Seattle Sightings: The 45th Seattle International Film Festival (review)

SIFF's twenty-five days of screenings, panels, workshops, and events constitute a grand bridge from spring into Seattle's summer season, its forty-fifth year paved with 410 films representing 86 countries. Although not as numerous as in years past, French-language features appeared consistently in the many thematic rubrics offered by the festival catalogue.

Gérard Corbiau's 1994 Farinelli and René Laloux's 1973 animated sci-fi La planète sauvage (with a live DJ and an alternative-rock soundtrack) appeared under both "Music" and "Archival." "Culinary Cinema" offered Le vin se lève (Bruno Sauvard), a documentary about the natural-vinification movement in Occitanie. "Fashion Fridays" included three documentaries: Célébration (Olivier Meyrou)—originally shot a year before Yves Saint Laurent's death in 2007 and banned from release by his partner Pierre Bergé during their lifetimes—provided an impressionistic view of the designer's last season. Jean-Paul Gaultier: Freak and Chic (Yann L'Hénoret) followed this cult fashion icon as he transformed highlights of his fifty-year career into a revue for the Folies Bergère. Timeless Beauty (Deyan Parouchev) examined the fashion industry's current trend toward models who are different—older or larger or whose skin exhibits freckles or even vitiligo.

Among the French features now showing in American theaters, two from SIFF's "Erotic/Sex" and "LGBTQ+" rubrics provoked spirited discussions among longtime regular attendees. Many deemed Un couteau dans le cœur (Yann Gonzalez), a murder mystery parody-homage to 1970s gay porn, too kinky. Sauvage/Wild (Camille Vidal-Naquet), about a young male prostitute working the streets, finished on several least-liked lists, notwithstanding lead Félix Maritaud's strong performance. More favorably received were Doubles vies (Olivier Assayas), a comédie de mœurs exploring the far-reaching effects of technological change on French society, and La chute de l'empire américain (Denys Arcand, Québec). Arcand chose a seriocomic approach in his critique of the ever-widening gap capitalism is causing between rich and poor. This sardonic heist-gone-wrong thriller unspools briskly: Pierre-Paul, a young delivery man with a PhD in philosophy, finds himself robbing Pierre to pay Paul as well as Camille (aka Aspasie), an expensive call-girl (who suggestively shares names with figures from both classical Greece and French literature, a vineyard in Champagne, and the Global Network of Sex Work Projects). As cops pursue and the Mafia lurks, this couple texts each other with alexandrines from Racine.

Similarly, director-actor-writer Louis Garrel plays with allusive references in Un homme fidèle. Abel (Garrel), for instance, finds himself caught between Marianne (Laetitia Casta, model for the 2000 rendering of the official Marianne bust) and Ève (Lily-Rose Depp, sporting red stiletto heels). The style of dialogue and the complicated romantic triangles inevitably evoke Marivaux and certain scenes and settings recall New Wave films (Truffaut's especially). Co-written with legendary screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, this feather-light comédie de mœurs veers in unexpected directions, much like a round of cadavre exquis.

The "Women Directors" rubric yielded a trio of French titles. Emma Peeters (Nicole Palo, Belgium) is a feel-good comedy about feeling bad. Disappointed by her life's mediocrity, actress Emma decides to commit suicide. Rather like Wylie Coyote's, her schemes, attempted in various cinematic styles (musical comedy, film noir, etc.), come to naught. Fortunately, a handsome young mortician intervenes. Geneviève Dulude-De Celles's debut, Une colonie, perceptively portrays a shy twelve-year-old girl's coming-of-age in a rural Quebec hamlet. Challenges abound—hair styles, sex, parties, peer pressure, and parents preoccupied with their own rocky relationship. A blossoming friendship with a boy from a nearby First Nation reserve eventually enables her to "color outside the lines." Les chatouilles (Andréa Bescond, Eric Métayer) represents Bescond's autobiographical rendering of recovery from the sexual abuse she suffered in childhood. The narrative unfolds loosely—avoiding explicitness—through memory, fantasy...