bonjour australie! alliance française french film festival

March is the month most commonly attributed with doom and gloom: it signals the end of summer, the end of daylight savings and—now that the Oscars® have been decided and the nominees have left our screens—the end of quality films in our cinemas. But before we tear our hair out lamenting the arrival of PAUL BLART 2: MALL COP WITH A VENGEANCE, the Alliance Française French Film Festival offers our celluloid cloud its silver lining. Between March 2^nd and March 31^st, the French Film Festival will tour Australia like a traveling salesman, stopping in Sydney (2-21^st March), Melbourne (4-21^st March), Canberra (18-31^st March), Brisbane (17-31^st March) Perth (17-31^st March) and Adelaide (18-31^st March) to offer audiences a splash of their ol’ fashioned French film elixir.

This year, the program boasts the Australian première (that’s French for premiere) of COCO CHANEL AND IGOR STRAVINSKY. As stylish as a Chanel gown and as compelling as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”, COCO AND STRAVINSKY focuses on the intense relationship between the famous designer and the controversial composer. Although this rumoured affair has never been confirmed, the film, which was based on the novel by Chris Greenhalgh, is nonetheless a stirring imagining of the events.

Featuring the lovely Sophie Marceau and the soon-to-be-huge Christa Theret, LOL is a glossy, clever comedy. In text-speak, LOL means “laughing out loud”, but in this case it is also a nickname for our heroine, Lola. Lol is an impossibly beautiful fifteen-year-old who lives with her freshly-divorced mum, Anne (the glamourous Sophie Marceau) in Paris. When Lol is reunited with her boyfriend in the schoolyard after summer vacation, he blithely tells her that he slept with somebody else over the break. Lol responds to this news as any self-respecting modern girl would: she says that she too was unfaithful, dumps his sorry arse and starts cosying up to their mutual best friend, Maël. As it turns out, Anne is going through many of the same relationship dramas as her daughter, so no-one is better equipped to understand Lol’s problems, if she would only confide…

For 11 year-old Paloma, life is deeply, tragically boring. She lives in pampered luxury in one of Paris’ fanciest apartment buildings and, in a bid to illuminate the absurdities of life, she decides to film the people around her. In the same building but a million miles away is the housekeeper, Renee. She meets with society’s expectations of what a housekeeper should be: reliable but emotionally barren, polite yet intellectually inferior. But underneath her dreary veneer lies the passion of a poet, the spirit of an artist and a mind possessing such insightful wisdom that it surpasses that of her employers. But unknown to them both, a sudden acquaintance with their elegant and enigmatic new neighbour, Mr Ozu, will change their lives forever.

In the tradition of AUSTIN POWERS but without the crass sense of humour comes OSS 117. Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, aka OSS 117, is the French spy considered by his superiors to be the best in the business. The year is 1967 – he’s been sent on a mission to Rio de Janeiro, to find a former high-ranking Nazi who went into exile in South America after the war. His eventful investigation takes him all across Brazil, from Rio to Brasilia and the Iguazu Falls, accompanied by a charming Mossad agent who is also looking for the Nazi. The man is charming, and so is the young woman. Set to the strains of bossa nova, their tale is by turns an adventure, a love story and a side-splitting comedy.

In Nazi-occupied France, the poet Missak Manouchian leads a rag-tag bunch of resistance guerillas to fight against their oppressors. Comprised of youngsters and immigrants, the “Army of Crime” leads a clandestine battle against the Nazi occupiers. Based on a true story, ARMY OF CRIME depicts a truly important historic moment in which ordinary people showed extraordinary heroism.