Co-presented by the Boston Jewish Film Festival, Christophe Malavoy’s ZONE LIBRE|FREE LAND (2007; July 26 at 2 pm and July 29 at 1 pm) likewise treads on familiar ground — a Nazi-pursued family taking refuge in a Free France barn — but traffics too often in pedestrian dialogue and unimaginative set pieces. (Still, as the drunken slob giving the clan shelter, Jean-Paul Roussillon is delightfully unclichéd and generous.) The smaller, indie-style works are better, but they’re often gummed up with their own sclerotic preconceptions, ideas inherited with little insight from Bresson and Téchiné. Gérald Hustache-Mathieu’s AVRIL|APRIL (2006; July 15 at 11:15 am and July 26 at 4 pm) is even centered, somewhat anachronistically, on enclosed Carmelite nuns, who are filmed with a Bressonian disdain for flow and spontaneity. One nun (Sophie Quinton) departs from her order to find her also-orphaned twin brother, who’s a gay research scientist on vacation at the beach. Before you know it, this shy devotionalist is swimming nude and making body paintings on the convent wall — and then Hustache-Mathieu favors us with one of the dreariest and most reckless melodramatic endings of the new century. Jean-Pascal Hattu’s 7 ANS|7 YEARS (2006; July 13 at 6 pm and July 15 at 3:30 pm) is even more anemic; the joyless sexual triangle involving a convict, his wife, and a prison warden exists in a more or less enervating bubble. PAS DOUCE|PARTING SHOT (2006; July 20 at 5:10 pm and July 28 at 1 pm), Jeanne Waltz’s strenuous and unrevealing film about suicide and depression, at least has the toothy, sylphic presence of Isild Le Besco to carry it. Le Besco may be one of the most distinctive faces in modern film — not pretty, but hypnotizing in its effulgent details. Here she’s a careless small-town nurse (and amateur sharpshooter) whose gruff manner is her way of covering up an overwhelming suicidal angst. When she does finally jam the gun barrel under her chin in the woods, she’s interrupted by local teens, and she impulsively (and anonymously) shoots one — only to return to work and have to care for the brat in her ward. The story hardly moves from there, however, and for all of her physical vividness, Le Besco is not quite the actress to make the psychological stew boil.
Signs of life do spill out of Christophe Honoré’s DANS PARIS|INSIDE PARIS (2006; July 21 at 7:20 pm), the sunniest film ever made about mortal melancholia. Goofy and forthrightly self-reflexive, the film incorporates direct-camera address, jumps in time, Chaplinesque shtick, entrancing clairvoyant conversations, and even, during one hushed phone call, a bewitching transmutation into a Michel Legrand–style musical. Puppy-eyed generational icon Louis Garrel is one brother, in college but neglecting his classes in favor of girls; Romain Duris is the other, suffering first through a maddened break-up and then returning to the home flat (inhabited as well by threadbare dad Guy Marchand) in a serious and suicidal depression. The family are also haunted by the suicide of a sister 12 years earlier, but, almost as a matter of principle, Honoré (whose previous films were rather leaden and aimless) achieves a fable-like bounce, one that derives largely from the filmmaking itself and from Garrel’s deadpan merriness.
