Welcome to Episode #218 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss the longtime creative partnership between French New Wave director Claude Chabrol and powerhouse actress Isabelle Huppert, starting with their chocolate-flavored psychological thriller Nightcap (2000).
00:00 Welcome
02:45 Trap (2024) 08:05 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) 14:44 Three Amigos (1986) 20:51 La Piscine (1969)
26:58 Nightcap (2000) 48:42 Story of Women (1988) 1:01:34 La Cérémonie (1995) 1:13:41 The Swindle (1997)
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.
“How can you be a nymphomaniac and never had sex?” “I’m choosy.”
The Criterion Channel has been doing a great job of resurrecting a forgotten generation of once-respected Gen-X indie filmmakers whose work has been weirdly difficult to see in recent years – names like Atom Egoyan, Gregg Araki, and Hal Hartley. During the glory days of independent film festivals and college radio chic, these low-budget, mid-notoriety auteurs enjoyed a surprising level of cultural mystique that has faded as the distribution of their work has effectively trickled into non-existence. Maybe that break wasn’t all so bad for their memory & reputation, though. Revisiting Hal Hartley’s filmography as a Criterion Channel micro-collection in the streaming age feels like taking a time machine back to the Classic Indie Filmmaking days of the 1990s. In particular, there’s something charmingly quaint about how his low-effort crime picture Amateur functions as a relic of that era. Every one of his characters loiter around public spaces smoking cigarettes, flipping through porno mags, and making deadpan quips over background tracks by PJ Harvey & Liz Phair. It’s cute in its own grimy little way, a dusty souvenir of 90s slacker kitsch.
The “amateur” of the title could refer to any one of the main players in Hartley’s off-Broadway, on-camera stage drama. Isabelle Huppert plays an ex-nun who’s learning a new trade as a writer of porno-mag erotica. Elina Löwensohn plays a video store porno actress who’s trying to break away from the industry by making big moves as a self-employed gangster. Martin Donovan is caught between them as a total amnesiac with a violent past – an amateur at basically everything due to his newfound medical condition. The unlikely trio eventually find themselves “on the run from bloodthirsty corporate assholes” as they cross paths with the gangsters at the top of the porno industry food chain, a mistake that has them evading handcuffs & bullets. This premise sounds like it might make for an exciting, sordid action thriller—and maybe it still could—but that kind of entertainment is not on Amateur‘s agenda. Mostly, Hartley uses the plot as an excuse to have his characters lounge around in hip NYC fashions (styled as a relapsed Catholic pervert, a soft goth, and a business prick, respectfully) while listening to college radio classics by the likes of The Jesus Lizard, Pavement, and My Blood Valentine.
There might be some genuine thematic heft in Amateur that I’m not taking seriously here, something about how New York City is a dangerous playground where desperate transplants reinvent themselves. That might have resonated with me more if it were NYC community theatre instead of a Hal Hartley film preserved in time. I mostly found myself distracted by just how Totally ’90s the movie was in its search for contemporary cool cred. Its gigantic cellphones, breakfast diner ashtrays, and business cards for phone sex lines were all just as specific to its status as an Indie 90s relic as its single-scene cameo from a loud-mouthed Parker Posey. This is a movie with multiple recurring arguments about why “floppy discs” are neither floppy, nor circular. Everyone is either absurdly angry or wistfully despondent in a perfectly Gen-X 90s kind of way, and there’s a lot of easy humor pulled from the clash between those two default attitudes. It’s an easy era to feel nostalgia for as a movie nerd, if not only because people like Hartley, Egoyan, and Araki used to get relatively robust distribution & critical attention, as opposed to the current cinematic landscape where you’re either making over-advertised corporate IP slop or disposable streaming service filler. We used to be a country, a proper country with a proper indie cinema scene, and the proof is currently streaming on Criterion.
Even as someone who’s only casually familiar with Angela Lansbury’s career, I was saddened to hear of her recent passing. I’ve never successfully watched an entire episode of Murder, She Wrote without drifting off to sleep or off to another channel; the most experience I have with her prestigious singing career is hearing her voice a cartoon teapot; and yet the TV interview clips memorializing Lansbury on local news broadcasts last week had me instantly crying for reasons I can’t fully articulate. She just seemed like such a kind, thoughtful, talented person that the world was lucky to have around – a very particular, gentle flavor of sweet that’s been draining from our cultural palate. Online posthumous praise for Lansbury has also helped me see new, nuanced shades to her persona, since I had only previously seen her typecast as a lovely old biddy for all of my life. Between reading John Waters’s real-life anecdote of bumping into Lansbury at an NYC fetish club to watching her bratty debut in Gaslightand listening to her get gruesome in Sweeney Todd, I now have a better rounded appreciation of who she was a person & a performer; and I feel like crying all over again.
Getting acquainted with the tougher, saucier side of Angela Lansbury has only enhanced my appreciation of her frothier performances as well. I’m particularly thinking of her turn as the Cockney-accented Mrs. ‘Arris in the 1992 made-for-television adaptation of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, a novel that was adapted again for a much lusher production this year. The 2022 version of Mrs. Harris is played by Lesley Manville, who I’m used to seeing as a heartless hardass in projects like Harlots & Phantom Thread. She’s a big-ol’ softie in her new starring vehicle, though, leaving all of the ice-queen viciousness to her villainous co-star Isabelle Huppert. Manville delivers the exact sugary sweet, kill-em-with-kindness defiance you’d expect from Lansbury in the role, playing Mrs. Harris as a human doormat who gradually learns to stand up for herself without ever stooping to the cruelty of the world she seeks to change. What’s hilarious is that Lansbury’s Mrs. ‘Arris is a much tougher customer. You get the sense that she could easily drink & swear Manville’s Harris under the table, tinging the role with a touch of the Cockney sass that kickstarted her career as a teenager in Gaslight. She’s still a total sweetheart, but there’s a sharpened edge to her character that’s missing from the newer, higher profile adaptation.
While Lansbury got to play Mrs. ‘Arris with a little grit & gristle (reflected right there in the accented title), Manville got to be in the better movie. Both adaptations maintain the novel’s basic premise that a kindly British housekeeper splurges her life savings on a couture Dior gown in Paris, much to the frustration of couture’s snootiest gatekeepers. That premise is just all there is to the made-for-TV version, which wouldn’t be much of a movie without Lansbury’s loveable screen-presence babysitting the audience between commercial breaks. Meanwhile, Manville’s Mrs. Harris essentially becomes a union organizer—inspired by an ongoing trash strike that’s only mentioned as a traffic obstacle in the Lansbury version—radicalizing both the workers at Dior and herself. Both versions of Mrs. Harris are lauded for being kind in a cruel world, but only Manville gets to learn to prioritize herself in the face of oppressive class & gender politics; she’s in a drama, while Lansbury is in a sitcom. The most telling difference between the two films is when a Parisian love interest warmly refers to Mrs. Harris as “Mrs. Mops” in honor of the maid that cleaned his room at British boarding school. In the made-for-TV version, it’s played as a sweet gesture; in the theatrical version it breaks her heart, and you desperately want to see her punch the cad’s throat.
I don’t want to exalt the 2022 version of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris as some high standard of artful cinema that the made-for-TV version can’t live up to. Both adaptations are the exact kind of passive British entertainment meant to be enjoyed under a giant blanket with an empty mind & a nice cuppa. Only the theatrical version has a true emotional hook to it, though. When Mrs. Harris inevitably gets the pretty dress she wants, the movie just works on a level that the 90s one can’t – joining “Paddington wishes Aunt Lucy a happy birthday” and “The Girlhood girls dance to Rhianna” on the list of scenes I can think back to when I need a quick cry. Lansbury doesn’t need a good movie to hit that emotional trigger, though. I can apparently watch 30 seconds of her doing a press junket interview with Entertainment Tonight and well up with tears in the same way. Her Mrs. Harris movie didn’t need to be especially “good” to be worthwhile; her sweet-but-secretly-tough presence was enough. All that said, there’s a much wider, brighter world of Lansbury projects out there I should have prioritized before watching her pretty-dress movie, especially now that I have a better handle on who she was. And maybe I should start with forcing myself to fall in love with detective-novelist Jessica Fletcher, who was likely an even tougher customer than Mrs. ‘Arris; I just have to stay awake long enough to get to know her.
Steve Guttenberg has a knack for playing silly characters. Whether he’s roller-skating the streets of New York City in Can’t Stop the Music or goofing off as a wacky cop in Police Academy, Guttenberg’s natural comic essence always has a way of making me smile. How could he not with those innocent brown eyes and big rosy cheeks? In 1987, Guttenberg did something completely out of his realm and starred in Curtis Hanson’s psychological thriller, The Bedroom Window. To my surprise, he did a damn good job in what was essentially his first serious role in a major motion picture.
In The Bedroom Window, Guttenberg plays the role of Terry, a young professional having an affair with his boss’s wife, Sylvia (Isabelle Huppert). During one of their trysts, Sylvia witnesses a woman being attacked from Terry’s bedroom window. Thankfully, the assailant flees the scene after the woman begins to scream and a couple of people go out into the street to help her. Shortly after the incident, a woman turns up dead not far from Terry’s apartment, and Terry feels obligated to tell the police about what was seen from his bedroom window when the prior attack occurred. The only problem is that Terry didn’t actually witness anything; only Sylvia saw the attack. To protect Sylvia and keep their affair under wraps, Terry gets as much detail about the indecent from Sylvia as he possible can, and he lies to police about being a witness. From this point, Terry’s life goes to hell in a handbasket.
The surviving victim from the attack Terry fake-witnessed is a young waitress named Denise (Elizabeth McGovern), and she meets Terry when they both attempt to pick out the attacker from a police lineup, which they are not able to accomplish. One of the guys in the lineup, Carl (Brad Greenquist of Pet Sematary fame), sort of fits the description that Sylvia gave to Terry, so Terry does his own investigating. After following Carl in secret, Terry becomes positive that he is the attacker, and he immediately tells the police that he suddenly “remembered” seeing Carl attack Denise. He just keeps creating lie after lie to put Carl behind bars. Terry gets himself into this massive web of lies for two reasons. One reason is that he wants to protect Sylvia and report vital information that could potentially get a killer of the streets. The other reason, the more selfish reason, is that Terry wants fame. He wants to be the reason Carl goes behind bars, saving women from being murdered and assaulted. Unfortunately for Terry, everything sort of blows up in his face.
What I thoroughly enjoyed about this film is Guttenberg’s acting and McGovern’s surprising takeover of the screen. Guttenberg’s inherent innocence was vital for the role of Terry. Regardless of the douchey things that Terry does, we can’t help but be on his side. We want him to come out of this mess as the winner. If an actor that wasn’t as likeable as Guttenberg played Terry, The Bedroom Window would have played out very differently. As for McGovern, for the first half of the film, she’s in the background. We only know her as the victim of an attack, and she shows up in scenes very sparingly. Towards the latter half of the film, she becomes a total badass and plays a huge role in taking down her attacker. Of course, she and Terry become somewhat of an item, which is such a cliché, but you can’t help but love them.
The Bedroom Window is far from being one of the top films in the thriller genre, but it’s a good watch. There’s enough mystery and edge-of-your-seat moments to hold your attention until the very end, and most importantly, it’s got Guttenberg.
The camp classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was a dual career revival for its two stars – Bette Davis & Joan Crawford – who had aged out of Old Hollywood’s cruelly small window of use for the in-their-prime actresses, despite their incomparable talents. While the surprise high-profile success of Baby Jane did lead to more roles for the two late-career titans, though, it also typecast them for dirt-cheap genre work far below their skill level, all because Hollywood deemed them too old to be fuckable. Davis & Crawford spent the rest of their careers as sadistic nannies, axe-wielding maniacs, and black magic hags – creepy old ladies who were literally, lethally demented. Baby Jane spawned an entire subgenre later coined as the “psychobiddy” thriller or the ”Grande Dame” horror or, most crudely, “hagsploitation.” Other notable actresses got roped into the genre as it continued to make money on the drive-in circuit: Shelly Winters in What’s the Matter with Helen? & Who Slew Auntie Roo?; Tallulah Bankhead in Die! Die! My Darling; Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest; etc. If there’s anything the once-respected British director Neil Jordan accomplishes in his recent cheapie Greta, it’s in reviving the psychobiddy genre for the 2010s, allowing his titular star Isabelle Huppert to chew scenery the way Davis & Crawford had in similar relics of hagsploitation past. The cultural context around Huppert’s casting has changed drastically since the days of the post-Baby Jane psychobiddies; the actor has been allowed to be complex, compelling, and sexy in plenty of better projects in recent years in a way Davis & Crawford weren’t at her age. Still, it’s crystal clear that Huppert is working within the hagsploitation paradigm here. She’s not even emulating the classier end of the genre like Baby Jane or Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte either; Greta is more on the level of the Bette Davis pic The Nanny or Crawford’s Strait Jacket: the really trashy shit.
While I am overall positive on this picture as a campy delight, I should be clear upfront; Isabelle Huppert is Greta’s only saving grace. In the film’s earliest scenes, before Huppert’s old-biddy cruelty enters the frame, goings are tough. Between Chloë Grace Moretz’s non-presence as a naïve country bumkin in the big city (even though she’s originally from the small podunk town of Boston?) and Neil Jordan’s severely unfunny misestimation of how young women talk & think, the first half hour of place setting is a cringey bore. Even the early scenes of Moretz & Huppert forming and unlikely intergenerational friendship (and surrogate mother-daughter dynamic) after a chance meeting in the vast anonymity of NYC are alarmingly limp. It isn’t until Moretz discovers that the pretense of their initial meeting – a luxury purse Huppert “accidentally” left on a subway train, luring strangers to return it to her – was a deliberate scam that Greta finally comes alive. The remainder of the film is exponentially more fun as Huppert gradually escalates from clingy grifter to creepy stalker to kidnapper to full-blown murderess. The dialogue never improves as the stakes are heightened, but Huppert brings life to the material through the stubborn will over her over-the-top performance. Watching her flip tables, menacingly “teach” piano as a form of torture, get carted away on a stretcher like Hannibal Lecter, and shout disciplinary epithets like “This is a bed of lies!” to her Misery-like victim is a perverse, persistent pleasure that overpowers the dialogue’s more glaring shortcomings. If nothing else, there’s a whimsical little dance she does – like a child’s improvised, freeform ballet recital – in her violent showdown with veteran Neil Jordan collaborator Stephen Rea that is A+ delirious camp and alone worth the price of admission. I don’t know that I would readily describe Greta as a great movie so much as a great performance, but like with Tom Hardy in Venom, Nic Cage in Vampire’s Kiss, or any number of over-the-top psychobiddy performances in its own genre’s spotty past, the film is the performance. Thankfully, nothing else matters here, because Moretz & Jordan could have easily dragged the material down if Huppert weren’t such a spectacle.
The trick of appreciating Greta as a psycobiddy revival is in affording Huppert’s performance enough time to fully heat up. I wouldn’t blame anyone for bailing during the film’s fun-vacuum prologue, but those who leave the film early will miss out on the joys of watching one of our great living actors indulge in some over-the-top cartoon villainy once she’s afforded the space. There’s even comfort in the fact that, unlike with hagsploitation titles of the past, Huppert has not been locked out of landing more substantial work in better pictures because of her age, which is how the psycobiddy was born in the first place. This is more of a trashy detour for her than a professional dead end, which makes it all the more fun to watch her indulge in a bit of vicious camp at the expense of her wet noodle collaborators, as opposed to feeling embarrassed for her the way we were when the great Joan Crawford was typecast as an axe-wielding maniac despite her legendary cinematic pedigree.
In Souvenir, Isabelle Huppert boinks someone a third her age and looks damn good doing it. It’s a story we’ve seen told onscreen so many times before that it could be its own genre. Still, I’m not sure it’s ever been this delightfully, delicately sweet. There are shots in Souvenir of Huppert reading on a bus & eye-fucking a young man that look like they were airlifted specifically from 2016’s somber, philosophy-minded Things to Come, but its overall tone is much closer to the tipsy glamour of a Muriel’s Wedding, complete with extensive references to ABBA. Souvenir is a delicately surreal comedy. Decades ago, it would have been referred to as “a woman’s picture.” As such, I suspect it’s unlikely to be as well-respected within the Isabelle Huppert Boinking Younger Men canon as films that strive to be Serious Art, but it’s covertly one of the best specimens of its ilk.
Huppert stars as a pâté factory worker (does it get more French than that?) with a limelit past she’d rather not be discovered. She’s drawn out of hiding when a young coworker/amateur boxer catches her eye with a sweetly innocent line of flirtation. Her young beau may be a loser who lives at home with his parents, but he has a kind of dopey charm & a fearless enthusiasm she cannot resist. He also inflates her own ego, recognizing her from her forgotten past as a finalist in the European Song Contest three decades ago (where she lost to ABBA, no shame in that). She’s terrified by his pleas to relaunch her career, but the excitement of pleasing him overpowers her desire to fade into her drab, solitary work & home life. The stakes of revitalizing her vintage career as a pop singer while initiating a love story with a (much) younger man are low, but painful: televised embarrassments, being stood up for diner, hearing herself described as “like ABBA, but not so famous,” etc. As thematically slight as the dual romance & pop star career revival stories might come across, though, the movie is never short of lovely.
Where Souvenir might feel slight in its narrative, it excels in its candy-coated imagery. The film opens in a bath of CG champagne bubbles and emerges into a freshly manicured, absurdly symmetrical world of bright colors & vintage pop music. Even Huppert’s factory job looks like a delicious dream, including countless primly-staged, bird’s-eye-view shots of pâté that should wear you down, but hypnotize instead. I was struck by the Old Hollywood glamour of certain scenes as well, typified by Huppert’s multiple (!) musical numbers & the rear projection shots of our mismatched couple’s steamy motorcycle rides. Souvenir is an inexpensive, lowkey delight, but looks far more appetizing than many films 10x its budget.
While Huppert Boinking Young’ns is almost enough of a repeated story pattern to be its own genre, the European Song Contest indie comedy is a well-established genre with a long tradition of recognizable tropes & narrative beats. Souvenir has a familiar skeleton, but its sugary exterior makes it an exceptional specimen. First off, Huppert looks incredible. Her first appearance is in the glamour photo lighting of a makeup mirror and it never diminishes form there; the camera loves her. It’s nice to see that quality applied to irreverent humor & playful eroticism for once, instead of the pitch-black descents into ennui & cruelty Huppert is usually cast in. Her gracefully unenthused dance moves, nonchalant pop music vocals, and fierce but delicate sexual humor elevate every frame she touches to the point where a movie that should be pedestrian is instead a kind of wonder. Souvenir is not the type of Huppert Boinking Youngsters picture that tends to score high critical marks or Best of The Year accolades, just like how the similarly femme irreverence of The Dressmakeris not the kind of Western that earns that kind of attention. It’s a gorgeous object & a glamorous heart-warmer, though, a subtly impressive, candy-coated dream.
As far as recent movies where Isabelle Huppert is isolated and callously mistreated by her family, colleagues, strangers, and a cat go, Things to Come is certainly a more enjoyable viewing experience than the miserable provocation Elle, one I’d be a lot more likely to return to. However, this muted, dryly funny rumination on the loneliness of middle age is not nearly as ambitious or as rawly vulnerable as Verhoeven’s gleeful sexual assault button-pusher, as grotesque as I found that film to be. It’s much more likely to fade into the ether than that career-revitalizing work, like so many pleasant, but disposable indie dramas of decades past. As insignificant as the film can feel in a larger pop culture impact sense, though, its pleasures are always immediately recognizable & agreeable, Huppert’s lead performance being chief among them.
According to Huppert’s protagonist, “After 40, women are meant for the trash.” Things to Come seemingly builds its entire sense of narrative conflict around that idea. Huppert begins the film as a successful academic with a rich family life and an unhinged, but caring mother. Gradually, time and social convention strips each and every one of her personal connections away from her until she is left entirely alone, with the exception of a cat she never wanted to adopt. Her kids are grown. Her publishers are looking to update or replace her textbooks with something flashier & easier to sell. Her husband’s passion for her has similarly been diverted to new pursuits. She’s essentially left alone with her mountainous stacks of academic books on Philosophy, her life’s calling, convinced that intellectual stimulation alone is all she needs to live a fulfilled life. It’s doubtful that could be possibly be true.
Oddly enough, this is the second film I’ve seen recently that addresses middle age romance complications between somewhat wealthy Philosophy academics. Where Things to Come aims for subtle humor and restrained drama, Rebecca Miller’s filmMaggie’s Plan goes loud & broad, echoing the traditionalist comedic beats of Old Hollywood screwball humor. Julianne Moore’s performance in that film is a much more immediately entertaining version of what Huppert pulls off here, although it’s arguably more caricature than Huppert’s character study. Things to Come certainly has its own moments of blatant punchline and situational humor. It’s just a much more subdued, melancholy look at the isolation and abandonment even the most successful, beautiful women to tend to suffer at middle age. As an audience with no particular affinity for subtlety in my pop culture entertainment, I much preferred the simple pleasures of Maggie’s Plan, but I could easily see others feeling differently on that point.
I’m possibly doing a disservice to Things to Come by comparing directly to other works like Elle or Maggie’s Plan, which only bear a passing resemblance to the film, but the truth is that it doesn’t do an especially great job of a distinguishing itself from the indie drama gestalt, leaving little room to discuss it on its own terms. Besides Huppert’s undeniable magnetism, the most distinctive aspects of the film are its broadcasting of philosophical readings and its attention to images of pure Nature: trees, water, mountains, flowers, a dead mouse. If I weren’t eternally bored by Philosophy as a subject or if the Nature photography had taken more of starring role in shaping the film’s narrative & tone, I might have been a lot more willing to allow Things to Come to sweep me off my feet. The film doesn’t seem all that interested in eliciting that reaction, though, and what’s left onscreen is mostly a melancholy character study about a woman whose age had relegated her “meant for the trash.” Huppert finds a worthwhile performance in that exercise, but not a particularly memorable one.
In all honesty, I’m probably the last person that should be writing this review. Paul Verhoeven’s latest is the exact kind of fearless, subversive button pusher that I typically enjoy from the director’s back catalog of all-time greats. It just happens to be a button pusher that centers its controversial mode of black comedy on rape. Sexual assault is more or less the only taboo in cinema that actually offends me when it’s treated lightly & without proper thematic consequence. It’s likely that I did not “get” Verhoeven’s Elle because of that personal hangup. The film opens with a brutal rape, which is repeated several times in greater detail and subsequently followed by increasingly crueler acts of sexual violence, but asks you to move on and shrug off the trauma as if it were nothing of any significance. Elle vaguely echoes ideas about what it’s like to mentally relive a trauma once it’s “behind you,” having to encounter your abuser in public social settings without acknowledging the transgression, the ineffectiveness of reporting sexual assault to police, and the misogynistic & sexually repressed aspects of modern culture that lead to rape in the first place, but all of those concepts exist in the film as indistinct whispers. Mostly, the rape is treated like a cheap murder mystery, with all of the typical red herrings & idiotic jump scares you’d expect in a whodunit. It’s a paralyzing trauma that has little effect on the story outside the scenes where it’s coldly detailed onscreen and the real shame is that it sours what is otherwise an excellently performed black comedy & character study by leaving very little room for laughter, if any.
Isabelle Huppert stars as the titular character in this glib rape revenge blood-boiler. Michelle is a video game developer who finds herself at a crossroads in her life with every one of her family members, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. Among these faces is an assailant who repeatedly rapes her in her own home while wearing gloves & a ski mask, a transgression made painfully real to the audience as soon as the credits begin. The movie sets up two mysteries in its early machinations: Who is Michelle’s rapist & what crimes did her father commit in the distant past to make her entire family a dysfunctional band of social pariahs? Only the latter mystery is at all interesting, but the former eats up the majority of the runtime, leaving little room for any other narrative to take hold. It’s difficult to get lost in Elle‘s dark, complexly humorous relationships with her mother, her business partners, her employees, her neighbors, and her son when the film keeps drawing your attention back to the constant threat of sexual assault, which is a much less interesting & more overly familiar dynamic. Worse yet, it asks you to chuckle quietly at the calm, blasé way she processes the trauma, a line of humor that’s never close to being amusing, unlike the character-driven comedy the film sacrifices to pursue it. It’s a credit to the cast, Huppert especially, that Elle is even watchable for the entire length of its bloated, coldly harrowing runtime. Everything from Verhoeven’s detached tone to the screenplay’s core concepts alienate me on such a deeply spiritual level that I’m having a difficult time grasping why people find the film entertaining and how it ended up earning so much critical acclaim, including from mainstream outlets like the Golden Globes.
As I said, I’m the exact wrong audience for this film. If tasked with editing & re-shooting Elle, I’d cut it down to a swift black comedy about a publicly disgraced, wealthy family struggling to put their lives back together; imagine an art film version of Arrested Development and you get the picture. That’s obviously not the film Verhoeven & Huppert set out to make, though, and I have as little interest in engaging with their cruelly detached rape revenge comedy/thriller as the film has engaging with its own themes of sexual assault. It’s not that I think rape is a topic wholly off-limits as a cinematic subject. Two of my favorite films from the last couple years, Felt& The Neon Demon, trafficked heavily in themes of threatened sexual assault. I just think that if you’re going to bring it up (and especially if you’re going to depict it several times in brutal detail with a comedic fallout), you owe it to the audience to make sure the trauma is thematically significant. If Elle fulfilled that requirement in any way, it’s safe to say that I didn’t “get” the film on a fundamental level. I’m totally okay with that being the case.
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