Vive le French Cinema, New and Vintage

Back in 2009, Nancy Meyers’s rom-com It’s Complicated — starring Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin, and local Steve Martin — joined the short list of movies based in and presumably about Santa Barbara. Locals quickly noted a faux pas or two, including a glaring one, when Martin talks about going to the “French Film Festival” in town, as if it was a thing.

All these years later, it is very much a thing, in the form of the savory French Wave Festival, a splinter event from the mothership Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF), now up to its 12th edition. This year’s festival is even bigger and deeper than before, and thanks to the welcoming home base of the new five-screen McHurley Film Center, it is expanding to 14 days.

With the program’s 21 titles en français (reading required), the festival provides a valuable window on the contemporary French cinema scene, and with classic vintage titles also enjoying some big-screen time for our cineaste-tic pleasure. I was able to preview several of the newer titles, often heralded by César Awards (the French Oscar) and Cannes Film Festival, for good reason. On the evidence of my selective tasting, this French Wave crop is strong and inviting.

Director Dominik Moll’s (Harry, He’s Here to Help; The Night of the 12th) latest, Case 137, takes on the true story, in fictionalized form, of the volatile 2018 “yellow vest” protests in Paris. A variation on the police procedural detective genre story, the narrative revolves around a female police investigator (the fine Léa Drucker) and a specific case of police abuse of a victimized young protestor. The film raises various questions — about the tensions and moral quandaries of internal police investigations, the stressful conditions in the heat of “battle,” and the fundamental right of protest 

Case 137 may ostensibly be a genre piece, but it follows its own course and avoids formulae or tidy resolutions, recognizing the ambiguities of the two sides of a story or two.

Colors of Time, directed by Cédric Klapisch, is a unique cross-generational family tree tale, at times sentimental, but by mostly agreeable degrees. The storyline traces the ancestry of a newly inherited house, with family members from different corners of the lineage, and society, rummaging through the musty, shuttered house, intercut with flashbacks of a fantastical ancestry leading through a trip from Normandy to Paris in the late 19th century and connections to brothels and implausibly famous artists. Why not?

File under French feel-good cinema. 

A more realistic premise greets us in director-writer Leyla Bouzid’s In a Whisper, the central theme of which is the ostracism of LGBTQ+ people in the Arab world. A gay Tunisian woman now living in Paris (Hiam Abbas) has traveled home for the funeral of an uncle, whose own closeted life has ended in a demise of suspicious circumstances and some degree of family shame. Bouzid does a laudable job of weaving a story of a particular character and the larger theme of navigating conflicts with family and society, while keeping us entertained, right through to the warm finalizing embrace of a 90-year-old grandma’s happy birthday scene.

For my money, the best movie of the few I sampled is The Little Sister, another film taking on tensions between the LGBTQ+ life and Islamic values, but this time in Paris. Director writer Hafsia Herzi’s film comes bearing the imprimatur accolades and awards, as the “Queer Palm” winner at Cannes, and a César win for “Best Female Revelation,” to Nadia Melliti. 

Melliti, a young and promising actress, gives a quietly compelling and layered performance as Fatima, a French-Algerian 17-year-old struggling with her sexual and existential identity. Yes, it is a coming-of-age film, but one of distinction and impressive cinematic control and style. 

Over the course of her evolving saga, Fatima wends her way through fickle shunning of her boyfriend and pursuing her interest in women, through bouts of hedonism and heartache, and at least the strong scent of true love. A careful blend of standard cinematic storytelling and naturalistic, semi-cinéma vérité modes serves to draw us into the film and its emotional truths.

Bon appétit à la cinéma.

SBIFF’s French Wave Film Festival runs from July 10-23 at the SBIFF McHurley Film Center (916 State St.). See sbifftheatres.com/wave for more information.