two leading ladies. In particular, Isabella Huppert now stands unrivaled at the pinnacle of a screen career that always surprises, even mystifies. You’d follow this 71-year-old to the ends of the earth…and damn near have.
Ghost Trail: Jonathan Millet: 2024: France, Belgian, Germany: 94 minutes
“Inspired by true events” appears in the opening titles of many a movie, but it rarely means “ripped from today’s headlines.” Here’s a story that is. Barely two months ago, The New York Times’ page one lead, “Al-Assad Flees Syria as Rebels Claim Power,” reported that “President Bashar al-Assad has resigned and fled Syria for Russia,” calling it “a stunning fall for a longtime dictator who had kept rebel forces at bay for years.” Imagine how many international citizens, some from France, were seized and imprisoned during al-Assad’s cruel 24 year regime.
Documentarian Jonathan Millet, in his first feature length drama, imagines one—a literature professor in Aleppo, Hamid, played with barely hidden anguish by French-Tunisian actor Adam Bessa. Hamid is released by his Syrian captors from a death camp north of Damascus in 2014, left to die in the desert. He’d been imprisoned, blindfolded and tortured in the infamous Sednaya prison, for the crime of speaking out against his government. His wife and daughter have died in a bombing. His mother is stuck in East Lebanon without her medications. It’s taken Hamid two years to make his way to Strasbourg and settle in as a construction laborer, where we follow him joining an underground unit dedicated to tracking down their Syrian captors.
The covert cell’s mission is to exact retribution and revenge—words and actions we’ve become all too familiar with, all too quickly. Hamid plays a video game in which he plays himself killing off the enemy in empty war torn streets. Ghost Trail is that rare, urgent movie drama that matches of-the-moment reality with a different impact than documentaries. Millet and his co-writer Florence Rochat want us to watch their surviving academic hunt down the bad guy who left him barely alive. It’s a chilling premise.
Hamid’s unites with a cell leader, Nina (a fierce Julia Franz Richter), plus another local refugee, Yara (Hala Rajab, equally fine). Their leads point him toward a university campus where a former prison guard, “Harfaz,” may now be a postgraduate student in chemistry, under the name Sami. From this description, Hamid locates the man he believes could be the jailer who tortured him, though his captors always placed a hood over his head. Nina wants him killed, But as a teacher, Hamid may settle for exposing his guilty party to the world through a free press in Paris.
For much of this aptly titled ghost trail, Hamid shadows Sami—walking the campus, studying at the library, eating his meals. Neither he nor the viewer are certain Hamid’s got the right guy, even when they finally share a table and start a 10-minute conversation that becomes the movie’s centerpiece. The tall, clean shaven Sami is played by Tawfeek Barhom, an extraordinary Israeli actor. Though he’s close enough for Hamid to smell his aftershave and maybe his skin, Barhom’s scripted performance is a touchstone in ambiguity—we simply can’t tell at this moment if Sami’s the monster from the “human slaughterhouse” prison. More will be revealed.
Ghost Trail is a profoundly thoughtful movie experience that’s not just inspired by true events, but dramatizes the kind of backstory most viewers will applaud. It’s a pause, a breath of fresh air in today’s darkening climate.
This concludes critic’s choices. Watch for Brokaw’s picks in New Directors/New Films, April 2-13.
Regions: New York City