The Alliance Française French Film Festival continues to be one of the cultural highlights of the Australian arts calendar. In 2024, the festival attracted a record-breaking audience, eclipsed only by the Taylor Swift tour. This year, the festival is expanding to deliver an eclectic programme of forty-two French and Francophone films across twenty cities (including the former Regent Cinema in Ballarat, Palace Cinema’s latest acquisition). Below are just some of the highlights in what is a strong program overall.

When Fall is Coming ★★★★☆

François Ozon is one of France’s most prolific and best-known international directors. He turns out on average one film per year and is a more or less permanent fixture in the AFFFF programme. Ozon never disappoints; irrespective of the subject matter, his treatments are always original, funny, moving, and humane. The style and tone may change with each film, but Ozon’s particular sensibility – which often involves a ‘queering’ of social and generic conventions – remains constant. When Fall Is Coming is a typical Ozon film: beautifully shot, perfectly cast, impeccable storytelling, with enough plot ambiguities to make judgement infinitely deferrable. Set in a picturesque village in Burgundy, the film is essentially the story of three generations of one family and how the past is a source of recrimination and, ultimately, of understanding. Hélène Vincent is wonderful as Michelle, a mother and grandmother whose mysterious past has caused estrangement from her troubled daughter, Valérie, played by Ozon regular Ludivine Sagnier. Michelle lives for her grandson, but their relationship is brought to an abrupt end when she accidently serves poisonous mushrooms for lunch. Nobody dies, but Valérie declares her mother unfit and cuts off all ties with her. What follows is part idyll, part social drama, part policier. Michelle’s relationship with those around her is exemplary of how Ozon believes we should all live; her faith in her best friend’s son, Vincent (Pierre Lottin), an ex-con trying to make good, when everyone else has written him off, results in a memorable exchange which might serve as the film’s epitaph: ‘Ah Vincent, he means right but always does wrong’, to which Michelle replies: ‘As long as he means right’.

The Story of Souleymane

The Story of Souleymane ★★★☆

For director Boris Lojkine, filmmaking is about defying expectations about what stories should be told. The Story of Souleymane both confirms and overturns our expectations about what this kind of film and its protagonist should be. Treading a fine line between poverty porn (a criticism applied to films that objectify individual hardship for the gratification and entertainment of a privileged audience) and documentary realism, Lojkine’s film avoids the former by presenting a character whose situation is emotionally and philosophically ambiguous for the audience. The film’s title plays on the idea of storytelling: it is the story of Souleymane, an undocumented migrant from Guinea working as a food delivery cyclist who lies in his attempt to obtain a visa; and it is also Souleymane telling his story – the fictionalised version and, ultimately, the true one. Lojkine did not want to make a didactic film about an individual coming up against a harsh immigration system; rather, he wanted to ask questions of the audience about rights and protection, and who deserves them. Indeed, what on the surface appears to be a typical treatment of an immigration story, does, upon reflection, give way to some complex soul searching. Lojkine does not compromise in his depiction of the frantic world of the delivery cyclist, and the scenes of Souleymane riding across Paris are tense and fraught with peril. The streets are loud, bright, and dangerous, and Souleymane faces death or injury every minute of his shift, as well as exploitation from those who profit from his precarity. Newcomer Abou Sangaré portrays Souleymane with subtlety and power.

Meet the Leroys

Meet the Leroys ★★★☆

Florent Bernard’s bitter-sweet tragi-comic family road trip is a homage to the films of Patrice Leconte and Judd Apatow, particularly their ability to mix different types of humour with emotion to create works that brim with generosity and sincerity. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Sandrine Leroy, a burnt-out mother stuck in a suffocating and at times verbally abusive marriage. When she asks her husband Christophe (José Garcia) for a divorce, he proposes a family road trip to the sights of the couple’s romantic past, after which Sandrine can decide if she wants to stay or leave. From the outset, it is easy to see why Sandrine wants a divorce: the couple seem completely ill-matched and their lack of anything other than children in common makes you wonder why Sandrine agrees to Christophe’s plan in the first place. She agrees not for the sake of the marriage, but for the family. What ensues is, in fact, surprising and at times even moving, for both Sandrine and the audience. Seeing that Christophe was not ‘always like this’ does not necessarily excuse what he has become, but does certainly soften the character. There are even times when it is possible to believe the marriage can be saved. Bernard’s film is deeply nostalgic for the peripheral France where he grew up, a France of car parks, shopping malls, and roundabouts. He takes what he calls an ‘American’ approach to filming, by which he means making these sites and spaces ‘cinematic’. It is nicely shot, dialogue is quick and witty, and Gainsbourg and Garcia play off each other well. It is Gainsbourg, however, who steals the film in a performance which utilises her unique physiognomy, vocal ability (from her soft delicate voice to a bloodcurdling scream in a nod to Antichrist), and comic timing.

Being Maria

Being Maria ★★★☆

Maria Schneider became a star at the age of nineteen when she starred in Bernardo Bertolucci’s controversial Last Tango in Paris (1972), opposite an ageing Marlon Brando. Jessica Palud’s second feature film, a loose adaptation of Vanessa Schneider’s book My Cousin Maria Schneider (2023), is not a biopic but rather what Palud calls ‘an elliptical dramaturgy with Maria as the guiding thread’. The events are interpreted through Maria’s perspective but informed by Palud’s own experience as an assistant on film sets where she witnessed first-hand the disconcerting control some male directors had over actors and actresses. Last Tango left an indelible mark on Schneider’s life and career, particularly the infamous ‘butter scene’ now considered one of cinema’s most harrowing rape scenes. At the time it was considered merely scandalous, and Schneider bore much of the brunt of the fallout. Palud’s film reframes the scene in light of the #MeToo movement to depict how this traumatic event impacted Schneider’s life. While somewhat reductive in its scope, given that Schneider spent much of her later career distancing herself from Last Tango, going on to become an outspoken advocate for women in film, Being Maria does give us a raw and unsettling interpretation of a time when men dominated the film industry and women were subjected to their often unscripted whims. Anamaria Vartolomei, who was a revelation in Audrey Diwan’s 1960s abortion drama Happening (2021), is transfixing as Maria. She is strongly supported by Céleste Brunnquell as Maria’s lover, and Matt Dillon as Brando, who, while not offering a perfect resemblance, is a convincing evocation of the screen legend.

Army of Shadows

Army of Shadows ★★★★★

This 4K restoration of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 masterpiece is part of an ongoing reappraisal of his work that has taken place over the past twenty years. When it screened at Cannes last year, the Festival advanced three reasons to re-watch it: first, Melville took part in the French Resistance and spent the next twenty-six years bringing fellow Resistance fighter Joseph Kesser’s 1943 book of the same name to the screen; second, it is a war film shot in colour; and third, Lino Ventura’s landmark performance as betrayed Resistance cell leader and political prisoner Phillipe Gerbier. To this we can add Melville’s uncompromising technical vision and Simone Signoret’s often overlooked performance as Mathilde. For those who have and have not seen it, this is a unique opportunity to watch a seminal work in French cinema the way it was intended to be seen, with significantly improved clarity of sound and image. Initially denounced in France as Gaullist propaganda irrelevant to the then social climate of May 1968, it was available only on bootleg versions until its US release in 2006. This is hard to believe, given its original critical acclaim. Army of Shadows is not a work of realism but is imbued with the same fatalism and abstraction as Melville’s other classic works, Le Samouraï (1967) and The Red Circle (1970). It is about the failure of a rebellion, a revolution eating its own children. Melville shot it in colour only to wash it out, to accentuate the colder tones. It is stark and austere in its palette, something the restoration beautifully accentuates.

Felicity Chaplin is Lecturer in European Languages at Monash University.