Frenched by French

Ever been made love to by a piece of art? French Filmfest is back to rekindle our passionate exchange of intellectual orgasms.

Recent contemplations have come down to a single fear of losing sight. When French Filmfest came greeting my beachless summer, I responded swimming in joy upon a realization my eyes were born normal to view filmic wondrousness.

It shouldn't come off a surprise that my idea of "me time" for the weekend would be sightseeing. Should you see this a travel from the obtuse to the precocious was worth every waking second processing subtitles, movie after movie. It was a tour free for all but the dense or a time killer seeker. 

La Famille Bélier is, in Kristofferson Guela's persnickety world, perfect, to say the least. The kind of perfect that made me cry with utmost genuineness. That's saying a lot considering I only get touched, in a mindset conditioned to appreciate the mainstream, by heartbreaking farewells in a movie. 

 
With La Famille Bélier, a full-fledged un-mainstream work of art, the goodbye scene shot right through all my senses before they even reached my heart. I did not know I was being prepared to cry in the end. I felt betrayed. And that betrayal messed about with my stubborn mechanism to be satisfied. How can most family movies not be like La Famille Bélier? How you demonstrate emotional appeal without hingeing on pity, entertainment without relying on the cheesy, and triumphant love without the wordplays and pick-up lines is in brilliant display in La Famille Bèlier. 

The elements of music coming into play, handicap does not entail obviousness or overuse. I am glad La Famille Bèlier did not bring music to gratuitous exposition and stayed focused on the main story arc.


Come mid-afternoon and another helping of French goodness filled the movie theater in the picture of Les Garçons et Guillaume à Table! It's like the Birdman of comedy or what I feel a breakthrough genre I may dub "SOLILOCOMEDY." The depth of this comedy is a tinge of black and heartwarming. Guillaume Gallienne urges himself to do the script more than justice; rather, he delivers with a usual sense of duty as do most French films I have seen. The premise, the conflicts, the exploitation and the denouement, all unfurled like a canvass too revealing to rede piecemeal. Guillaume could deliver best actor and best actress speeches in one night, on one stage, both at the same time.

I don't remember a single time a French film had ever failed me. Until 108 Rois Demons came along. It is, to say the least, too elementary even a nursery book can put it to shame. Put it this way: I have exerted more effort fighting snooze from second scene on than figuring a conspiracy how mediocrity had slipped into this cinematic digest. A number of other "me timers" weren't too shy to share this sentiment leaving the cinema with a discernible air of whatdafackness 40 minutes into this test of patience. Ultimately, it served me a valuable lesson: this is how not to make a good movie.

My "me time" Sunday culminated in a redemptive mood that's so cruel French cinema did me some ample reminding of why they are superior in filmmaking. In three words and 90 miuntes, it won me back - Lulu Femme Nue. How could a married woman with three children choose to lead a life of abandonment and find solace in learning the ropes of survival preying on other people's equally lonely lives is the moral uncertainty this movie gives us a taste of. There's another story similar to this. There is an exhausted human being who wants a life out of his aquarium for the past 1 or 3 decades (1 as a corporate slave; 3 an ambitious firstborn). Denudate and in personal recession, albeit on different levels of reality, this movie is my story.

Le Havre was my mint following an adventurous meal capped off by luxurious afters. I had it a day later - a Monday, a Manic-for-Movies Monday. It's vintage and rightfully a classic. Its story inspires the way a Dolphy movie would - all about the good, the kind, and the miserable. Complete with Messianic formula formed in the last two decades of the 20th century,  Le Havre incites feelings of nostalgia and old-school genius. It was a perfect pitter-patter of my yearly dose of French.

The 2015 French Filmfest finds me watching alone yet again. Two of my movie buddies have immigrated to places I have always wanted to be. Both enamored by their boyfriends, almost in a "put a ring on it" phase of their lives. Who knew my own life's plot twist would be me marching on without my supporting characters?  French films have consistently put me in what-ifs that go a natural direction to be eerily close to reality and tragically funny. They have tickled my artistic senses more than 253 likes a Facebook photo could sire. A highlight of my year I celebrate in the company of dark chocolate-covered almonds, Jamba Juice, and tofu chips. This once-a-year phenomenon I pine for as only French films can make beautiful sound exquisite, disorienting turn into imposing, and great, as a sated moviegoer would exclaim by film credits' end, look magnifique, or basically make filmmaking a synonym game of thematic clichés only the French could make headway in.