Frog Season

Every summer, Seattleites tired of a shitty movie season are thrown
a bone in the form of a few French releases that come out earlier in
other places. The films breeze in on a promise of sophistication and
substance amid the trash pile of steroid-pumped blockbusters and
predigested rom-coms at the multiplex. It doesn’t matter if the French
movies are any good. They show sleek-looking Euros sipping little black
coffees and glasses of red wine, having lots of guilt-free sex, and
purring sweet Gallic nothings in each others’ ears. It’s enough to whet
any self-respecting art-house appetite.

The next few weeks offer a double serving of French cinema, though
don’t be fooled: The little cream puff of romantic noir is more filling
than the undercooked period biopic served on a bed of seven
Césars (the French equivalent of Oscars).

Culinary metaphors aside, Anne Fontaine’s The Girl from
Monaco, a tricky, darkly comic thriller masquerading as an escapist
trifle, centers on a love triangle between Bertrand, a successful but
dithering middle-aged defense lawyer (Fabrice Luchini) in Monaco on a
high-profile case; Christophe, the younger, virile bodyguard
(French-Arab actor Roschdy Zem) assigned to protect Bertrand; and
Audrey (newcomer Louise Bourgoin), an even younger and very sexy
weather girl who once dated the bodyguard but who now, to everyone’s
surprise, has her sights set on the lawyer.

As in Dry Cleaning, her best-known feature here, Fontaine
builds erotic suspense deftly; you’re never sure who’s trying to screw,
or screw over, whom—and who’s nursing actual feelings. She also
nails the bewitching effect that youth and beauty, here personified by
Audrey, can have on the insecure and aging, embodied by Bertrand.
Better yet, the director, working from her own script, shows us how
that spell can go from liberating to imprisoning. As Bertrand’s
feelings for Audrey grow increasingly obsessive, he turns to Christophe
for advice, and the focus shifts to the odd-couple intimacy between the
two men: a cautious, cerebral thinker and his confident, instinctively
physical protector.

The Girl from Monaco is so briskly plotted (a compact 90
minutes) and soaked in bright Mediterranean blues and yellows that it’s
easy to overlook the sharp, even feminist observations made about male
friendship and sexuality. The three main characters are all types, but
they’re uncommonly well-drawn, richly played types, and Fontaine blurs
their outlines enough to keep us on our toes: Audrey, for all her
oversexed daftness, is a force of nature whose ambition and carnal
boldness keep her out of any man’s grasp; Bertrand, the disciplined
intellectual, is nearly undone by a sexual awakening as dewy-eyed as
any adolescent ingénue’s; and Christophe’s military stoicism and
clipped baritone delivery mask passions that move the story from frothy
bedroom farce into more unsettling Hitchcockian territory.

Indeed, The Girl from Monaco is the rare entertainment whose
twists and turns seem driven by plausible emotions churning just
beneath the characters’ skins, rather than predetermined plot
mechanics. And so Fontaine teases us toward a perversely poignant coda
that recasts everything that came before as a love story of an
unexpected sort.

An odd love story is also at the heart of another upcoming French
release, Séraphine, Martin Provost’s often lovely but
frustratingly academic biopic about the unsung early-20th-century
painter Séraphine Louis. Many directors have labored to convey
the complexities of the visual-art process, as well as the train wreck
it often causes in the artist’s personal life, and most have come up
with clichés. Even less-awful American efforts of the last two
decades have ranged from plodding (Robert Altman’s Vincent &
Theo) to half-baked (Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat and Ed
Harris’s Pollock).

Séraphine fares only slightly better, but its flaws
come packaged in another language, so most critics—foreign-cinema
fetishists that they are—won’t notice. The movie traces the rise
to recognition and descent into madness of Séraphine (Yolande
Moreau), a religious, literally tree-hugging eccentric who cleans
houses by day and creates vibrant flower and fruit portraits by night.
The other major character is Séraphine’s employer Wilhelm Uhde
(Ulrich Tukur), a gay German art dealer who alternately champions her
and leaves her high and dry until her death.

Séraphine’s was a quiet life, and the movie is refreshingly
free of the chronological parade of “big” moments that typically clog
these stories. If anything, it’s too restrained, too discreetly filmed,
too gently paced. The outsiders’ bond between Séraphine and
Wilhelm—a shared passion for painting and their separate,
unfulfilled sex lives sublimated into friendship—is the most
unusual thing in the movie, but it’s often shoved aside by long shots
of Séraphine puttering around acting batty. We get the point:
Artistic genius comes from mysteries of the soul, as well as
consciously applied talent. Thoughtful as it is, the movie lacks the
poetry or point of view to see this idea through with force.

Moreau, with her pudgy Cheshire Cat face, seems lit from within as
Séraphine’s eyes widen in inspiration and narrow in
disappointment. And there are several moments when Provost gets at her
essence—a shot of Séraphine gorging on berries off the
bush, a sequence in which she shows her work and soaks in various
reactions. But he never stays close, opting instead to respectfully
ration out his subject’s life story in graceful, somewhat remote
vignettes. Séraphine is a fantastic weirdo of a character in a
movie a bit too normal to do her justice.