New Orleans French Film Fest 2026

March 24, 2026March 24, 2026 / swampflix / Leave a comment

During one of this year’s pre-screening introductions, it was announced that The New Orleans French Film Festival is the longest running foreign-language film festival in the United States. That’s an impressive feat for such a humble, unassuming event. Even though it’s a major highlight of the city’s cinematic calendar, French Film Fest is by far the more laidback of the New Orleans Film Society’s two annual festivals. It’s more of a for-the-locals event than the Oscars-qualifying red carpet pageantry of New Orleans Film Fest proper. That casual, low-stakes atmosphere is a major part of its charm. Every spring, French Film Fest takes over the original Uptown location of The Prytania for a solid week of French-language cinema from all over the world. It’s usually slotted in the lull between the chaos of Mardi Gras and the chaos of Festival Season, a time when there’s nothing better to do than hide from the few days of nice weather we’re allotted every year in a darkened movie theater. There are even short stints of time allotted to make friends outside in the sunshine, in line between start times. I make sure to never miss it.

I caught four films during this year’s festival. A couple were older titles, a couple were new releases, and they were all the exact kind of non-commercial art cinema that most audiences can only access streaming at home (unless they happen to live in a city with a bustling film festival calendar). It felt great to spend a weekend watching esoteric cinema with up-for-anything filmgoers in a century-old single-screener instead of puzzling through them alone on streaming, where they’d fight for attention with my diabolically addictive smartphone apps. It may be one of the city’s least flashy film festivals, but its casual, accessible, warmly friendly vibe is what makes it also one of our best. To quote every hack journalist who’s ever been flown out to Cannes … Vive le cinéma, vive la différence! And, while we’re at it, vive les théâtres!

Below, you’ll find a rating & blurb for every title I caught at this year’s New Orleans French Film Fest, listed in the order that they screened.

Orpheus (1950)

One of the more charming quirks of French Film Fest is the way it integrates The Prytania’s usual Sunday morning Classic Movies series into the program. This year, that repertory slot was filled by Jean Cocteau’s 1946 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, which previously played in the same slot way back in the Before Times of 2019. The programmers took the chance to make a mini-Cocteau retrospective out of the event this time around, pairing Beauty and the Beast with the director’s second-most celebrated title, 1950’s Orpheus (and inviting Cocteau scholar Chloe Cassens to contextualize both presentations). As with Beauty and the Beast, it was a pure pleasure to experience Orpheus for the first time in a proper theater, rewarding my procrastination in not catching up with it sooner on The Criterion Channel. Also like Beauty and the Beast, it retells a long-familiar literary tale, aiming to wow its audience with visual splendor instead of twists in narrative. Cocteau recounts the entire Orpheus & Eurydice myth in the opening credits, fully laying out where his tale of a frustrated poet and his even more frustrated wife will go by the final reel. His major deviations from that plot template are temporal and illusionary: updating the story to a 1950s beatnik setting and playing around with cinematic magic tricks to convince the audience of its otherworldly surrealism. It’s ultimately more domestic & restrained than Beauty and the Beast, but it’s no less essential as pre-New Wave French cinema — only “cinéma de papa” if you happen to have the coolest papa in Paris.

Jean Marais stars as both Orpheus and as Cocteau’s onscreen surrogate, a famous poet who feels out of step with the chaotic Left Bank youth who are taking over his industry. Orpheus threatens to blow up his life and his marriage when he starts flirting with the personification of his own Death (María Casares), embodied as an ice-queen heiress who funds the hipper, buzzier work of his youthful competition. The introduction of Death into his household kicks off a supernatural domestic drama that straddles two worlds: life and the afterlife. His wife is transported to the afterlife first, and his efforts to bring her back mimic the more famous section of the Orpheus myth. The amazing thing is that Orpheus initially succeeds, bringing Eurydice back to the land of the living for as long as he can manage to not directly look at her. The resulting sequence is a kind of domestic screwball comedy that literalizes the emotional distance between married partners who are considering cheating on each other, as Eurydice finds an employee of Death of her own to flirt with. The husband cannot see his wife, and the marriage can only last as long as the pair can stand to not confront each other head-on. In a way, this makes Orpheus a great thematic pairing with last year’s repertory selection for the festival, Jean-Luc Godard’s domestic drama Contempt, despite the vast differences in their genre & tone.

Of course, Orpheus‘s main attraction as a cinematic relic is Cocteau’s more surreal visual touches, which are largely saved for the afterlife sequences. There, bodies move backwards and in slow motion, unmoored from the physics of real life, as if in an underwater dream. That otherworld is accessed through household mirrors, which become doorways through an unspoken magic commanded by Death. That’s where the movie really won me over. I’ve always loved when fantasy movies dive into a scary mirror realm, but I usually have to find those realms in schlocky horror films like The Evil Within & Poltergeist III or the supernatural porno Pandora’s Mirror. It was lovely to see that fantasy trope in a Good Movie for a change, one that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to recommend in mixed company. Orpheus is too closely tethered to contemporary Paris to compete with the visual extravagance of Beauty and the Beast, but when it leaves that realm to find another on the opposite side of a mirror, it’s splendidly surreal in its own way.

Dahomey (2024)

The other repertory title I caught at this year’s festival was a much more recent release. Mati Diop’s fine-art documentary Dahomey never screened locally between its 2024 premiere at Berlinale and its subsequent streaming release on Mubi, possibly because its one-hour runtime made it an awkward fit for proper theatrical distribution. Dahomey‘s quiet, distanced approach to documentary filmmaking does benefit from theatrical exhibition, though, so I’m once again grateful that my procrastination was rewarded by this festival. More importantly, it reflects well on the festival’s programmers that they thought to include such a politically combative snapshot of France’s cultural legacy, instead of merely coasting on the easy sophistication of beloved Parisian filmmakers from the past like Cocteau, Godard, and Varda. Diop looks to the past by tracking the recent return of two dozen artifacts plundered from the former Kingdom of Dahomey under French colonial rule to the modern nation of Benin. She attempts to give life back to these stolen & exported statues by literally giving them a voice, allowing them to narrate their own journey from European museums back to their African origins. We spend much of the film’s first half in the darkened crate during transport, then watch the statues’ identity emerge while being cataloged & contextualized once they’ve returned “home.”

For all of its art-house abstraction, I was most engaged with Dahomey in its second half, when the university youth of modern Benin were allowed extensive screentime to debate what those statues’ return means historically & politically, if it means anything at all. It likely does mean something that the conversation—much like the artifacts’ return—is left frustratingly incomplete, with many of the students pointing out the insult of only two dozen artifacts being returned out of the seven thousand that were initially stolen. Not all of the Beninese reaction to the statues’ return is verbal, though. Often, we silently observe the observers, as visitors to the artifacts’ new museum home are documented as reflections in the display glass. What does it mean that these objects are now stored in an African museum instead of a European one, still removed from their original ceremonial purposes? Diop asks this question with no intent of answering it, and the voice she gives the statues is just as confused about what to do to fix the evils of the French colonial past as anyone else. The displacement has already happened; what to do next is literally up for debate. All she can do in the meantime is document the unsettled dissonance of the present.

The Piano Accident (2026)

The two new releases I caught this year were directed by French Film Fest regulars, starting with a new one from returning prankster Quentin Dupieux. Dupieux’s talking-leather-jacket horror comedy Deerskin became Swampflix’s favorite movie of 2020 after its riotous premiere at the festival, mere weeks before COVID-era lockdowns made it one of the year’s only theatrical outings for the crew. I only mention that to note that this year’s The Piano Accident is Dupieux’s best movie since Deerskin, despite heavy competition in intervening Swampflix favorites Mandibles & Smoking Causes Coughing. The major constant in those three Deerskin follow-ups is Dupieux’s ongoing collaboration with French actress Adèle Exarchopoulos, who has been making a bigger & bigger fool of herself in each outing, seemingly relishing the opportunity to de-glam and de-sexualize her onscreen image. Whereas she previously appeared in Dupieux’s goofball comedies as a scene-stealing supporting player, The Piano Accident expands their collaboration into a leading role, casting Exarchopoulos as a sociopathic social media influencer with no redeeming qualities beyond her skills to debase herself for money. She takes great delight in making herself ugly, inside and out, and their ongoing collaboration reaches new heights of deliberately vacuous absurdity in the process.

The titular piano incident is a social media stunt involving a piano dropped from a great height, turning a classic Looney Tunes gag into a grisly tragedy. The monster responsible for that tragedy is a ruthless content creator who goes by the screen name Megajugs (Exarchopoulos, naturally). At first, Megajugs appears to be a collection of off-putting physical quirks. She has the obnoxious laugh, haircut, braces, cruelty, and sense of humor of a teenage boy, stunted in her maturity from earning online fame at an early age. Her ugliness is revealed to run much deeper than the surface, however, when she’s blackmailed into her first longform interview by a journalist who wants to dig past her blank-stare surface. What that journalist finds is a vast, terrifying nothingness. Megajugs saw an out-of-context clip from Jackass as a teenager, discovered that she can make money hurting herself for other people’s amusement in increasingly violent “pranks” on her own body (smashing her hand with a hammer, setting herself on fire, “testing” her family’s electric turkey carver, etc.), and has since devolved into a nihilistic routine of producing self-harm video #content for likes — partly for profit, mostly out of habit. Dupiuex invites you to laugh at her self-destructive online stunts (such as dropping a grand piano on her own legs from a ten-meter height), the step back and gawk at the horrific mindset of someone who would produce or consume that content for idle amusement.

If The Piano Accident has anything direct to say about our post-social media world, it’s that nothing means anything, and the internet has turned us all into miserable pieces of shit. Looking at the larger breadth of his recent output, I think he’s also been expressing a growing frustration with having to explain his own meaningless, absurdist pranks. In Yannick, a theatrical audience talks back in open hostility to a stage play they see no meaning in. In Daaaaaalí, famous surrealist Salvador Dalí evades explaining the meaning behind his work to a documentarian who attempts to sit him down for a sincere interview. The Piano Accident voices that artistic discomfort with audiences & journalists even louder, with the villainous Megajugs grunting in frustration over the expectation to interact with her fans or to explain her artistic intent to the press. She has no idea why she hurts herself for other people’s entertainment other than that she feels compelled to do so. It’s starting to become clear Dupieux feels similarly about his own work; it’s more a matter of routine & compulsion than it is an intellectual pursuit. Thankfully, in both Dupieux’s & Megajugs’s cases the art itself is consistently funny, so it doesn’t matter in the moment that there’s a menacing meaningless behind the cheap-thrills surface. That’s something for you to ponder on your own time, miserably.

The Stranger (2026)

François Ozon is just as much of a New Orleans Film Festival staple as Quentin Dupieux, with past Swampflix favorites When Fall Comes & Double Lover seeing their local premieres at the fest. His latest film, The Stranger, is an adaptation of the eponymous 1940s Albert Camus novel, about an eerily vacant white man who murders an Indigenous local in French-occupied Algeria for seemingly no reason at all. Thematically, it splits the differences between all of the other titles I caught at this year’s fest, combining the literary traditions of Orpheus, the anti-colonialist politics of Dahomey, and the disturbingly vacuous absurdism of The Piano Accident into a single picture. Compared to the rest of Ozon’s catalog, it’s a little too stately to register among his personal best, but it very well might be his prettiest. There’s something to the John Waters adage that “If you come out of a movie and the first thing you say is, ‘The cinematography was beautiful,’ it’s a bad movie,” but since The Stranger is partly a story about the vast nothingness lurking under the surface of things, I feel okay saying that the black & white cinematography was beautiful, and the movie was good. It just falls slightly short of Great.

Benjamin Voisin stars as the titular stranger, a coldly quiet twentysomething who gets by on his handsome looks despite his near-sociopathic detachment from all human emotion & empathy. We first meet him as he receives the news that his elderly mother has passed away, spending two days with him in near silence while he travels to her isolated nursing home to see her body buried. As a result, we initially have no idea whether he’s always this emotionally detached or if he’s merely stunned by his grief, but it gradually becomes clear that the problem runs much deeper than familial loss. He is decidedly non-reactive to the constant human atrocities around him, from the neighbor who beats his own dog to the even nearer neighbor who beats his own lover to the daily systemic injustices against the Arab locals who walk the French-occupied streets outside his apartment. By the time he participates in those injustices by firing a gun, his apathy curdles into something much more sinister and much less personal. The entirety of human existence is literally put on trial as the movie picks at his motivations, which feel random & instinctual rather than meaningful. He simply just is, and existence is horrifying.

Camus’s political & philosophical ponderings at how “we are all guilty, we are all condemned” eventually prove worthy of the time spent with this quiet, impenetrable protagonist, but it’s a long journey to get there. The 1st-person voiceover narration that would give the stranger’s actions immediate meaning is delayed until after his random act of shocking violence in the 2nd act, so it takes a while for the narrative significance of the 1st-act events of his life to become clear. Before the terrifying nothingness of his personality is exposed in a French courtroom, we mostly just watch him sip coffee, have sex, smoke cigarettes, and experience a sustained, lifelong ennui — the standard French existence. If you have the patience to discover how the unremarkable hallmarks of his persona implicate much larger, existential evils outside his immediate orbit, the movie ultimately rewards you for sticking it out. Notably, part of that reward is hearing The Cure’s debut single “Killing an Arab” over the end credits, which will be stuck in your head for most of the runtime leading up to that stinger anyway. It’s a thuddingly obvious needle drop, but by the time it arrives it’s a welcome relief from singing it internally yourself.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: The Swimmer (1968)

August 22, 2024 / swampflix / 1 Comment

Our current Movie of the Month, 1968’s The Swimmer, stars Burt Lancaster as an aging suburban playboy who, on a whim, decides to “swim home” by visiting a string of friends’ backyard pools across his wealthy East Coast neighborhood. It’s a boldly vapid premise that New Hollywood button-pusher Frank Perry (along with his then-wife Eleanor Perry, who wrote the majority of his early screenplays) somehow molded into a low-key mindmelter of 1960s moral rot through an eerie, matter-of-fact sense of surrealism. The Swimmer is more of a quirky character piece than it is concerned with the internal logic of its supernatural plot. Instead of only traveling by the “continuous” “river” of swimming pools he initially envisions over his morning cocktail, Lancaster spends much of the runtime galloping alongside horses, leisurely walking through forests, and crossing highway traffic barefoot. He does often emerge from one borrowed swimming pool to the next, though, and along the way we dig deeper into the ugliness of his himbo playboy lifestyle. He starts the film as a masterful charmer, seducing the world (or at least the world’s wives and mistresses) with an infectious swinging-60s bravado. By the time he swims his last pool, we recognize him as a miserable piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to kiss the feet of the infinite wonderful women of his past whom we meet along the way. The overall result is sinisterly ludicrous beefcake melodrama, presented in lurid Technicolor.

I can’t think of a better time to revisit The Swimmer than now. Not only was its general film-nerd awareness boosted during its brief run on the Criterion Channel earlier this year, but it’s also been so brutally, unrelentingly hot outside that all I want to do is look at, dive into, and drown in swimming pools. Every day that I have to take the bus or walk home from work in the Carribean hell heat of downtown New Orleans, I imagine how wonderful it would be if I could swim my way across the city in an endless line of swimming pools instead, just like in Perry’s film. Unfortunately, even Lancaster’s decrepit playboy protagonist couldn’t pull that off without cutting some corners on-foot, so his swimming-home dream remains unachievable. However, I have been able to swim my way across several other movies in the same milieu as The Swimmer: intense psychological dramas centered around summertime sex, booze and, of course, swimming pools. So, here are a few more titles in that subgenre to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

La Piscine (The Swimming Pool, 1969)

There’s no telling how the over-the-hill playboy Ned sees himself in The Swimmer, but it might look a little like 1960s Alain Delon. Delon was in his prime when he filmed his own poolside psych drama La Piscine, but his outer beauty does little to conceal the inner ugliness he shares with Lancaster in The Swimmer. The film opens with Delon lounging half-naked poolside, barely lifting his head to sip his cocktail, then initiating sex with his girlfriend the second she’s within butt-swatting reach. The couple are enjoying a horny, lazy vacation in South France before the reverie is interrupted the arrival of her ex-boyfriend and his teenage daughter, played by a young Jane Birkin. Tensions quickly rise as it’s immediately apparent that everyone in the makeshift foursome is attracted to exactly the wrong person, threatening to escalate the volatile group dynamic with physical violence if anyone acts on their obvious, mutual desire.

La Piscine is not especially exciting as a psychological crime thriller, but it still excels as deliriously overheated summertime hedonism. It feels like the entire cast is always seconds away from either a poolside orgy or an afternoon nap, and they’re all too miserable to enjoy either option. It’s a real shame for all involved that the tension is released through violence instead of orgasm. Before that act of violence (which takes place in the titular pool, of course), they lounge around a true summertime Eden, soaking up the oversaturated Eastman Color sunshine of a gorgeous, chic European locale. There have been plenty of erotic dramas & thrillers over the years that have taken direct influence from La Piscine, but the director I found myself thinking of most was Luca Guadagnino, who borrowed its summertime color palette for Call Me By Your Name and its plot for A Bigger Splash (another classic in Swimming Pool Cinema).

Swimming Pool (2003)

Luca Guadagnino is not the only European hedonist to have floated a soft remake of La Piscine. François Ozon’s 2003 erotic thriller Swimming Pool is so directly influenced by La Piscine that it barely bothered to change the title. Charlotte Rampling stars as an uptight pulp mystery writer in need of inspiration, vacationing at another Southern French villa with its own backyard swimming pool. Once there, she becomes obsessed with the sex life of a local twentysomething who has frequent, loud fuck sessions just one bedroom wall away. The two mismatched women quickly develop a catty, petty roommate rivalry that, again, escalates to a shocking act of violence involving the swimming pool just outside their bedroom windows. Swimming Pool works really well as a poolside erotic thriller (telegraphing some of the best aspects of Ozon’s Double Lover), but it works even better as a repressed-Brits-vs-the-liberated-French cultural differences comedy, as Rampling struggles to adjust to the local hedonism.

The differences between the two women’s personalities are plainly delineated by how they interact with the titular swimming pool. While the younger roomie is content to swim in the pool without any leaf-skimming or PH maintenance, Rampling coldly declares “I absolutely loathe swimming pools” as a way to imply only a filthy beast would swim in that Petri dish. It’s the difference between someone who truly lives and someone who only writes about people who live, a difference that Ozon sketches out with a sly smirk by the final reveal. He also has a lot of fun playing with the wavy mirror surface of the pool water, reflecting and abstracting Rampling’s obsessive gaze as she ogles the half-naked youth swimming & fucking just outside her own bedroom.

Deep End (1970)

If all of these suburban & provincial swim sites make the other swimming pool dramas on this list a little difficult to relate to as an urbanite in need of cooling off, dive into Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End instead. Set in downtown Swinging 60s London, Deep End follows the mouthbreather exploits of a horny teenager who falls for his older coworker in an urban bathhouse, to both of their perils. The story gradually establishes a hierarchy of low-level sex work from bathhouse-attendant tips to porno theater cruising sites to strip clubs and actual, true-blue brothels, but the bathhouse’s swimming pool is ultimately its main source of leisure and its main site of violence, as is customary to the genre. As the teen’s older, street-wiser coworker, Jane Asher might be the most inspired “Risk it all for her” casting in the history of the practice; she could easily make a chump out of anyone. Still, it’s incredibly bleak watching the ways the poorly socialized lout conspires to sexually corner her so that he can lose his virginity with his boyhood crush. It probably says something that when he does finally corner her in the deep end of the central pool, it’s been entirely drained of water. It’s eerily empty.

All four of these movies involve sex between adults and nearby youth. All involve heavy drinking and physical violence, usually poolside. No wonder this year’s January horror novelty Night Swim found so much to be scared of just beneath the surface of its backyard suburban swimming hole. Pools are not just an excuse to get half-naked & cool off in a semi-social setting. They’re also deadly, with just as much threat of drowning as threat of spontaneous sex & merriment.

-Brandon Ledet

New Orleans French Film Fest 2024

March 5, 2024March 5, 2024 / swampflix / 4 Comments

It’s the more laidback of the New Orleans Film Society‘s two annual film festivals, but New Orleans French Film Fest is still always a major highlight of the city’s cinematic calendar. It’s more of a for-the-locals event than the Oscars-qualifying red-carpet pageantry of New Orleans Film Fest proper, and since it’s all contained to one single-screen venue, attendees tend to become fast friends in line between movies. Every spring, French Film Fest takes over the original Uptown location of The Prytania for a solid week of French-language cinema from all over the world. It’s usually slotted in the lull between the chaos of Mardi Gras and the chaos of Festival Season, a time when there’s nothing better to do but hide from the few weeks of nice weather we’re allotted every year in a darkened movie theater. I’m forever looking forward to it, even now that this year’s fest has just concluded.

One of the more charming rituals of French Film Fest is the way it integrates The Prytania’s usual Sunday morning slot for the Rene Brunet Classic Movies series. This year, that repertory slot was filled by 1978’s La Cage aux Folles, the French farce that was remade as The Birdcage in 1990s Hollywood. Curiously, the projection was SD quality, when past years’ Classic Movie selections like Breathless, Children of Paradise, and Cleo from 5 to 7 were screened in crisp digital restoration. It was a warmly lowkey presentation that fit the tone of the film, though, recalling the feeling of renting a Blockbuster Video cassette of a classic comedy to watch with the family. A lot of the jokes in La Cage aux Folles might be overly familiar for audiences who’ve seen them repeated beat-for-beat in The Birdcage, but I can report that the VHS-quality scan absolutely killed with a full 10am audience anyway. It’s classically funny stuff.

Everything else I saw at this year’s festival were new releases, many of them just now arriving in the US after premiering at last year’s Euro festivals like Cannes & Berlinale. They were the kinds of non-commercial art cinema that most audiences can only access at home on streaming services and borrowed public-library DVDs, unless they happen to live in a city with a bustling Film Festival calendar. As a couple of titles were real patience-testers in their sprawling, unrushed runtimes, I appreciated the chance to watch them without distraction in a proper theater. Even moreso, it just felt great to spend a week watching esoteric cinema with up-for-anything filmgoers in a century-old single-screener – downing gallons of black coffee between screenings to keep up the momentum. To quote every hack journalist who’s ever been flown out to Cannes … Vive le cinéma, vive la différence!

Below, you’ll find a rating & blurb for every new release I caught at this year’s New Orleans French Film Fest, ranked from favorite to least favorite. Enjoy!

Omen (Augure)

What’s scarier: sorcery or disappointing your family? Omen is a magical-realist emigration drama about a Congolese-born man who returns to visit his family after growing up estranged in Belgium. The family is displeased to see him and his white, pregnant wife, both of whom they greet more like demons than like fellow human beings. After an ill-timed nosebleed is misinterpreted as an attempt to curse the family with his demonic spirit, he and his wife are briefly held hostage for a sorcery ritual meant to disarm their threat to the community. Then, the central POV of the story fragments into multiple perspectives, abstracting Omen into a much more unique, open-minded story than what’s initially presented. I’ve seen tons of Afro-European emigration dramas of its kind at film festivals in the past (most often dramatizing the shifting identity of French-Senegalese immigrants), which set a very clear expectation of where this story would go. It turns out the movie was deliberately fucking with me through those set expectations, much to my delight.

Rapper-turned-filmmaker Baloji Tshiani leaves a lot more room for voices from the opposite side of this post-colonial culture clash to be heard with clarity & sincerity than what audiences have been trained to expect. Usually, we follow characters who were born in Africa but socialized in Europe as they float between the two worlds, untethered to any clear sense of personal identity. That’s how Omen starts, but then we get to know the Congo Republic through the eyes of its lifelong citizens who never left. The two worlds are described as belonging to “a different reality” and “a different space time”, conveyed here through magical-realist fairy tale logic that includes breast-milk witchcraft, a music video retelling of “Hansel & Gretel,” a Neptune Frost-style “Cyber Utopia,” and Warriors-style street gangs of warring marching bands, luchadores, and crossdressing ballerinas. None of these stylistic touches come across as empty aesthetics, either. The region’s religious conservatism, political corruption, labor exploitation, financial desperation, and mass stripping of identity are all taken gravely seriously; they’re just expressed through the visual language of a culture that operates in a “different space-time” from what most audiences are used to seeing.

Omen is packed with tons of striking images, tons of eerie atmosphere, and tons of characters squirming under soul-crushing tons of guilt. The familiar, opening-segment protagonist is just one of many.

Our Body (Notre corps)

The dark fantasy of Omen was somewhat of an outlier at this year’s festival. Most of this year’s program was defined by rigorous, realistic documentation of French-language cultures across the globe. The major highlights hyped in the fest’s pre-screening intros were two documentaries that sprawled past the 2-hour runtime mark, with programmers half-apologizing and half-daring the audience with durational cinema ordeals. I showed up for both. Of the two, Claire Simon’s exhaustive, 3-hour documentary about the daily operations of a Parisian hospital’s gynecology ward was my favorite. It starts as a fly-on-the-wall doc that observes the medical consultations & procedures that everyday French citizens undergo at the hospital. Then, it gets incredibly personal incredibly quick as Simon becomes a patient herself.

Our Body is a little frustratingly slack in moments but overall impressive in scope, basically covering the entire span of human life in a single location. Simon starts the film with mention that she walks past a graveyard when traveling from her home to the hospital for every day’s shoot. In the hospital, she witnesses multiple modes of birth, therapeutic preparation for death, and endless variations of bodily transformation between those two points (including transgender perspectives that might otherwise be excluded from a less thoughtful gynecology doc). It would have been a compelling film even if it maintained a Frederick Wiseman-style distance in its fascination with daily bureaucratic process, but its eventual Agnès Varda-style inclusion of Simon’s own medical crisis & recovery is what makes it something special. As the title indicates, it’s impossible to maintain emotional distance when studying the creation, transformation, and expiration of the human body like this; we’re all intimately familiar with the condition of being human, even if only a fraction of us have ever had a C-Section.

Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros

Speaking of Frederick Wiseman, the 93-year-old director also had a sprawling documentary on this year’s French Film Fest lineup. The four-hour runtime of Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros made Claire Simon’s film look puny by comparison, though. It’s easily the longest movie I’ve ever watched in a theater (an experience made doubly daunting by the fact that I immediately bussed to The Broad Theater to watch Żuławski’s 3-hour sci-fi abstraction On the Silver Globe after it was over). Thankfully, Menus-Plaisirs does not make its audience weep & squirm quite as much as Our Body does, since it’s about a trio of family-owned fine dining restaurants instead of the immense beauty & cruel limitations of the human body. I can’t say it was an especially significant experience for me, at least not when compared to critics who recently declared it the Film of the Year. Mostly, it was just a pleasant afternoon sit, like binge-watching a season of Top Chef guest-produced by Dodin Bouffant.

In Wiseman tradition, there is no voiceover or onscreen text explaining the interpersonal drama of the chefs at the story’s center. In fact, all of the contextual background info about how the three restaurants operate is saved for a tableside conversation in the final 2 minutes of the runtime, so feel free to fast-forward 4 hours for that explanation if you’re feeling lost. Even without the context, though, you gradually get to know the trio of chefs as a father who can’t quite let go of his business and his two apprentice sons, who struggle with a low, consistent hum of brotherly competition. Because it’s a Wiseman movie, though, most of the drama is just the garnish decorating the main course: process. We mostly just watch the chefs source ingredients, brief staff, prepare food, and schmooze guests. The scenery is beautiful, the personality clashes are mostly under control, and everyone is well fed. Life goes on.

The Animal Kingdom (Le règne animal)

One of my favorite French Film Fest traditions is selecting movies based entirely on the actresses featured in the cast, regardless of director, genre, or subtext. The French Film Fest ritual is incomplete if I haven’t seen a mediocre movie starring at least one of a handful of festival-standard actresses: Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Marion Cotillard, etc. And now, I can confidently say that Adèle Exarchopoulos has earned her place on that prestigious list. I’m at the point where I’ll enjoy pretty much anything as long as Exarchopoulos is in it, including this supernatural thriller that was instantly forgotten after it premiered last year in Cannes’s Un Certain Regard program.

The Animal Kingdom is a moody fantasy film about a world where humans start mutating into other animal species, like a somber revision of the Netflix series Sweet Tooth. The central drama is a coming-of-age story about a teenager who’s struggling with the sudden loss (or, rather, transformation) of his mother during this phenomenon. He also struggles with the terrifying possibility that his own body might be transforming as well, in an especially monstrous version of puberty. Then there’s his struggle to connect with his distracted father, who’s fixated on retrieving his feral-beast mother and reassimilating her into the family home. Exarchopoulos operates at the fringes of the story as the father’s reluctant love interest. She plays a kind of stock FBI character from 90s action thrillers, the kind who are always 2 or 3 steps behind the fugitive main players. It’s like watching Tommy Lee Jones track escapees from the Island of Dr. Moreau – a part she plays with only mild enthusiasm.

There are a few Icarian moments when the ambition of the film’s superhuman CGI are not matched by the might of its budget, which often breaks the spell of the story it’s telling. There’s some grounding, visceral detail in the body horror of the beastly transformations, though, especially as characters pick at their bloodied nails, teeth, and stitches the way a wounded animal would. That’s another time-honored French Film Fest tradition in itself, come to think of it: listening to an audience who don’t typically watch a lot of genre cinema express disgust with the ordeal of a well-executed gore gag. I have particularly fond memories of watching the grotesque erotic thriller Double Lover with this exact festival crowd for that exact reason. I just wish Adèle Exarchopoulos was given something half as interesting to do in this film as any one scene in that all-timer from Ozon.

The Crime is Mine (Mon crime)

François Ozon’s selection in this year’s French Film Fest was nowhere near as memorable as the nonstop freakshow of Double Lover, but it did hit a different quota for what I love to see at the fest. The Crime is Mine is a traditional crowd-pleaser comedy that features a performance from festival-standard Isabelle Huppert, making for two collaborators who are both capable of much weirder, wilder work. Huppert stars in this 1930s-throwback farce as a Silent Era film starlet who struggled to make the transition to talkies, so she instead attempts to become famous through a headline-grabbing murder. It’s an adaptation of a stage-play comedy that mildly updates its source material, but mostly just aims to please. It’s very charming & cute but deliberately unspecial, like a mildly more subversive version of See How They Run. If you want to see Isabelle Huppert go big in an outrageous wig, you could do much worse, but you won’t walk away accusing Ozon of having The Lubitsch Touch.

-Brandon Ledet