Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Pictured : 'Are you tired, old man?' Divorced writer-turned-day labourer, Paul ( Bastien Bouillon ) works for less than UK minimum wage in the French social drama, ' At Work ' ( À Pied d’Oeuvre ), adapted from Franck Courtès ’ 2023 autobiographical account by Gilles Marchand and the film's director Valérie Donzelli . Still courtesy of Diaphana Distribution (France)  We see a perfectly beautiful stretch of patterned wallpaper, red on white. Then a mallet bursts through. Before long, the wall of a room in a house is rendered into dust, the rubble swept up into plastic sacks, one of which is loaded onto a truck by Paul Marquet (Bastien Bouillon), a bespectacled 42-year-old, divorced day labourer who is the protagonist of French director Valérie Donzelli’s eighth feature film, À Pied d’Oeuvre ( At Work ). Adapted from Franck Courtès’ 2023 autobiographical account of his own switch from photographer to handyman, Donzelli and her co-writer Gilles Marchand fashion a fi...

  Contains spoilers. French director Lola Quiviron’s debut feature, Rodeo , is four-fifths social realist drama, complete with drab lighting and tight camera work, and one-fifth genre movie, climaxing in a heist that the protagonist dreams of pulling off. It is unsatisfying on both counts, introducing for good measure some moments of magic realism – bikers see things that ordinary people do not. Almost held together by a committed lead performance by Julie Ledru as sympathy-testing, cadge everything if I can, bike-stealing, adrenaline-addicted Julia, the film points a sympathetic lens at a road-hogging group of wheelie-spinning first or second-generation immigrant dirt bike riders, known collectively as the B-Mores. Julia, we discover, is a whirlwind of trouble, fleeing a couple of men in an early scene, having broken a door, following the theft of her bike. We aren’t told the full story, but we guess that she thought she knew who stole her bike, kicked a door down to retrieve ...

  Why would a woman kill her own child? It is a question asked in director Alice Diop’s courtroom drama, Saint Omer , in which the action is seen through the eyes of an apparently disinterested woman, Rama (Kayjie Kagame) whose own background and situation bind her to the case. Co-written by Marie Ndiaye, Amrita David and Diop, the film is carefully crafted, sensitive and packs an emotional punch. It asks questions about identity and culture and has a terrific closing argument. It uses film extracts in an interesting way, as if the director wanted to incorporate her own mood board. It also puts an alarming statement in the mouth of the accused, Laurence Joly (Guslagie Malanda), the Senegalese daughter of a United Nations interpreter, who took her fifteen-month-old baby daughter, Elise, to the beach at Berck-sur-Mer at night and drowned her: ‘I don’t why I did it. I’m hoping this trial will tell me.’ The film opens with breathing and the crashing of waves. We watch a woman in prof...

  Watching the 1970s set French drama, Annie Col ère ( Angry Annie ), I experienced a sense of d éjà vu. In it, a thirty-something married mother of two procures an abortion, joins an illegal group, and starts performing abortions herself. Didn’t I watch this last week with Call Jane ? Director Blandine Lenoir, who co-wrote the screenplay with Axelle Ropert, spent five years on the project, researching the work of MLAC – the Movement for the Liberation [Freedom] of Abortion and Contraception, which led to the legalisation of abortion in France in 1975. She has made the better film, only accidentally finding timeliness – as Call Jane did – with the overturning this year of Roe vs Wade in the United States, which once again criminalised the termination of pregnancies in large swathes of the country. Set in a small village, Lenoir’s film deals with a nervous mother, Annie (Laure Calamy) who seeks help from her local MLAC and, like the protagonist in Call Jane , finds herself joining...

  Robust ( Robuste ) is the debut feature of French co-writer-director Constance Meyer, who had served as a third assistant director on Jonas Carpignano’s Mediterranea and directed a series of shorts of increasing acclaim, including Rhapsody (2016) and La Belle Affaire (2018). In the latter, she worked with G é rard Depardieu, one of France’s greatest screen actors, who in his prime could play any role and make it convincing, but who now resembles a shipwreck, damaged beyond repair, sunken in his own personal abyss. The joy of D é pardieu the actor – as opposed to the man who claimed Russian citizenship for tax purposes in 2013 and who has been accused of the sexual assault of a young actress in 2018, not to mention instances of drunk driving and urinating in a cabin that have marked the last decade or so – is that there is still an artist’s curiosity and a willingness to appear vulnerable on screen. We sense – or perhaps project – a desire for the actor to be reconciled within h...

  Rightly criticised for relating outlines in spoiler terms, I tried describing director L é a Mysius’s film, Les Cinq Diables ( The Five Devils ) more abstractly: a fire, a child with strong sense of smell, time travel, karaoke. Other reviewers have simply described it as a lesbian drama. (Why didn’t I think of that?) Those reviewers have taken as its chief signifier the film’s star Ad è le Exarchopolous, who appeared in the 2013 Cannes Palme D’Or winning lesbian romance, Blue is the Warmest Colour , in which she starred opposite L é a Seydoux. Unlike Seydoux, who has appeared in two James Bond films as well as David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future and Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch , Exarchopolous is less well known internationally. Her one English language film, The Last Face , directed by Sean Penn, was greeted with derision at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. Co-written with Paul Guilhaume, Mysius’ follow-up to her 2017 feature debut, Ava , is at its heart a mother-daug...

  Anaïs (Anaïs Demoustier), the title character of writer-director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s debut feature, Les Amours d’Ana ïs ( Anaïs in Love ), is a whirlwind. When we first meet her, she is snatching a bunch of flowers then running down the street to head for her apartment. She has a claustrophobic fear of elevators (as revealed later on) so dashes up the stairs to let in her landlady, who scowls at her sceptically. Anaïs offers the woman some juice but then finds that she doesn’t have any. She offers her some tea. The landlady refuses. Ostensibly, the landlady has come to install a smoke detector, one that has an adhesive back so you can attach it on the wall with ease. Anaïs does so. Halfway through the conversation, the smoke detector falls down. Anaïs jumps. We jump. She re-affixes it. Her landlady reminds her that Anaïs owes rent for March and April. Anaïs promises to pay. She wants to get someone to move in with her, though she has issues - as we discover, like not wa...