The Phoenix’s sell-out French Film festival culminated in zany actor/ director Albert Dupontel’s black comedy Nine Month Stretch, with Q&As afterwards. This was only the second screening of the film in this country, after a rapturous reception in France, including 4 Cesar nominations.

Dupontel’s fast paced, satirical drama on the French justice system was a magnificent pop at pomposity. Dupontel said that his first script was ‘unbearably sad’. He tweaked it a bit. The result was a combination of slapstick, mime, Monty-Pythonesque absurdity and gore.

Having seen Sandrine Kimberlain do severe (Simone de Beauvoir in Martin Provost’s Violette), we now saw silly. Very silly.  Kimberlain plays Ariane Felder, a lonely, singleton – a judge destined for even higher office, until she is persuaded to attend a riotous New Year’s Eve party. Subsequently, she falls pregnant – but has no memory of the night.

What happens next is one of the funniest sequences of the film. Dupontel spoke of his admiration for Chaplin. It showed. On Felder’s orders, the CCTV footage is replayed, watched by a sparkling, twinkle-eyed surveillance officer (Bouli Lanners) and an increasingly horrified Felder. A figure in a Louis XV wig frolics with a stranger among dustbins, in energetic sexual intercourse. Lanners offers to zoom in. Felder refuses, and seizes the tape.

The plot spins on with increasing absurdity. Bob Nolan (Dupontel), a notorious criminal, known as the Eye Gobbler, barricades Felder in her flat. Nolan is fighting for his life. Burglar and orphan – bien sur – killer – NON!  Felder is his last hope. What Felder comes to realise is that Nolan is hers: he is the man on the CCTV footage.  The child they have conceived together anonymously brings succour to them both.

Felder’s splendid last minute defence of Nolan in Court is a dramatic tour de force – a wonderful double-play between the law and the defendant, with the court room a bewildered chorus of eyes left, right and up to the ceiling.

Jean Dujardin’s brilliant improvised mime routine on national TV suggested that as the Oscar winning lead in The Artist, he was underused.

Dupontel was charming, mischievous and resolvedly un-politically correct. When’s the next one? 
 

Four films representing some of the best and most diverse contemporary French talent are being shown at the Phoenix this week. Martin Provost's biopic of the life of celebrated feminist author Violette Leduc (Emmanuelle Devos) teased out her tangled bi-sexual emotional life, including a long-term attachment to Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), who was both her inspiration, mentor and prop, reading Leduc's first manuscript, left outside her flat.

Leduc's many disappointments in love and life were overlaid on a deeply troubled relationship with her mother (Catherine Hiegel), and repeated rejection (she was illegitimate). 'You've made me out to be a monster', her mother tells her, on her daughter's shaky return from hospitalisation, including ECT treatment which de Beauvoir sought to prevent. Leduc's Bohemian Parisien circle including Genet, Sartre and her gay benefactor Jacques Guerin (Olivier Gourmet) are crisply observed. Provost's restraint, along with the dark wintry palette of Director of Photography Yves Cape, strike a sombre, respectful tone. When Leduc finally tastes success, and moves to the sun of Provence, we feel the heat and sunlight which has entered her life, at last.

Previewing its launch at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Roman Polanski's Venus in Fur proved a masterful adaptation of David Ives' New York based two act play, with two outstanding actors. Now located in Paris, Mathieu Amalric plays writer-director Thomas Novachek,who has adapted the 1870 novel Venus in Furs by Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, which inspired the term Masochism. Enough said. He's looking for a leading lady - Wanda von Dunayev. When a striking, rain-drenched actress called Vanda Jordan (Emmanuelle Seigner) sashays her way, unannounced, into the audition, Novachek is initially repulsed, and contemptuous of her talent, but he is gradually drawn in. Who lands whom is a titanic contest.

Two more films remain: Bright Days Ahead (Monday 6.30pm) and Nine Month Stretch (Tues 6.30pm, with Director's Q&As).

Over the next four days, the Phoenix Cinema is screening some of the best of recent French cinema. Martin Provost's Violette, Roman Polanski's Venus in Fur, Marion Vernoux's Bright Days Ahead and, on Tuesday, the season culminates with Albert Dupontel's Nine Month Stretch, with Q&As with the Director.

This promises to be a feast of the latest in French film success, and well worth a visit.