Temps perdu The Boston French Film Festival goes à la recherche BY PETER KEOUGH
	The Tenth Annual Boston French Film Festival At the Museum of Fine Arts July 7 through 24

French filmmakers’ preoccupations with sex, death, and philosophy frame their deeper issue — with time. Proust is their role model. The offerings in this vintage year at the Boston French Film Festival celebrate that obsession, as well as quintessential Gallic actors Gerárd Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve, veteran directors André Téchiné, Benoît Jacquot, Olivier Assayas, and Erich Rohmer (the latter pair’s films, Clean and Triple Agent, were not available for preview), and that sine qua non of French cinema, Les enfants du paradis/Children of Paradise (1945; July 23 at 4 pm).

These films prove once again that the medium can recapture time, after a fashion, but only to make its loss more poignant. They render time sensible in images when they don’t try to do so in words, as is the case in Genesis, a documentary from Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérrenou (2004; July 9 at 5:30 pm). The old African griot who narrates the film defines time as the "form that endures, a form fighting against time that drives all organized forms toward disorder and chaos." True enough, but long before the end of this brief piffle, I wanted to send him and his florid banalities back to the primordial soup. Providing redundant illustration is unamazing nature footage that looks like outtakes from Le peuple migrateur/Winged Migrations, Microcosmos, and Koyaanisqatsi, films whose success Genesis fails to repeat.

More to the point is Cinévardaphoto (2004; July 21 at 6 pm and July 24 at 12:30 pm). Directed by Agnès Varda (a reminder of the Nouvelle Vague, the time that French cinema has been in recherche of ever since), it compiles three of her short documentaries from the past four decades, a regression that subtly underlies her themes. First and best, from 2004, is "Ydessa, les ours et etc . . . /Ydessa, the Bears and Etc . . . " Ydessa Hendeles, a startling apparition in black with long henna’d hair and a red-painted twisted mouth, is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and an artist and curator living in Toronto. In a former Nazi gallery in Munich, she assembled thousands of photographs of people posing with teddy bears, an attempt, she says, to create a world with an illusion of innocence. The impression of most of those who see it — at least, most of those interviewed by Varda — is death. The photos cover the gallery walls from top to bottom in rows resembling drawers in a mortuary. The individual photos show countless strangers, most of them dead. (Surviving teddy bears inhabit vitrine cases on the floor.) In a room off to itself is Maurizio Cattelan’s hyperrealistic sculpture of an undersized kneeling Hitler. Varda in her narration makes acute, witty observations, her wry tone undercutting the oppressiveness and the fascination of the nightmare of the past.

Freud would have had fun analyzing Hendeles’s obsession, and he would doubtless applaud Varda’s crafty dissection of these relics of memory. But for him the tragedy of the past lay not in its loss but in its inescapability. Hitler is also a looming presence in Benoît Jacquot’s Princesse Marie (2004; July 17 at noon; co-presented by the Boston Jewish Film Festival), a 190-minute TV bio-pic of Marie Bonaparte, Princess of Denmark and Greece (Catherine Deneuve, in a consummate performance). Marie is a formidable descendant of Napoleon and, when first seen here in 1922, an unhappy woman. Frigid, she undergoes an unsuccessful clitoral resection and decides that her problem may be more psychic than anatomical. She takes her case to the aging Freud (Heinz Bennent), who restores to her not just the power of orgasm but that of a "phallic woman." This power she wields to save him from the Reich. Although (intentionally?) corny in its psychoanalytical clichés and its use of creaky devices like archival footage and maps showing the indomitable Marie’s travels, the film triumphs in dramatizing the past — and recovering it.

And where would French film be without the Oedipus complex? Variations on that theme and on Jean Vigo’s 1933 classic Zéro de conduite (and later manifestations of that film from Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . to Richard Linklater’s The School of Rock) shape Jean-Jacques Zilbermann’s Les fautes d’orthographe/Bad Spelling (2004; July 10 at 3:15 pm and July 14 at 6 pm; co-presented by the Boston Jewish Film Festival). But it’s a gem in its own right. Fifteen-year-old Daniel (Damien Jouillerot) must contend with both the abuse of fellow students and his own parents’ tyranny in the latter’s boarding school, a pit not unlike the one in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les diaboliques. He also suffers the title affliction and what the school nurse describes as "late development." When his suffocating mom (Carole Bouquet) expels his only friend, a Jewish boy with whom he’s smitten, he decides to fight back — not with guns but with economics. It’s a tribute to individual resourcefulness and class revolution.

A very different boarding school, a cross between the set of the ’60s TV show The Prisoner and that of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, figures in Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence (2004; July 21 at 8 pm). Little girls arrive from who knows where in little coffins and, severed from their past, undergo an eerie training for no clear purpose. Then when they reach a certain age, they disappear. Sounds like an allegory to me. Hadzihalilovic has an unnerving style like that of her husband, Gaspar Noé, but without the jarring violence. Innocence evokes the mystery of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Return with its dreamlike, impeccably photographed alternate universe. It’s sure to irritate many and not be forgotten soon.

What awaits the girls in Innocence when they finally leave the mysterious school? Maybe an unwanted pregnancy like that of Claire (Lola Naymark) in Éléonore Faucher’s auspicious debut, Brodeuses/Sequins (2004; July 9 at 6:30 pm). To avoid scandal, Claire leaves her job at the supermarket and heads back to her rural home town to work with Madame Mélikian (Ariane Ascaride) stitching embroidery for Paris designers. An ideal solution, except that her boss is grieving the loss of her son in an auto accident caused by a local boy with whom Claire falls in love. Meanwhile, her belly is getting bigger, and Claire dreads the day she’ll have to give up the baby for adoption. Faucher shows restraint (though the Vermeer-like photography perhaps over-embroiders the film), transforming these melodramatic elements into a limpid parable of two mothers, one bereaved of the past, the other of the future.

Whatever the destination of the innocents in Innocence, let’s hope they have better company than the pair of dull initiates in Emmanuel Mouret’s Vénus et Fleur/Vénus and Fleur (2003; July 15 at 6 pm and July 23 at 12:30 pm). Timid, tubby Fleur (Isabelle Pirès) looks forward to a dull vacation at her uncle’s Marseilles chateau until, through the device of exchanged pocketbooks, she hooks up with insufferable, hot-to-trot Russian visitor Vénus (Veroushka Knoge). Vénus is boy-crazy, and Fleur idolizes her spontaneity, her ability to live in the moment and her past of (presumed) suffering in her benighted homeland. When a boy comes between them, though, they start to recognize the truth: Vénus is annoying and Fleur is a bore.

Perhaps Fleur might grow up to be like Natacha (Ariane Ascaride) in Robert Guédiguian’s Mon père est ingénieur/My Father Is an Engineer (2004; July 9 at 2:45 pm), which is also set in Marseilles. Natacha starts out in a mute, catatonic state, and it’s a pity she doesn’t remain that way. Instead, her former flame Jérémie (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), a physician disillusioned with the politics involved in saving the world’s poor, tries to learn the reasons for her malady — and also relive his on-and-ultimately-off relationship with her. Turns out that Natacha is also a doctor, but unlike Jérémie, she remained in her home town to serve the multicultural poor there, dispensing bad advice along with her services. A Romeo-and-Juliet-like pair of 13-year-olds, the girl French and the boy Arab, ask her for help when their parents don’t approve and the girl gets pregnant. Natacha’s solution: let them get married and have the baby. Why couldn’t have she have given the kids condoms before it was too late? Her crusade leads to her come-uppance, and it’s hard to be sympathetic. Told in a farrago of flashbacks and including a treacly rendition of the Nativity story as a linking text, the film confirms Guédiguian as the most overrated of French directors.

André Téchiné takes a similar story and gets it right in Les temps qui changent/Changing Times (2004; July 17 at 8 pm; co-presented by the Boston Jewish Film Festival). Deneuve returns as Cécile, here a less regal discontented spouse. She lives in Tangier with her younger husband, Nathan (Gilbert Melki), a native-born Jewish doctor who likes to swim in the pool and has drinks before his first appointment at 11 am. Cécile gets some satisfaction, if little pay, from her job as a host of a radio show playing song dedications for wayward lovers, and that’s how old flame Antoine (Gerárd Depardieu) tracks her down. A wealthy building contractor, Antoine is in town to supervise the construction of a local media center, but what he really wants is to retrieve his old love. Depardieu puts in a touching, comic turn as the persevering romantic (his first re-encounter with Cécile is a classic of humiliation), and Téchiné orchestrates the chronology and performances in a funny, moving depiction of the triumph of love over time.

Fanny Ardant hooks up with Depardieu in Anne Fontaine’s slow-starting but ultimately powerful Nathalie . . . (2003; July 24 at 8 pm). Catherine’s problem is nothing new, as her hypochondriac mother reminds her: husband Bernard cheats on her incessantly. Her solution is to hire high-class hooker Marlène (Emmanuelle Béart) and have her establish a relationship with Bernard and then report all the details. Perhaps Catherine is seeking to refire their initial passion, but what we get is a twisted triangle of voyeurism, deception, and power that Freud might define as sado-masochistic. It reminded me of an unchaste version of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love. Fontaine established her talent for the perversity and tenderness of relationships with her previous film, Comme j’ai tué mon père/How I Killed My Father; here she extends her insight into desire and rage and their reconciliation.

Tom (Romain Duris), the protagonist of Jacques Audiard’s brilliant De battre mon cœur s’est arrête/The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2004; July 16 at 7 pm), a remake of James Toback’s 1978 Fingers, also mourns a lost love: playing the piano, a legacy of his deceased mother, herself a concert pianist. Now he works in real estate, a business, as he tells a teacher at an aborted audition, that consists of planting rats in the apartments of unwanted tenants and working over squatters with a baseball bat. That profession is the legacy of his father, an over-the-hill deal maker whose foiled schemes Tom is called on to back up with his muscle. Audiard’s jagged, vérité-like style and Duris’s performance — evoking not so much Harvey Keitel’s in Toback’s film as a combination of the Keitel and Robert De Niro characters in Mean Streets — transcend the story’s absurdities. I remember the original Fingers, which has its passionate defenders, as overwrought and dumb. If so, this is an instance of the past not only retrieved but redeemed.