Joel Super
Communications Officer, International Engagement, Communications and Protocol

What do Nick Nolte, Catherine Deneuve, and Robert Mondavi all have in common? (Aside from wealth and fame, that is.) Last fall, each showed up in one of the wonderfully varied, interesting, challenging, and/or quixotic films of the Tournée French Film Festival held October 13-19 at Boardman’s Art Theater in Champaign. Sponsored by The University of Illinois and Parkland College, the festival included multiple screenings of Olivier Assayas’s Clean; Robert Lepage’s The Far Side of the Moon/La Face cachée de la lune; Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queen/Rois et Reine; Karin Albou’s Little Jerusalem/La Petite Jérusalem; Jonathan Nossiter’s Mondovino; and Sébastien Lifschitz’s Wild Side.

Tournées, launched 10 years ago, is an annual grant program offered through the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French Ministry of Culture (CNC), designed to support the screening of contemporary French films on U.S. college and university campuses. This is the second year the program has funded a festival in Urbana-Champaign. The Parkland/University of Illinois collaboration came about when Margaret Flinn, Assistant Professor of French and Film Studies at Illinois, approached Colleen Cook at Boardman’s with the information about the grant program.

Cook, in turn, suggested involving Parkland College. At Parkland, Seamus Reilly, then head of English & Critical Studies, and several instructors in that department were immediately very enthusiastic and, although there was no guarantee of receiving grant support, everyone quickly agreed upon a three-way collaboration. Reilly notes that “the idea of using the Boardman to show another festival series of films was appealing to me [and] I have been delighted with the success of the venture.”

According to Flinn, one of the group’s major objectives in producing the festival was to make it germane to as many people as possible by selecting a wide variety of film types and genres from the choices offered through the Tournée grant program. (The program requires recipients to use grant monies for rental of Francophone films from an officially selected list.) Since it wasn’t so long ago that some Americans were calling for french fries to be relabeled “freedom fries,” any undertaking that offers an opportunity to broaden, deepen, and add complexity to our view of Francophone culture is clearly welcome. The characters, subjects, and even locations of the festival films certainly offered that possibility.

Take the Chinese restaurant scene in Clean. Emily (Maggie Chung), the protagonist, speaks French to her customers and Cantonese to her uncle/employer as she waits tables in his Parisian restaurant. She has, at this point, relocated to France after her English husband overdosed in Canada and she lost custody of their son to his grandparents. Nolte plays the grandfather. The sense is neither one of globe-trotting spectacle for its own sake, of slick cosmopolitanism, nor of trite multi-culturalism. The diverse ethnicities/nationalities and continent-hopping locations all play as an entirely natural outgrowth of a plot unfolding around a faded rock musician trying to overcome her heroin addiction. By turns gritty, lyrical, bleak, and beautiful, the locations are both primary and secondary at once, saying critical things about the character and interesting things about contemporary life in Vancouver, Paris, and London without shouting them at you.

Much the same can be said of the entirely delightful The Far Side of the Moon and the absorbing Little Jerusalem. Together, they illuminate distinctive aspects of the Francophone world not generally treated in films seen at the multiplex. For viewers whose ear for French is better than mine or who read program notes before a film, it may have been clear from the start that The Far Side of the Moon was set in Québec City and that the protagonist was Québécois. But I like to approach films cold, let them unfold, and read the notes later to fill in what I may have missed. So it was a pleasure gradually to realize that Philippe (Robert Lepage) the portly, 40-ish protagonist, physically inhabited a world just up the road a bit—but where the road signs are in French. As the result of Lepage’s fine acting and a radically different haircut and costume, gradually, too, comes the recognition that he also plays Philippe’s volatile gay brother, a television weatherman. The laconic Philippe (who makes his living doing phone sales while trying—for the second time—to get his dissertation accepted) couldn’t be a larger contrast to his younger brother. Their scenes together exemplify the film’s visual and situational humor.

Little Jerusalem, on the other hand, treats a piece of the Francophone world far away from North America and, I wager, from the experience of most of us in the audience. The film is set in Sarcelles, a low-income Parisian suburb known as “Little Jerusalem” because of it large population of North African Jewish immigrants. Focused on the lives of one family, the action unfolds amid the customs and culture of their orthodox Sephardic Jewish community, whose language alone seems to connect them to modern French life. They live cheek by jowl with North African Muslim immigrants and French nationals, but their world-view and the customs expressing it conflict with both. In an early scene, the director deftly illustrates the “in the world/not of the world” dichotomy that defines the characters’ lives. As Ariel, the patriarch, puts on his prayer shawl and faces east for morning prayer, his sister-in-law in the next room takes off her drab, modest clothing after a night of studying Kant. Both actions are set in front of their dreary housing project windows with a view out to equally dreary, monolithic apartment blocks. In juxtaposing male/female, sensuality/spirituality, ancient/modern, philosophy/religion, the scene economically suggests volumes about the characters, their lives, and the struggles the film will explore.

Mondovino, a documentary film directed by American Jonathan Nossiter, in turn explores the equally rarified (if, shall we say, more earth-bound) realm of wine making. In many ways, the film is an anti-globalization argument, but the idiosyncratic framing—interview subjects half out of the frame, repeated shots of dogs at dog level—help produce a lightness and amiability most viewers do not associate with the genre, let alone the subject of globalization. Given Nossiter’s thesis, that marketing imperatives and marketing power are reducing all wines to bland sameness, it is not surprising that this film, too, continent-hops, jumping from Burgundy to Tuscany to Napa Valley to Argentina so Nossiter can demonstrate his point. But since the insufferably smug Mondavi family and unspeakably conceited wine critic Robert Parker dominate the American scenes, it is generally a relief to get back to France. Although the indigenous wine grower in Argentina and the elderly Sardinian wine maker and his wife are clearly intended to be admired, it is the somewhat crotchety old French guys, who speak about wine and wine making with honesty, forthrightness, dignity, and passion, who are Nossiter’s standard-bearers for individuality and principle in a globalized market. And in this crop of films, they are unique types. The freedom-fries folks would be surprised to meet guys who bear such little resemblance to their stereotypical notion of Frenchness.

Perhaps more typical in this sense, Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queen takes as its protagonist the quintessential chic, beautiful Frenchwoman—Nora (Emmanuelle Devos)—and, for good measure, casts Catherine Deneuve in a secondary role as a psychiatrist. The film seems for some time a series of non-sequiturs where quixotic characters act with unfathomable motives. Slowly, the protagonist is revealed to be not the fragile woman she at first appears, but an iron-willed force of nature. You might be forgiven at this point for thinking “ah, a prototypical French art-house film” because, in many ways, you’d be right. (And that would be positive or negative, depending upon your taste.) But the comic antics of Nora’s ex-lover Ismaël (Mathieu Amairic), which occur in a plot at first parallel to and then intersecting Nora’s, shatter the seriousness and subvert the suave leading-man stereotype necessary to the prototype. In the end, the film is rich and full in intriguing ways and resists all efforts to pigeon hole it.

The Tournée Festival itself offered a rich and full experience with just a few films. In their variety and originality, the six films the committee selected went a long way to achieving their goal: helping Parkland and the University bridge the gap between intellectual inquiry and everyday culture from around the world.

The festival films are all available on DVD.