Female Film Critics 24/375
In The Passengers of the Night, French director Mikhäel Hers settles in with a recently separated, middle-aged woman and her two children for an exploration of unexceptional and yet quite moving 1980s Parisian lives. Affection for all the characters results from a nonjudgmental, straightforward presentation of events over a seven year period, beginning with François Mitterrand’s election, May 10, 1981.
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It feels like a precious gift, the latest film from French director Alice Winocour, a delicately constructed journey through trauma and recovery that cuts like a knife and soothes like a hug, somehow, miraculously, managing both bundles of feeling at the same time.
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In cinema or books, adopting a disguise, a fake persona, to learn about a different race’s or social class’s experiential reality is not new. Perhaps the many iterations speak to the quite fascinating fantasy of stepping out of our own world into another. French director Emmanuel Carrère adopts this idea with full immersion in Between Two Worlds. Adapted from Florence Aubenas’ 2010 nonfiction book The Night Cleaner, Carrère immediately establishes author Marianne Winckler in disguise as a cleaning woman, euphemistically called a ‘maintenance agent.’
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Unobtrusively, in Our Body, French director Claire Simon documents patients, doctors, and nurses in a gynecology ward of a Parisian hospital. In over two hours and forty-nine minutes, Simon observes interaction concerning a wide range of women’s medical conditions and records several operations. Discussions include abortion, trans therapy, hysterectomy, endometriosis, fertility testing and treatment, breast and cervical cancers, mastectomy, and more. Unexpectedly and ironically, director Simon becomes one of the subjects part way through her filming, and she joins the diverse group of women.
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Céline Devaux has crafted an airy and enjoyable romp which carries with it some very perceptive commentary about how we construct our inner and outer selves. Everybody Loves Jeanne is a delightful peek inside the mind of an over achiever who probably needed to fall down so she could learn who she is. It also understand the complexity of grief – whether that be grief for a parent or grief for a career and smashed dreams. Witty and brilliant, Everybody Loves Jeanne is a gift.
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French director Léa Mysius’ The Five Devils is enigmatic, at times compelling, but ultimately puzzling and disappointing. The story focuses on eight-year-old Vicky who possesses a hypersensitive sense of smell and an ability to mix powerful potions leaving individuals unconscious. She benefits from her ability to travel back in time where she learns unpleasant secrets of violent events. The title, The Five Devils, suggests a comment on the five central characters that, in the final analysis, are reconsidered in what appears to be a meaningful flashback. It didn’t work for me.
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Juliette Binoche shines as a writer caught between honesty and authenticity in director Emmanuel Carrère’s compelling drama Between Two Worlds. Based on the non-fiction book by French journalist Florence Aubenas, the film explores what happens when an undercover writer with the best of intentions about sharing the realities of working-class life gets closer to her subjects than she planned, threatening both her objectivity and her connection to the community she’s come to feel a part of.
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Emmanuel Carrère’s French drama Between Two Worlds, adapted from the bestselling non-fiction book The Night Cleaner, is a gentle introduction to the hardships faced by the underprivileged wage workers amongst Northern France’s impoverished unemployed who have no choice but to take grueling jobs cleaning bathrooms, water ferries and other various public spaces despite some of them possessing past professional career accolades.
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The Mother and the Whore (1973) indulges a French ménage-à-trois. French New Wave writer/director Jean Eustache grabbed attention in 1973 with The Mother and the Whore which won the prestigious Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix. Largely autobiographical, Eustache focuses on three individuals, all friends he enlisted for a candid, explicit foregrounding of sexual relationships: Jean-Pierre Léaud as Alexandre, Françoise Lebrun as Veronika, and Bernadette Lafont as Marie.
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Two once-inseparable childhood friends reconnect on a vacation to Greece’s Cyclades islands in the French comedy Two Tickets to Greece, a tart yet touching look at how friendships nurture us, even when one thought they’d died on the vine. As teens, Blandine and Magalie listened to the soundtrack to the 1988 film The Big Blue and talked about visiting Amorgos, where the diving movie was filmed. Yet after a falling out, they haven’t spoken for about thirty years.
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