French film festival

The Cable Car’s French film festival is almost at an end. I missed a lot of it, because I was in Ithaca at this conference.

I saw part 3 of Lucas Belvaux’s trilogy, "After Life." It’s about the after-life of some Belgian terrorists (are they nationalist Flemings? Walloons? the film doesn’t say), their post-arrest, post-jail return to civilian life. Having only seen one part, I can't speak to the trilogy's ambition to present the same story in three different genres. The one I saw was supposedly "melodrama." It was highly stylized, and so it was melodramatic in that sense, though often very cool: you see a lot of the main actor's somber, impassive mug while he drives or smokes or stands around. The impassive guy’s morphine-addicted wife is wonderfully played by Dominique Blanc, who spends a great deal of the film in withdrawal--I am always a sucker for excessive physical performances, but even so, this one stood out. She sweats and paces and compulsively repeats the same self-comforting motions-- wiping her brow, rubbing her eyes--without ever being able to draw some relief from those motions.

Through a somewhat clumsy plot maneuver, husband and wife end up on opposite sides of the equation in morphine’s "algebra of need," as William Burroughs described it. Not just that he is a cop, but the two of them end up with entwined but utterly opposing aims. I guess that's a common enough plot engine, but it's done well here. There is a marvelous scene where they sit side by side on floor, exhausted by their separate struggles, not speaking, each having come up against the wall of the other.

Occasionally though, as when you’re forced to accept a high school where Ornella Muti stalks around foxily, sipping champagne in the teacher's lounge, it's hard to believe in a noir Belgium.