French Film Fest 2005---Les temps qui changent

In LES TEMPS QUI CHANGENT André Téchiné has extracted the best performance we’ve seen from Gérard Depardieu in recent and not-so-recent memory. Téchiné’s extraordinary accomplishment in this film is that he effortlessly achieves a graceful balance between the genre of French vacation film (country home, pool, family reunion) and that of French film shot à l’étranger. Téchiné’s LOIN was very much defined by Morocco, the experience of being abroad, out of France. The only film that comes close to the same harmony as LES TEMPS in certain moments is LE SOLEIL ASSASSINÉ (Murdered Son) a seaside film starring Charles Berling and directed by Abdelkerim Bahloul. A film sorely missing from this year’s Rendez Vous when a mediocre film like Tell me I’m pretty is being included with what is otherwise a formidable lineup. LE SOLEIL takes place in another former French colony Algeria and Berling plays the poet Jean Sénac who runs a radio program in French just like Deneuve does in this film and one reason it would have complimented LES TEMPS. The resemblance between the films ends with the radio station characters. LES TEMPS is about love and the four principal characters in the film. LE SOLEIL is about a hero.

Catherine Deneuve introduced the film on Sunday to a spellbound audience that gasped on seeing her. The same age as Téchiné (both are 1943 born) Deneuve has continued to remain alluring and compelling in all her recent work and was no less so on stage. She thanked us for coming to see French films, French films with English subtitles no less. The film proposed the question, she informed the audience, as to whether the first love of one’s life can also be the last love. An audible sigh went through the screening room.

Depardieu arrives in Tangiers in search of Deneuve the first love of his life after convincing his company to post him there to oversee the construction of a new television studio facility. He sends bouquets of flowers anonymously and even consults a local Moroccan woman responsible for his leisure and entertainment to teach him how to cast a spell on Deneuve to win her back. When he finally has a face to face encounter with her he is flat on the floor outside a grocery story having hit his nose and damaged the cartilage. Deneuve’s husband rushes on hearing the noise and informs Depardieu he is a doctor. As if the circumstances are not humiliating enough Depardieu has an attack of diarrhea when Deneuve spots her husband and comes up to them both. Depardieu’s performance is irreproachable. He is contained, mature, passionate, and poignant. No mean feat given the general tendency to exuberance in his acting coupled with the challenges Téchiné puts his way in terms of the stupefying and the ridiculous all of which he pulls off with pathos.

Enter Deneuve’s son played by Malik Zidi. Home on vacation he fails to warn his parents in advance that his girlfriend and her son will make the trip with him. His girlfriend is there in search of a twin sister who has decided that for twins to become whole and heal they must cut contact with their siblings. Zidi spends his time back home in Tangier rekindling a relationship with a former male lover who eventually diagnosis his problem saying that--you are half French and half Moroccan, half man and half woman you’re indecisive. Lubna Azabal who plays Zidi’s girlfriend is plying herself with sleeping pills while Melki spends most of his time in the swimming pool, drinking, and watching his medical practice decline. The family is gathered in a house in Tangiers away from the bustle of the city, each tending their own problems and imperfectly, imperceptibly, trying to make peace with the flaws and humanity of the other. The father with the son’s gay-side, the girlfriend with the rupture from her twin, the mother with herself and the men in her life. Unrushed and human to the core they all lash out in moments and then arrive at a different understanding, evolve.

The love story or rather, at this point in the film, the non-love story between Depardieu and Deneuve happens in the background. He wants her back he tells her, he wants to spend the future with her. They are walking and she says there is no future the forest they just left behind is over and now there is the cliff and its nothingness. But there is the sea in front of the cliffs and across the sea there is Spain, the beginning of Europe he says.

Téchiné’s genius in all his films is that they end up more like living entities with the hum and heartbeat of the passage of time, the complexity and evolution of characters taking place both within and outside time. The beauty of his films is like condensed sunlight and the dialogue is always just so. LES TEMPS is quintessential Téchiné, to be cherished dearly.