Film reviews: A heartwarming blockbuster and an enigmatic mystery as Rendez-Vous French Film Festival kicks off
La Femme Cachée faces buried trauma; En Fanfare celebrates the power of music; and Saint-Exupéry tells an old-style adventure story
La Femme Caché.
En Fanfare.
Visions Ouest presents the Rendez-Vous French Film Festival from February 28 to March 7
FROM HAUNTING EMOTIONAL portraits to old-style adventure stories, Rendez-Vous French Film Festival marks 31 years with a strong array of offerings starting February 28. Here are just a few of the highlights; note that all have English subtitles.
La Femme Cachée
February 28 at 2 pm at Alliance Française Vancouver
Nailia Harzoune is arresting and enigmatic as Halima, an Algerian-French immigrant to Canada whose reaction to finding out she’s pregnant with her first boy causes distress instead of joy. It drives her to return from Montreal to Montpellier, France, to confront her estranged family and her traumatic past, with her jovial Quebecois husband Sylvain (an appealing Antoine Bertrand) and preschool daughter in tow. Director Bachir Bensaddek bathes the film in atmosphere, contrasting the domestic content of Halima’s homelife in Quebec against the suffocating world of her parents’ aging apartment in Southern France. Bensaddek turns the latter’s central corridor, with its black-and-white-checkered floor and glowing glass bathroom door, into an eerie trap that Halima can’t escape. Sylvain struggles to understand what she’s dealing with; her daughter longs to play hide and seek in the old apartment, a game that seems to make Halima unusually stressed. Halima’s aging parents—a compliant mother who refuses to eat at the table with the others, a stern and threatening father—add to the tension. What has fractured the Algerian family, and what does Halima hope to gain confronting it all? Bensaddek uses restraint in the slow-burn mystery (sadly based on a true story), building to a denouement that, fittingly, offers no easy answers.
En Fanfare
March 1 at 7 pm at Alliance Française Vancouver
En Fanfare was a hit at Cannes last year, where its real Municipal Miners’ Band of Lallaing marched the red carpet, and it quickly became a feel-good audience favourite in France. Emmanuel Courcol’s film about the connecting power of music manages to fill your heart without being sentimental or maudlin. Famed conductor Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe) has leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant; through DNA testing he finds out he’s not only adopted but has a biological brother, Jimmy (Pierre Lottin). Thibaut heads to working-class northern France to find Jimmy, who works in a school cafeteria and plays trombone in a brass marching band. They could not be from more opposite worlds—Jimmy is as out-of-place in fine-dining restaurants as Thibaut is at the local pub—but they start to connect over music. Along the way, Thibaut manages to ignite new ambitions in his sibling. Centred on two empathetic and genuinely funny performances (watch Lavernhe mock his brother as “Mr. Posho” one moment, then fall apart while listening to Charles Aznavour in his car the next) and full of colourful side characters, En Fanfare builds to a moving crescendo that’s been leaving audiences in the warm, fuzzy kind of tears across France—and promises to here, too.
Saint-Exupéry
March 7 at 4 pm at SFU Woodward’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
With a look that mixes an adventure storybook with an old-style Saturday matinee serial, Saint-Exupéry pays whimsical tribute to the titular French hero’s time as an aviation pioneer in 1930s Argentina. Argentine-French director Pablo Agüero balances fact with family-friendly fantasy—totally fitting for a tribute to the airman-inventor-author who would go on to write Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince). There are even nods to that book (which was inspired by a real experience in Argentina), including a remote mansion and a precocious little girl. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry did in fact fly for France’s Aéropostale—the mail delivery service, not the fashion line—throughout South America after the First World War, charting new routes over its deserts and into its punishing Andes range. The film opens with Saint-Ex and fellow pilot Guillaumet (Vincent Cassel) stuck in a thunderstorm in their notably open-air small planes. From scenes in the desert at sunset to the endless snowy Andes, the sweeping setting feels heightened, like a dreamscape. Later, Guillaumet goes missing during a challenging nighttime flight, with Saint-Ex and Guillaumet’s wife (Diane Kruger) launching an extended search mission. Anyone who’s read Saint-Ex’s Vol de Nuit (Night Flight) knows how the extraordinary story turned out. Here it’s all recounted with the kind of magical touches the writer-adventurer himself would have appreciated. 
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