Gallic love, thrillers and royal courts a la carte
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)