With the exception of Benoît Jacquot — whose L’INTOUCHABLE|THE UNTOUCHABLE (2006; July 20 at 6:45 pm and July 28 at 2:40 pm) is another self-important but meandering examination of undressed womanhood, here personified again by the testy Le Besco — the established celebs of the industry turn out to be the most reliable. Bertrand Blier’s COMBIEN TU M’AIMES?|HOW MUCH DO YOU LOVE ME? (2005; July 28 at 8 pm) features the outrageous Frazetta figure of Bellucci (amped way up, not dressed down) as a preposterously saucy hooker seduced into a 24/7 deal with a schlubby lottery winner (Bernard Campan). As usual with Blier, the sexual combat is anything but programmatic and PC — the air is thick with confrontation, and the high-stakes comedy rises spontaneously from his characters’ absolute unpredictability. On another planet altogether, Bruno Dumont’s FLANDRES (2006; July 15 at 7:15 pm) returns to the uncommunicative, working-class lowlands of La vie de Jésus|The Life of Jesus and L’Humanité, considering a virtually mute farm worker and his female buddy/sex mate and how their dubious life in the muddy nowheresville of the title is interrupted by conscription and armed service in the Mesopotamian desert. Inconclusive and strangely suggestive, Flandres is all about the shared visceral experience, and the juxtaposition of uneducated Euro-poverty and the electric brutality of low-gauge foreign war is hard to shake.
But forgive a critic his taste buds: my favorite of the fest, Brice Cauvin’s DE PARTICULIER À PARTICULIER|HOTEL HARABATI (2006; July 21 at 3 pm and July 29 at 5:20 pm), is perhaps nothing more than an entry in a new French genre. (Call it “anxious symbolism,” and think Caché, Lemming, La moustache, Calvaire.) Yet that makes it absurdly, ticklishly resonant — an ambiguous probing through post-9/11 bourgeois anxieties. A couple (Hélène Fillières and Laurent Lucas, the latter something like this mini-genre’s axiomatic persona) are a day away from a trip to Venice when they find an Arab’s valise filled with foreign money. They never make it to Italy — we’re not told why — but when everyone asks, they begin fabricating. Tiny white lies metastasize, paranoias spawn, actual photos from the fictional trip come back from the lab, and their tidy Parisian existence — job, home, parenthood, marriage, friendships — harrowingly begins to disintegrate. Cauvin, with his first feature, hits a mesmerizing home run; the film is enigmatic, but so rich in metaphor, the pungent surface details are almost irrelevant.
