CINEFRANCO 2011 from Friday (March 25) to April 3, at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West) and National Film Board (150 John). cinefranco.com. See Indie & Rep Film listings.
The programmers of the 2011 Cinefranco Film Festival must feel a little like pinballs this is the second time the festival has relocated in as many years.
After moving from the Royal in 2009 to the AMC in 2010, Cinefranco has shifted back westward to the shiny hallways of TIFF Bell Lightbox. But despite the new digs, the festival is still the same, offering a cross-section of commercial French-language cinema from around the world that didn’t make it to TIFF and isn’t likely to land a Toronto theatrical run.
The festival opens with Michel Rodde’s Impasse Du Desir (Friday, 6:45 pm, rating: NNN), a Swiss thriller that stars Remy Girard, whom English Canadians know as a charming character actor and Quebecois worship as a god. The fairly conventional set-up casts Girard as a therapist who learns of his young wife’s infidelity and sees an unbalanced new patient (Laurent Lucas) as a possible solution to his problem.
Girard’s basically playing a more dynamic version of the Farley Granger role in Strangers On A Train, but it’s nice to see him swimming in darker waters. If you’d prefer him in a more conventional role, the night’s second feature, Marc-Andre Lavoie’s Tough Luck (Friday, 9:30 pm, unavailable for preview) lets him play to his hangdog strengths as a lonely Montreal writer assembling the story of his life for a dating service.
Girard’s not the only actor cast against type: check out Isabelle Huppert in Copacabana (Tuesday, 9 pm, rating: NNN). Marc Fitoussi‘s domestic dramedy casts the reliably intense star of The Piano Teacher, White Material and one crazy-ass episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as Babou, a relentless non-conformist who’s shocked to discover her buttoned-down daughter (Lolita Chammah, Huppert’s actual daughter) doesn’t want her at her wedding.
To prove she’s serious about settling down, Babou gets a real job selling time shares at the chilly Belgian seaside, but she’s not really built for the 9-to-5 life. Huppert’s not really built for light comedy either, but it’s fascinating to watch her feel her way through the role the same way Babou feels her way through the world.
Fans of the cult comedy Man Bites Dog will be delighted to discover another jet-black Belgian satire, Kill Me Please (April 2, 10 pm, rating: NNNN). This one’s a screwball farce set at a high-end assisted-suicide clinic where the harried director (Aurelien Recoing) does his best to maintain an air of peaceful competence while trying to stave off one catastrophe after another. Director Olias Barco tips his cap to Man Bites Dog by featuring that film’s star, Benoit Poelvoorde, in the opening scene (and covering him in blood before it’s over).
If you’re looking for something lighter, there’s 2 Frogs In The West (Saturday, 3:30 pm, rating: NNN), about a young woman (Mirianne Brule) who quits college and ditches Montreal to find herself in off-season Whistler, where she falls in with a fellow francophone (director and co-writer Dany Papineau) and his anglo housemates. It’s a high-altitude version of Cedric Klapisch’s L’Auberge Espagnole (Pot Luck), with charming leads, a nice visual sensibility and a brisk pace.
Cinefranco’s documentary component includes Fadel Saleh’s Les Conspirationnistes (Saturday, 2 pm, rating: NN), a fairly superficial look at the allure of conspiracy theory. Using Toronto’s Conspiracy Culture shop as a focal point, it’s a jumble of YouTube clips, insistent talking-head interviews and – inevitably – the scene from The Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo the red pill. Whoa, right?
The festival offers a master class with producer-director Driss Chouika at 11 am Saturday (in advance of the 1 pm screening of his film Crossed Destinies), an interview with U of T French history professor Eric Jennings at noon April 2 (preceding the 2 pm screening of Turk’s Head) and two free filmmaker round tables Sunday morning. The first, at 10 am, looks at the state of fiction features the second, at 11:45 am, considers the distribution and marketing challenges facing documentaries.
normw@nowtoronto.com
