Despite the absence of a title sponsor this year, festival director Marie-Pierre Richard and her team have assembled a superb, wide-ranging programme for the 10th Dublin French Film Festival, which runs from December 3rd to 13th. At a time when fewer and fewer foreign-language films are bought for distribution in Britain and Ireland, the festival offers a unique opportunity to catch the cream of recent French cinema; of the 25 new features on the programme, no more than eight are likely to be released here.
The festival opens with Claude Miller's La Classe de Neige (School Trip), winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes this year. A handsomely composed and initially very intriguing film, it follows a nervy, insular boy on a school skiing trip while his over-protective - and strangely sinister - father hovers in the background. Unfortunately, much of the thought which clearly went into such a promising scenario is squandered in its limply reductive and predictable resolution.
The most controversial film of the festival is certain to be Seul Contre Tous (I Stand Alone), the first feature from 35-year-old writer-director Gaspar Noe and a sequel to his 1991 extended short film, Carne, which will be shown with it. Both centre on a butcher (Philippe Nahan) whose traumatic past is recounted in an extended rapid-fire prologue before the new film picks up his story.
Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and the Michael Douglas character in Falling Down, the butcher suffers from an aching sense of failure and feels entirely dislocated from society. As his rage gathers momentum, he is set to explode. When I saw the film in Toronto, some members of the audience actually ran from the cinema.
The young writer-director, Francois Ozon, who won the short film prize at the French Film Festival two years ago with Un Robe d'Ete, is on audacious form in his first feature, the calculatedly outrageous Sitcom, which deals with an apparently contented suburban French family of four whose bourgeois lifestyle is turned upside down after the father brings home a rat as a pet. The consequences involve incest, homosexuality, bisexuality, and orgies which are left unseen but hilariously suggested.
The most satisfying of the French entries at Cannes this year, Patrice Chereau's Ceux qui m'Aiment Prendront le Train (Those who Love me can Take the Train) takes the title from the final edict of a domineering, abrasive and bisexual painter who demands his family, friends and lovers take the four-hour journey from Paris to Limoges for his funeral. Almost all of the film's first half takes place aboard the rapid-transport SNCF train, as disparate characters from the dead man's past are thrown together and forced to confront their relationships with him and with each other.
The second, even more discursive half of the film details the funeral, and a long night of the soul as the protagonists are thrown together for emotionally fraught confrontations, only a few of which are resolved. Chereau's consistently compelling film assembles an exemplary cast which notably includes Charles Berling, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Pascal Gregory and newcomer Sylvain Jacques, along with the magesterial Jean-Louis Trintignant (in a dual role) and Vincent Perez, startlingly explicitly shown at one point as a transsexual-in-progress.
The films new to me in the festival which I most eagerly look forward to seeing include: Eric Rohmer's Conte d'Automne, which earned the veteran writer-director the best screenplay prize at Venice two months ago; Francis Veber's French box-office smash hit, Le Diner de Cons (The Dinner Game), a farce involving a bizarre weekly dinner engagement; Cedric Kahn's L'Ennui, which deals with the complicated relationships of a philosophy teacher (Charles Berling) who's struggling to write a book; and Gilles Bourdos's Disparus, featuring Gregoire Colin, Anouk Grinberg and Xavier Beauvois in the story of a young woman carried back in time from 1989 to 1938 by the diary of a left-wing militant.
The festival also promises four recent films starring Isabelle Huppert, including Claude Chabrol's Rien ne va Plus, his 50th feature, and Benoit Jacquot's L'Ecole de la Chair (The School of Flesh); a retrospective on the great veteran, Alain Resnais, which includes such true classics as Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad and Providence, along with his latest movie, On Connait la Chanson; and, to celebrate the festival's 10th anniversary, a selection of 10 outstanding French movies of the past 10 years, among them Au Revoir, les Enfants, Delicatessen, Romauld et Juliette, Toto the Hero and Three Colours: Blue.
All screenings are at the IFC, apart from the opening night presentation, which is at Savoy 1. The festival booking office opens in the IFC on Monday.
