Fidelio: Alice's Journey can literally be described as relating a journey of self-discovery. A mechanic on the Marseille-registered freighter Fidelio, the equally titular Alice navigates the seas with an all-male crew and explores who they are while investigating her own sexuality.
It’s a general rule that extras on a home cinema release should not be watched before the feature. This sumptuous box set of French art-auteur Jacques Rivette’s most – until now – hard-to-see films reverses that. Just as the director turned the nature of cinema on its head with his oblique, often-lengthy, dream-like contemplations, The Mysteries of Paris: Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 Revisited must be seen before Out 1: Noli me tangere, as a way in to the just-short of 13-hour epic it examines.
Michel Gondry’s last film, the unwatchably hyperglycaemic Mood Indigo (2013), was so arch and quirky it irritated more than appealed. Thankfully, Microbe and Gasoline resets the dial to the charm levels of 2008’s Be Kind Rewind. And things hadn’t been plain sailing before that too. The stilted, US-made The We and the I (2012) suggested that, after The Green Hornet, Gondry was a fish-out-of-water in America. Microbe and Gasoline is low-key, sweet, warm and made in France.
The title of French director Lucie Borleteau’s first feature conceals a range of meanings. Fidelio is both the name of the enormous maritime freight vessel on which most of the action takes places, and a clear hint at “fidelity”, a concept with which its independent heroine Alice (Ariane Labed) negotiates throughout. If its French original, Fidelio: l’odyssée d’Alice, also suggests something else, the “Odyssey” of Alice’s journey meaning a return to the starting-point of home, then our expectations are challenged.
The off-the-wall premise of The New Girlfriend could have been one adapted by Pedro Almodóvar. After married woman Claire’s close childhood friend dies, she gives an undertaking to look after the widowed father David and the couple’s daughter, to whom she is godmother. While keeping her promise, she accidentally discovers he is a secret transvestite – David says his wife knew of this.
En Équilibre addresses the impact of disabling and irreparable injury, thwarted ambitions, the questionable practices of insurers, and the connection between two dissimilar, yet both frustrated, characters. Despite its different strands, the film adeptly draws them together into a coherent and unexpectedly enthralling whole.
A now-canonical film like Eyes Without a Face has the potential to become over familiar. What was once shocking could now seem quotidian. Freshness is a quality which can be blunted. Yet seeing Georges Franju’s 1960 film anew reveals it as still heady, and still unlike any other film.
A film about 20 years in the life of a character acknowledged as peripheral to a movement in popular culture which spawned global stars is a difficult sell. Audiences are going to wonder whether the chronicling of a minor player not central to the bigger picture is the wrong focus. With Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden the light is on Paul Vallée, a club DJ trying to make his way in the fertile early Nineties French electro-dance music scene from which Daft Punk became the global breakout phenomenon. And it’s the helmet-wearing duo which loom large over Eden.
This must be one of the year’s most remarkable archive exhumations: it may well become the re-release of 2015. A French take on the western released in 1969, Cemetery Without Crosses was explicitly made in the style of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Leone even directed one scene – a set piece in which the cast gather around a table for dinner. Its director and lead actor Robert Hossein says it was France’s first western.
When least expected, comedy has come stumbling into the work of French auteur Bruno Dumont. In his seven films to date, from the Cannes-winning Humanité of 1999 through to the stark Camille Claudel 1915 from two years ago, the director, frequently working with non-professional actors, has marked out a distinctive territory defined by its bleakness and emotional intensity.