2014 César awards

[update below] [2nd update below]

The French Oscars. The awards ceremony is happening tomorrow night, at the Théâtre du Châtelet (as always). The full list of nominees is here. Leading with ten nominations is Les Garçons et Guillaume, à table!, followed by La Vie d’Adèle (Blue is the Warmest Color) and L’Inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake) with eight each. When the nominees were announced a month ago, there were nine films in the top categories I hadn’t seen (and, for most of them, had little to no interest in seeing). But as I wanted to be fully informed when casting my ballot, as it were (see below), I managed to catch all nine in the past month (DVD, VOD, en salle). I have blog posts on most of the nominees. For the ones I don’t—those seen of late—here’s my brief take on each:

Alceste à bicyclette (Cycling with Molière): A duo of two aging stage actors played by Fabrice Luchini (nominated for best actor) and Lambert Wilson, do an impromptu rehearsal of Molière’s “La Misanthrope” at the former’s home on the Île de Ré. There’s obviously a story behind this and other things happen but that’s basically the film. And it’s good. Fine acting and worth seeing.

Elle s’en va (On My Way): A mid 60ish restaurateur (or restaurateuse?), beauty queen in her youth, and with all sorts of personal problems and états d’âme drops everything and embarks on a road trip from Brittany to the Haute-Savoie and points in between, picking up bratty grandson along the way, having one night stand with man half her age (before picking up grandson), meeting up with estranged daughter, ex-husband, aging mother, former beauty queen contestants, and various other people. The pic is Catherine Deneuve (best actress nominee) front and center. It’s her all the way. If one is a fan of Mme Deneuve, it may be seen. Otherwise, one may decide not to see it.

Les Beaux Jours (Bright Days Ahead): Fanny Ardant (best actress nominee) plays an early 60ish dentist in coastal Dunkerque who’s taken early retirement, has a perfectly acceptable life with dentist husband (Patrick Chesnais, best supporting actor nominee), and with two married daughters and grandchildren in town, gets bored, and falls into a torrid affair with a man (Laurent Lafitte) some 25 years her junior, who is clearly not wanting for female companionship but puts the moves on her anyway (what does he see in her? well, she has quite the body for une femme d’un certain âge—Fanny Ardant clearly has a rigorous work out regimen—and the libido to go with it). She’s trying to figure out what she wants in this new phase of her life. It’s a small film. Inoffensive. Not worth going out of one’s way for but may be seen.

Michael Kohlhaas (Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas): A historical drama set in the 16th century and based on German author Heinrich von Kleist’s early 19th century novella. The film faithfully follows the novella, so it appears, except that it’s set in southern France (and mainly shot in the Vercors) and not in Germany. The Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen (best actor nominee), who plays Michael Kohlhaas, learned French for the role. He’s good, as is the film.

Mon âme par toi guérie (My Soul Healed by You; alternatively: One of a Kind): A mid 30ish laboring man named Frédi (Grégory Gadebois, best actor nominee) is on disability, lives in a trailer park near Fréjus on the Mediterranean, has a complicated marriage, whiles away his time drinking beer with his prolo buddies, and learns that his recently deceased mother had bequeathed to him the powers of faith healing. So the word gets around, including in the Fréjus well-to-do classes, that this pudgy schlump of a guy, but who has a really good heart, is a faith healer. With his hands only. A little massage and voilà. Gadebois puts in a good performance but the pic is far from perfect. One may see it, but one may also skip it.

Renoir: This one opened in the US last year and to mostly good reviews (and in France as well). As the title suggests, it’s a biopic of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (played by Michel Bouquet, best actor nominee) and is set in precisely the summer of 1915, during WWI, at his home in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur, and with the Master in his mid 70s and ailing, but still painting bare-breasted women away. His son Jean (Vincent Rottiers) comes home wounded from the front and takes up with his father’s latest model, a comely young local girl, Andrée (Christa Theret), and whom he later marries (Jean later went on to become the great filmmaker). The film is about the relationship between the three and with the backdrop all the women in the sumptuous Renoir household who tend to the Master. It’s slow paced movie but absorbing. I liked it.

And then there’s this one, nominated for Best Music, that I saw en salle in December:

Casse-tête chinois (Chinese Puzzle): The third installment in director Cédric Klapisch’s series on the intersecting lives of the friends and lovers—Xavier (Romain Duris), Martine (Audrey Tautou), Isabelle (Cécile de France), Wendy (Kelly Reilly)—who came together as flat-mates in their university year abroad in Barcelona in the 2002 L’Auberge espagnole (entertaining movie, not at all bad, and great publicity for the EU’s Erasmus program) and who we met again as they hit their 30s in the (less good) 2005 Les Poupées russes. In this one, which takes place mainly in New York, the gang is approaching 40 and middle age. It’s a featherweight of a film, the lightest of light comedies, and utterly forgettable. A decidedly sub-optimal manner in which to spend two hours of one’s time. If you haven’t seen the first two films of the series, absolutely do not see this one. If you have seen the two, it’s up to you.

A couple of remarks about the César nominees. First, the Césars have categories for “most promising actor/actress” (meilleur espoir masculin/féminin), for first-time performances. As this is France, you have to pay your dues and wait your turn in the age hierarchy before great things can happen to you—and even if you’ve already done something as great as any of your elders. And as it happens, Adèle Exarchopoulos, who had the co-lead role in ‘La Vie d’Adèle’, has been nominated in this category, whereas Léa Seydoux is an outright best actress nominee. This is scandalous, as this was Exarchopoulos’s film. She was in almost every frame and her performance was stunning. She should by all rights win the César for best actress tout court, over Seydoux and everyone else, and not be relegated to the lesser category. Equally scandalous—or maybe just preposterous—is the nomination of the Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani to this same “most promising actress” category, for her role in the (excellent) film Syngue Sabour, which is entirely in Persian, was shot nowhere near France, and has nothing French about it apart from it being based on a Goncourt-winning novel written in French and by a naturalized French author. But what is particularly ludicrous is that Farahani is already a major Iranian actress and who has had lead roles in major films. WTF was the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma thinking when it nominated her to this sub-category?

The second remark, which I’ve already made in two posts this week: Nominated in the best supporting actress category are Julie Gayet (Quai d’Orsay) and Marisa Bonini (Un Château en Italie), both of whose performances were unexceptional—and in Gayet’s case, lasted only a few minutes. But, as one knows, Mme Gayet is François Hollande’s companion and ladylove, and Mme Bonini is (since 2007) Nicolas Sarkozy’s mother-in-law. Coincidence? Bon, on est en France…

Voilà my vote:

BEST FILM: La Vie d’Adèle.
This is a no brainer. No hesitation whatever.

BEST DIRECTOR: Asghar Farhadi (Le Passé).
Farhadi directed this very good French movie without speaking a word of French. As for Abdellatif Kechiche, he was, by numerous accounts, an insufferable, tyrannical, odious jerk while directing ‘La Vie d’Adèle’, so doesn’t deserve it (and for a third time at that).

BEST ACTOR: Guillaume Gallienne (Les Garçons et Guillaume, à table!).
Gallienne is excellent in this, and plays the two major roles in the film to boot. He edges out Mathieu Amalric (La Vénus à la fourrure), though all the nominees are very good.

BEST ACTRESS: Emmanuelle Seigner (La Vénus à la fourrure).
The other nominees are all worthy—and a couple very worthy (e.g. Bérénice Béjo)—but Seigner was outstanding in this.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Olivier Gourmet (Grand Central).
There are other worthy nominees but Gourmet is a very fine actor and deserves it.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Géraldine Pailhas (Jeune & Jolie).
She was good enough here but this is sort of faute de mieux. Not an exceptional crop this year IMO.

As for the Most Promising Actor and Actress categories, I won’t vote in them out of principle (and haven’t seen all the movies in any case).

UPDATE: ‘Les Garçons et Guillaume, à table!’ won Best Film and Guillaume Gallienne Best Actor (with the film winning five awards in all). Sandrine Kiberlain (‘9 mois ferme’) won Best Actress (deserved). Roman Polanski took Best Director for ‘La Vénus à la fourrure’ (a strange choice, as it was a great film but on account of the actor and actress, not the director). Adèle Haenel won Best Supporting Actress for her role in ‘Suzanne’ (pourquoi pas?) and Niels Arestrup (‘Quai d’Orsay’) Best Supporting Actor (why not?). Adèle Exarchopoulos naturally won Most Promising Actress—the only award for ‘La Vie d’Adèle’; Abdellatif Kechiche didn’t even show up for the ceremony—and Pierre Deladonchamps (‘L’Inconnu du lac’) Most Promising Actor. Nice that ‘Alabama Monroe’ (The Broken Circle Breakdown) won Best Foreign Film. ‘Sur le chemin de l’école‘ beat out Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Le Dernier des injustes’ for Best Documentary (which means that I’ll have to see it). The complete list is here.

2nd UPDATE: The très cinésnob Les InRocks (France’s answer to Rolling Stone) is most unimpressed with the Césars awarded last night.