Gallic love, thrillers and royal courts a la carte
JAKARTA (JP): At next Wednesday's opening of the Jakarta French Film Festival, an invitation-only ceremony at the Taman Ismail Marzuki theater in Cikini, Minister of Information R. Hartono is expected to make a speech on the merits of cooperation to help revive the national film industry.
The festival's godmother, Jajang C. Noer, the accomplished Indonesian actress and film director, will introduce the players from the event's premiere movie, Tonka: director and actor Jean- Hugues Anglade, producer Jean-Francois Lepetit, and female lead Pamela Soo.
In Javanese tradition, Jajang will break a flower pot and toss petals into the crowd. After all is said is done, the movies will be able to take center stage.
Tonka is the story of a disillusioned sprinter whose life is rejuvenated when he meets Tonka (Soo), an outcast of Indian origins who lives in a giant publicity can by the side of the airport.
Anglade, better known as the psychopath in Roger Avary's Killing Zoe, directs himself as the runner who curses every injury as he nears the abyss every athlete feels when the body lets go. His way up is through the heart as he develops a passionate bond with the bizarre and savage girl, largely untouched by the rigors of conventional daily regimens.
The picture lifts off when the odd couple takes their love to the track and use their emotionally-charged training sessions to both become world-class athletes.
Nine French movies in all will be presented at the TIM's Graha Bhakti Budaya theater -- with four showings daily from Dec. 11 to Dec. 14 -- offering a diverse palette of what France has to offer in its drive to become a commercial force in global film.
With a Rp 5,000 ticket, viewers will have the choice of movies that can please the whole family: intricate love stories for sentimentalists, disturbing social exposes for rebellious teenagers and panoramas of the past for history buffs.
Some of the actors, such as Anglade, are in two movies. Plus, many of the producers and directors will be on hand, stamping the event with the feel of a real festival.
The most intricate of stories is Nelly et M. Arnaud (Nelly and Mr. Arnaud), with cute-as-a-button Emmanuelle Beart of Mission Impossible fame entangled in a love triangle with her lover (Anglade) and her employer.
She is Nelly, who is hired to write the memoirs of a retired judge, Arnaud. Over time, they become dangerously close, and Nelly finds herself trapped between a man she no longer loves and another she finds impossible to love. The old man and the beauty change each other, but not to the point of falling for each other. Beart gives one of her best performances as a character who finds herself tortured and unfulfilled.
Star of two of the other love stories is up-and-coming Clotilde Courau, whose charms are more discreet than Beart's. In Fred, she plays Lisa, who is in love with a loser. Fred is 30, unemployed, likes nothing better than to drink cheap beer with barflies and ride around in a no-man's-land on a bicycle.
Lisa's love saves him from going insane, but it also drives him into a spiral of small-time hustling to try and please her with the rewards of easy money. The scams become too dangerous and the boredom of love unbearable. Courau is at her strongest when she wills her desperado back on the road of normalcy.
In Marthe, she stars in the title role of educator of a World War I soldier wounded at the front. Simon, acted by Gerard Depardieu's flamboyant son, Guillaume, washes himself of all the mud in mind and body at a surreal hospital, lost in space between sea and earth, rock and sand, detonations and silence.
The junior Depardieu is an irresistible match with Courau in this French version of The English Patient, which was directed by Jean-Loup Hubert.
The most grandiose of the movies is the historical Marquise, set at the court of Louis XIV, a rags-to-riches story about an actress during the cruel and tumultuous elegance of the 18th century. As she becomes a star in the orbit of the Sun King, she takes on the playwright Moliere and the poet Racine.
Vera Belmont the sulfurous Sophie Marceau as the temptress who makes all grown men, even the king of kings, cry. The director's strength is in making such a rich and dense destiny feel so contemporary and, in the end, banal.
During the four days, the CCF will participate by showcasing four youth movies by first-time directors, each of which will be preceded by a short film from a Jakarta Arts Institute (IKJ) student. It is odd to have to go to a French Film festival to get to see an Indonesian work, but the opening of new horizons is the idea behind the event.
One of these school projects, Novi, has been nominated for the International Encounters of University Film in Poitiers, France. Written and directed by Asep Kusdinar, the 23-minute work is the story of Novi, a young boy who likes to cross-dress and wear the scarves of his mother.
His father is baffled by his son. At night, he observes him, stretched out with eerie sensuality on a bed of dreams. The father watches, unable to understand what exactly is happening, but curiously enthralled. (Nicolas Colombant)