Now in its 11th year of providing wider exposure for francophone cinema in Toronto, Cinéfranco also confirms an important truism for couples on screen: relationship flame-outs always seem more spectacular when they happen in French. After all, this is a culture that has long valorized the concept of “l’amour fou,” thereby promoting the sort of passionate, aggressive and potentially destructive behaviour that might get someone arrested in other parts of the world. For characters in a French romance, to love is not just to suffer but to destroy a lot of furniture, too.

That notion is readily proved in Cinéfranco’s opening-night film. A third feature from Quebecois director François Delisle, You (HHH; March 28, 7pm) is the very tumultuous story of a Montreal woman who leaves her husband and son for her lover. Alas, her feelings of liberation are short-lived and she becomes horrified at herself for her callous abandonment of her family. As the unfaithful Michele, Anne-Marie Cadieux gives a performance of such sustained intensity and ferocity, it’s a wonder that the relatively milquetoast men in Michele’s life — husband Paul (Laurent Lucas) and new guy Thomas (Marc Béland) — survive their encounters with her. However, the director manages to channel her fury in the right directions, using Cadieux — who received a Genie nomination for her troubles — to energize a film that otherwise may have been sunk by its pretentious airs and sketchy characterizations.

An equally bold performance distinguishes another Cinéfranco highlight, Anna M. (HHH; April 4, 10pm). In this Gallic variation on Fatal Attraction, Isabelle Carré — who lost the César for Best Actress to the unstoppable Marion Cotillard — boils the proverbial bunny as a young woman who develops a pathological obsession with her doctor (a suitably helpless Gilbert Melki). As her case of erotomania intensifies, Anna escalates her campaign from letters and phone calls to far more creative and bizarre schemes to make the good doctor hers and hers alone — hammers, delivery trucks and bottles of cough syrup all come into play. Though Michael Spinosa’s third feature stretches credulity at times — female viewers may also bristle at the sight of such a retro-Freudian archetype of the hysterical woman — Carré’s sensitive performance prevents Anna from ever seeming like a cartoon monster or, for that matter, Glenn Close.

Among the young characters in Water Lilies (HHH; April 3, 6:30pm), the aggression may be more subtle and sublimated yet the potential for emotional mayhem remains high. Céline Sciamma’s well-regarded first feature provides a look into the world of teenage girls, a place that’s often explored in films but rarely in such a revealing and discomfiting manner. Marie (Pauline Acquart) is a reserved 15-year-old who is drawn to Floriane (Adèle Hanael), the most sexually brazen member of her synchronized swimming team. Assorted lusts and rivalries soon create a volatile environment, the messiness of the ensuing psychological and sexual warfare being effectively juxtaposed with the modernist austerity of the film’s French suburban setting.

Like Water Lilies, the latest feature by veteran director Claude Miller was heavily represented at the most recent César Awards. Cinéfranco’s closing night film, A Secret (HHH; April 6, 8pm) won recognition for supporting actress (and Gérard’s daughter) Julie Depardieu. The honour also served to acknowledge the movie’s major box-office success in France despite a mixed reception from critics. Adapted from the autobiographical novel by Phillippe Grimbert, it’s a firmly middlebrow yet effectively rendered drama about a Jewish teen’s discovery of the truth about his parents’ lives during World War II. As the situation for French Jews worsens around them, Maxime (Patrick Bruel) and Tania (Cécile De France) strive to resist their extramarital attraction to each other. Apparently, the force of Eros persists in even the most fraught circumstances, a notion that Miller’s film makes unflinchingly clear.

Moving beyond its core program of lovestruck French and Quebecois features, Cinéfranco continues to showcase seldom-seen work from France’s former colonies in Africa. This year’s slate includes three movies set in Morocco, including the Canadian co-production Where Are You Going Moshe?, which begins a local theatrical engagement starting April 11. Cinéfranco also includes the English Canadian premiere of Issa Serge Coelo’s DP 75: Tartina City (HHH; April 6, 1pm), an upsetting drama about a journalist who tries to publicize human-rights abuses in his native Chad but is instead incarcerated and tortured in a secret jail. The DP 75 of the title is his prisoner number while “tartina” is what passes for prison food: stale bread smeared with sheep shit. Urgent but unpolished, Coelo’s film may be more valuable as a piece of agit-prop than a work of drama but it will evoke a very unromantic but equally potent set of passions in Cinéfranco’s audience. 

Email us at: LETTERS@EYEWEEKLY.COM or send your questions to EYEWEEKLY.COM
625 Church St, 6th Floor, Toronto M4Y 2G1