Ma vraie vie à Rouen (Olivier Ducastel / Jacques Martineau, 2002)

Etienne's mother is a bit worried. She thinks, her son should get hobbies that involve other people. Instead he is skating and filming his family. A movie filmed with a video camera with amateur footage of normal lives sounds like the perfect recipe for 100 minutes worth of yawning, however Ducastel and Martineau manages to get me involved and it is difficult to catch my intention.
While Etienne gets more confident with his camera, he also keeps getting on people's nerve  who don't want to be captured. Etienne hangs out with his best friend Ludovic, but while the latter is interested in the chicks, Etienne all the times backs out. This in spite of his plan to get finally laid. It is always embarrassing for Etienne when someone mentions, that he is a handsome guy and that he should find some girls to hang out with. It doesn't take long until Etienne's real obsession becomes evident - the male body.
Coming of age has been told and will be told many times. To see it through the eyes and the lens of the main character is a bold and successful experiment. Everybody who likes people should see this film.
9)10

Au revoir là-haut (2017, Albert Dupontel)

The Great War binds the lives of three men together. On one side are the accountant Albert (played by Dupontel) and the artist Edouard (brilliant as ever Nahuel Pérez Biscayart). On the other side we have the trigger-happy Henri d'Aulnay-Pradelle Laurent Lafitte, to whom I haven't payed much attention before). November 9, 1918. Everybody is waiting for the end of the war, with the exception of Pradelle. He sends his people on a useless mission. The jaw of Edouard is shot off, Albert wakes up under a dead horse, but is otherwise not wounded. When Edouard sees his deformations, he wants to die. However. Albert deletes him only from the archives, as Edouard doesn't want to return to his family.
Albert doesn't get his previous job back, back still he manages to make enough money, so that they can survive. Emile, a girl from the neighborhood, who can understand Edouard, joins them. Edouard takes up drawing again, but now he sketches war monuments: banal, ugly and expensive - that is the key to success.
See You Up There starts as a serious war drama, trenches, a dog finding the way overt the battlefield, tired soldiers waiting for the truce and senseless war action full with realistic detail. A gripping scene is when Edouard realizes that a part of his face is missing. It become sort of costume drama in postwar Paris with the losers and the winners of the Great War. The film changes direction again after some time. When we learn about the family background of Edouard, family drama is added. And when Edouard invents the scheme to make money by selling war monuments a touch of comedy id added.
Viewers of See You Up There are in for a treat. The longer you watch the film, the greater the pleasure. It's for people who like brilliant dialogues and witty comedies. Obviously it is not a crowd pleaser. When I saw the film today, I was in for a "private performance".
9/10

Paulette (2013, Jérôme Enrico)

A comedy about old-age poverty? Including people that were labelled as racaille (thugs)? Here you go - Ken Loach gone funny.
Paulette has a very little pension and can hardly survive. She doesn't pay her bills, is a shameful dumpster diver and a racist, as she says that people with a darker skin live better. Her son in law is black and she hates her grandson. (What kind of mother will give her son to such a bitch?) From her son in law, who is working at the police, she learns that the wealth of the young people is from drug dealing. She wants to enter that business also and gets the chance when she catches a package of weed. The other dealers don't like the extra competition, so Paulette changes her business model. She processes the drugs in biscuits and cakes. However, when she refuses to sell her pain chocolat to school kids, the drug mafia is no longer amused. - In the end she transfers her bakery to Amsterdam.
Bernadette Lafont is grumpy Paulette. Her character is changing during the film. With success and income she becomes a jolly grandmother. Money obviously makes people happy.
This film has a realistic setting, but a fairy tale narration. So we get a conciliatory narration, some fanciful characters and altogether a feel good experience. An amusing, not too demanding film.
5/10

La tourneuse de pages (2006, Denis Dercourt)

Chabrol hasn't lived in vain, as shows The Page Turner. This has been labelled as a thriller. Genre labels might help to decide me if I want to see a certain film, but they also raise certain expectations as to that genre as to excitement and suspense. I think this film was lacking both excitement and suspense, but it was quite well as a drama.
Mélanie is an aspiring pianist. During an important audition she is distracted by one of the judges, Ariane. This affects her performance and she actually fails. Some years later Mélanie has the chance to ruin the life of Ariane.
I don't agree with this POV: this is not about the obsession and hatred of a girl, but about ruining another life. We all know that Ariane did not ruin the plans of Mélanie on purpose. So, it is hard, if not impossible, to sympathize with Mélanie and her cold revenge. This could work, if it was narrated in a neutral voice, but it is not. The character of Mélanie remains quite shallow. I was expecting something more, like an examination of Mélanie's hatred, but it never came. Pity.
5/10

Une rencontre (2014, Lisa Azuelos)

A story that didn't start will never end - this is the tag line of this film. Recently too many "romantic comedies" are in my backlog - or are they just chick flicks? This is not exactly my type of feel good film.
A family father meets an attractive writer at a book fair. He thinks that he is happily married, but actually he has better relations to his children than to his wife. She is approaching MILF-age, so young and beautiful are around her like moiths around the light. But she also falls for the family father. There is only one but - "married men have no dick". Meaning - she does not want to be a mistress and she respects the instution of marriage for the sake of the wife. So they hug and don't exchange phone numbers. So they meet by chance and that is it. The film plays with conventions - just to confirm them.
I saw this film before and forgot about it - maybe these notes will help me to remember it, if I encounter it another time.
4/10

Espèces menacées (2017, Gilles Bourdos)

Once again thank to the Biennale for making this accessible already now, just after the world premiere.
This is a film with three intertwined stories and, as usual in this kind of film, their ways and fates start crossing each other.
There are Tomasz and Joséphine. We see that things start to go wrong for them already in theur marriage night. One year later their marriage is completely abusive. Josephine has been forced to cut all relations with her parents, but she refuses help. She has become a mental slave of her husband.
There is Melanie and her father. Melanie is going to marry Jan, a professor who is 18 years older than her father. He is so furious that he doesn't report his own marital problems. We are not focussing very much on this story.
Melanie's husband is the professor of Anthony. He has problems to get acquainted with girls. His mother has been transferred to a psychiatric ward, because she torched her husband's car. She has a refusing attitude towards her son, but at last they find a consensus.
This is a film about the absence of parents. Tomas, the worker has no parents at all. He never mentions them. He forces his wife to cut all connections to her parents. It is a somewhat embarrassing to note that middle and upper class does not have similar problems. They seem to be able to communicate and to relate better to each other. I find this disbalance rather disturbing.
So misery all the way through (maybe with the exception of Melanie and her silver daddy). But  this is not exactly social realism, but rather middle-class misery. It is not bleak, but filmed under the bright sun of southern France. Only indoor scenes have a tendency to be rather sombre.
Unfortunately the film becomes a bit sentimental at the end, but on the whole this film is quite enjoyable.
8/10

Flandres (2006, Bruno Dumont)

I was both chocked and fascinated by this film. It is a great and an ugly film. It comes as a pitiless, almost clinical study about dehumanization, how ordinary people can be trained to commit atrocities. The main character is Demester, a farmer in a miserable region of a French-speaking country. He and other people in that region have no perspective for the future. So it seems to be a ticket out of the local misery. There is a war going on in an unnamed country where people speak Arabic. They commit horrible atrocities and are also victims for similar retaliations.Demestre returns and cannot really communicate what he has been through.
As said, this film is ruthless and drills to the bone. We don't feel pity for all the characters involved. This film is even bleaker than Ordinary People by Vladimir Perišić (2009).
8/10