Vive le Cinéma Français

For a decade, with a mandated pandemic break, the distinctive small but substantial French Wave Film Festival has served as a midsummer treat for art cinema fans. Consider it a mid-season mini-feast landing between the major events under the banner of its hosting Santa Barbara International Film Festival. 

Come next year, the French Wave Film Festival will head downtown to take over the multi-screen SBIFF Film Center, currently undergoing elaborate and elegant renovation. For now, the seven-day, 11-film event from July 11 to 17 holds court in its traditional home base, the state-of-the-art Riviera Theatre. 

As is the tradition, the curation of the festival — by SBIFF programmer Stewart Short — brings handfuls of impressive and important French films of recent vintage. The list represents a variety of styles and genres and often bearing the glittery imprimatur of prestigious awards and nominations.

Jim’s Story (Le roman de Jim) is in the official Cannes club and also won the César Award winner for Best Actor for Karim Leklou. The Marching Band (En fanfare) also shares the Cannes connection and seven César Award nominations, including Best Film. Both Suspended Time (Hors du temps) and That Summer in Paris (Le rendez-vous de l’été) made the lofty grade as selections in the Berlin International Film Festival. 

Legendary names from the annals of French culture also show up in the program. Julie Delpy was a triple promise, as director-writer-actor in Meet the Barbarians (Les barbares), dealing with the issue of Ukrainian refugees. Monsieur Aznavour is a biopic about the iconic French singer Charles Aznavour, with César Award nominee Tahar Radim in the lead role.

Of the films I was able to preview, Souleymane’s Story (L’histoire de Souleymane) was the standout, a simple and globally relevant story of complex dimensions. Director/co-writer Boris Lojkine’s film, whose awards include four Césars and Cannes’s Un Certain Regard award for the stunningly fine lead actor Abou Sangaré, is a realistic account of one refugee’s struggle toward the goal of gaining asylum. Souleymane’s Story follows the Guinean delivery rider’s travels in Paris, in the tense time leading up to his all-important asylum status interview.

We can’t help but relate this story to the lives of many in our midst, during the horrific deportation scandal in America — and down the block. With a storytelling eye somehow both coolly objective — artfully drawing on handheld camerawork — and ultimately, deeply compassionate, Lojkine follows our innocent hopeful refugee from his arduous bicycle delivery work on Parisian streets to overnight stays at refugee shelters, and a climactic interview scene that delivers a painful and cathartic end piece. We learn about our everyday hero’s personal life and painful saga in measured doses over the course of the film, rather than through tidy narrative exposition, but nothing prepares us for the unleashed emotionality of the finale.

From a radically different neighborhood and socioeconomic strata of Parisian life, not to mention cinematic genre, Léa Domenach’s charmer The President’s Wife goes to the top of the French political landscape, where prime ministers and presidents — and, importantly, their wives — dwell. “Loosely based” on the true story of the outspoken First Lady Bernadette Chirac, here played with her burnished elan by the great Catherine Deneuve, the film is on some essential level a feel-good comedy with feminist and political overtones.

Not one to sit idly by as a president’s quiet, well-dressed, and well-mannered spouse, Madame Chirac asserts her voice and opinions on political matters and, when her husband has a scandal with an Italian actress, gains the gumption and public notoriety to win an office of her own in Corrèze. 

Her champion and advisor, guiding her path into the political and public spotlight, informs her early in her political climb to consider the secrets to Lady Di’s success — “humanitarian aid and showbiz.” When she balks and fears her age will get in the way, he corrects her: “You’re not a has-been; you’re vintage.” 

The film deftly blends the slightly fictionalized film and archival footage of the actual subject. Quirky filmic asides include the sudden appearance of a Greek chorus/choir by the roadside in one scene. Clearly, it’s not a film that takes its real-life subject matter too seriously. But it does manage to make incisive points about the follies and sexism of the political arena, with Deneuve’s magnetism leading the charge. 

See sbifftheatres.com/wave for more information.