Four French Films
Includes spoilers for the movies Anatomy of a Fall, Grand Expectations, La Syndicaliste, and Saint Omer.
I ended up seeing a lot more Proper Cinema this year for programming, location and timetabling reasons. An unusual dearth of explosions on screen for me, and the jury is out on whether my brain is the better for it.
A few days ago I watched the French movie Anatomy of a Fall. It is about the investigation into and trial of a woman, A Female Novelist, who lives up a snowy mountain outside Grenoble. One day, her son arrives home from a walk with his guide dog to discover his father dead on the ground. He had fallen from a height. The woman maintains the cause of death was an accident but authorities pursue the theory he was pushed. A trial ensues. Her marriage is dissected by strangers. Her relationship with her son forever altered.
The week before that, I went to see Grand Expectations. French again. In this film, a young working-class politics student is on holiday in Corsica with her privileged boyfriend when they are involved in a confrontation with a local. It ends violently. They cover things up. Her future will be ruined is the justification for fleeing. The relationship crumbles, but she forges ahead - not thriving, but adequately surviving, building something. Then her ex returns and with it the rot of what happened. Her world unravels. She falls under the eye of the French justice system.
I kept thinking of Sally Rooney heroines watching this movie. There is a dinner conversation at the start you can see taking place in one of her books. If you’ve ever thought ‘cool politics but one of these novels needs a gun’ then maybe this movie was made in a French laboratoire pour toi. I couldn’t find a trailer with English subtitles but on the settings button on a YouTube video you can select autotranslate into your language of choice. A crude solution that’ll give you the gist.
Some months ago, I went to see La Syndicaliste. This movie is an adaptation of the true story of Maureen Kearney, a trade unionist in France who was sexually assaulted in her home by masked intruders. She had been working on a whistleblowing case, calling out shady deals in the nuclear energy sector. The French police treated her like dirt. She was forced to recant her story. It is an upsetting movie, but I am, not glad but perhaps grateful that I watched it. My blood was hot throughout. I could have screamed. The movie made me cry.
In the screening I saw, there was a man next to me who said ’dead right’, or something similarly fucking stupid, when the ending titles said how China has taken over the energy sector in Europe. I wanted to put a knife in his thighs.
In Spring, I went to see Saint Omer. This is another French film about a woman who has been caught up in that country’s justice system. In this story, a pregnant academic and writer travels to attend the trial of a Senegalese woman who committed infanticide. The writer watches and listens to the woman’s story. A terrible crime has occurred, yes, but the brutal and alienating context of one woman’s experience of motherhood - untouched by kindness, empathy and support - keeps us grounded in a world of concrete grey. How can the court look such a case in the eye? What kind of world have we let happen?
Saint Omer unsettled me. Ten months later I’m thinking about the director’s choices - the setting, the script, the camera’s focus.
I joked, in bad taste, after Anatomy that all these movies taught me a valuable lesson, if you’re a woman in France and you commit a crime or are adjacent to a criminal act, google a list of countries that won’t extradite you and get to one of them. That inquisitorial continental justice system will put you on the rack.
Then I began to think of Ireland’s own tortured system - the Kerry Babies, the X case, the dead woman whose family were put through a grotesque hell because of a foetal heartbeat, the Dunnes strikers, the women of Debenhams, the woman at the centre of the Belfast rape trial, Vicky Phelan and the others in her wake, I could go on. Infinite Irish films.