Louis Garrel plays his grandfather in film directed by his father and also featuring his sister
CinéSalon: JEALOUSY (LA JALOUSIE) (Philippe Garrel, 2013)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, March 20, $14, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues through April 17
212-355-6100
fiaf.org
www.distribfilms.com
Nearly fifty years after the release of his first film, the short Les enfants désaccordés, post-New Wave auteur Philippe Garrel has made one of his most intimate and personal works, the deeply sensitive drama Jealousy. Garrel’s son, Louis, who has previously appeared in his father’s Regular Lovers, Frontier of the Dawn, and A Burning Hot Summer, stars as Louis, a character based on Garrel’s own father, essentially playing his own grandfather. As the film opens, Louis, an actor, is leaving his wife, Clothilde (Rebecca Convenant), for another woman, Claudia (Anna Mouglalis). A talented but unsuccessful actress, Claudia immediately bonds with Louis’s young daughter, Charlotte (Olga Milshtein). But soon jealousies of all kinds — professional, romantic, maternal, paternal, residential, and financial — affect all the characters’ desires to find happiness in life.
Shot in widescreen black-and-white by Belgian cinematographer Willy Kurant, who has photographed such films as Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Féminin, Agnès Varda’s Les creatures, and Maurice Pialat’s À nos amours during his glorious career, Jealousy is a subtle meditation on the many fears that can accompany love. Somewhat of an innocent, Louis doesn’t yet realize the consequences of his actions, thinking that he can slide through life and good things will just happen. But as his love for the secretive Claudia grows, so do the problems they all encounter. Philippe Garrel wrote the film, which is divided into two sections, titled “I Kept the Angels” and “Sparks in a Powder Keg,” with three collaborators, Caroline Deruas, Arlette Langmann, and Marc Cholodenko, who each took on different scenes, resulting in a choppiness that can be off-putting and disorienting at times, but the strong performances (featuring significant improvisation), tender pacing, quiet interludes, and melancholic score by Jean-Louis Aubert overcome that drawback. The film is very much a family affair — in addition to Philippe directing his son playing Philippe’s father, Philippe’s daughter, Esther Garrel, plays Louis’s sister — adding to the poignancy and intimacy of this very moving story. Jealousy is screening March 20 at 4:00 and 7:30 in the FIAF CinéSalon series “Louis Garrel: Love Songs & Heartbreak,” consisting of films starring and/or directed by Garrel, continuing with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s Un château en Italie paired with Garrel’s short La Règle de trois on April 3, Garrel’s feature Two Friends on April 10, and Christophe Honoré’s Love Songs and Garrel’s Little Tailor on April 17. All screenings will be followed by a wine and beer reception.
After her lover, Paul (Damien Bonnard), hangs himself, Gina (Lindsay Burdge), a rather dim flight attendant, hooks up with Jérôme (Bonnard again), a bartender at a strip club. But what is a one-night stand for Jérôme turns into a dangerous obsession for Gina in Nathan Silver’s Thirst Street, a dark comedy that is neither dark nor funny. The problem is that until a rousing finale, Gina and Jérôme are not sympathetic characters that the audience will care about in the slightest. It doesn’t appear that it’s the suicide that drives Gina nuts; she’s already a dull, uninteresting person before that, and Jérôme is not exactly someone you can get behind either. Silver has said that Gina was inspired by Don Quixote, but she’s more of a disappointing combination of the protagonists from Aki Kaurismäki’s Match Factory Girl, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, and Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction as seen through the lens of Brian De Palma and Wes Anderson (especially when it comes to Anjelica Huston’s narration). Burdge (The Midnight Swim, A Teacher) turns in a brave performance, and Esther Garrel is terrific as punk rocker Clémence, Jérôme’s former flame, but the rest of the cast fails to ignite, despite boasting such actors as Jacques Nolot as nightclub owner Franz and Françoise Lebrun as Gina’s landlady. (Silver also once again casts his mother, Cindy, this time as one of Gina’s fellow flight attendants; let’s just say she doesn’t do him any favors with her acting ability.) Silver (Uncertain Terms, Stinking Heaven) never quite grasps what the film should be, resulting in a confusing mess of multiple genres that merely brushes the surface of his tongue-in-cheek (or is it?) narrative. Thirst Street opens September 20 at the Quad, with Silver and Burdge participating in Q&As following the 6:55 screenings on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday night.