The Alternate César Awards: César du meilleur film (Best Film)

[tenia]

Part of the movie's subtext in any case goes indeed in line with Bedos' overall conservative personal vision of the world. In this regard, what you're pointing out is indeed there (and true enough : Victor's new life is a happier one, Marianne's a sadder one), and is indeed some kind of a riff on "it was better before".

[Black Hat]

Illusions perdues (Xavier Giannoli)

Man, did I hate this predictable, schlockfest of a movie, but it did seem to be a crowd-pleaser.

[domino harvey]

Finally, for this year, I would advise (if an English-friendly release exists) to give a spin to Le cousin, with Chabat and Timsit, which I always found to be a good cop story.

After loving Corneau’s blasphemous remake of Melville’s Le deuxieme soufflé, which just pushes style as substance about 1000 meters past its normal breaking point to great success that vastly outpaces the original (warning: I’m in the minority in believing this), I had high hopes for Le cousin but was unfortunately underwhelmed. The film never makes up its mind if its a comedy or not (having two comic actors in the lead would say it is, but much of this isn’t aiming for laffs), and the most memorable scenes, like Patrick Timsit’s “Nounours” showing his claws by suddenly beating an impudent drug dealer’s face into broken glass, don’t gel with the tone surrounding them. Also Anges Jaoui’s character is one of the most worthless underwritten wives I’ve ever seen in one of these policiers

[domino harvey]

Illusions perdues (Xavier Giannoli)

Man, did I hate this predictable, schlockfest of a movie, but it did seem to be a crowd-pleaser.

Call me one of the crowd, because I thought this was exceedingly entertaining. Two and a half hours fly by in this compelling examination of naïveté, as our protagonist learns the hard way that if you aren't waved in past the red velvet rope by default, be wary of promises to be snuck in around the back. Easy to see why Vincent Lacoste won the Cesar, his editor is the most entertaining of the characters on display, and his bit about how to turn any positive sentiment about a work into something negative when writing a review is the film's smartest and funniest moment (and now we know how Armond White writes his reviews... wait, does he even still write reviews?). Fundamentally I like any movie that seems vaguely aspirational and optimistic and then reveals it knows how the world actually works. Shout out as well to Jeanne Balibar's subtly intimidating performance as That Woman You Don't Want to Fuck With

[diamonds]

Easy to see why Vincent Lacoste won the Cesar, his editor is the most entertaining of the characters on display, and his bit about how to turn any positive sentiment about a work into something negative when writing a review is the film's smartest and funniest moment (and now we know how Armond White writes his reviews... wait, does he even still write reviews?)

You are actually aligned with White (at least this once), who had some very kind words to say about this film.

[domino harvey]

By pretending the film’s attacks on the Facebook Forwardization of his fellow right wingers are actually directed at the left of today just because they are depicted by the left of yesterday! Hilarious as always, he knows perfectly well who the target actually is

[the preacher]

Critics vs. academics

For anyone interested, here is something that (I think) is not published anywhere: SFCC (syndicat français de la critique de cinéma)'s top French films since 2010:

2010
1.Des hommes et des dieux, Xavier Beauvois
2.Ghost Writer (The), Roman Polanski
3.Carlos, le film, Olivier Assayas
4.Tournée, Mathieu Amalric
5.Nom des gens (Le), Michel Leclerc

2011
1.Exercice de l'État (L'), Pierre Schoeller
2.Le Havre, Aki Kaurismäki
3.Artist (The), Michel Hazanavicius
4.Guerre est déclarée (La), Valérie Donzelli
5.Pater, Alain Cavalier

2012
1.Amour, Michael Haneke
2.Holy Motors. Leos Carax
3.Adieux à la reine (Les), Benoît Jacquot
4.Camille redouble, Noémie Lvovsky
5.De rouille et d'os, Jacques Audiard

2013
1.Vie d'Adèle (La) - Chapitres 1 et 2, Abdellatif Kechiche
2.Inconnu du lac (L'), Alain Guiraudie
3.Suzanne, Katell Quillévéré
4.Vénus à la fourrure (La), Roman Polanski
5.Passé (Le), Asghar Farhadi

2014
1.Timbuktu, Abderrahmane Sissako
2.Sils Maria, Olivier Assayas
3.Saint Laurent, Bertrand Bonello
4.Bird People, Pascale Ferran
5.Combattants (Les), Thomas Cailley

2015
1.Fatima, Philippe Faucon
2.Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse - Nos Arcadies, Arnaud Desplechin
3.Mustang Deniz Gamze Ergüven
4.Loi du marché (La), Stéphane Brizé
5.Ombre des femmes (L'),Philippe Garrel

2016
1.Elle, Paul Verhoeven
2.Frantz, François Ozon
3.Mort de Louis XIV (La), Albert Serra
4.Tortue rouge (La), Michael Dudok de Wit
5.Une vie, Stéphane Brizé

2017
1.120 battements par minute, Robin Campillo
2.Barbara, Mathieu Amalric
3.Grave, Julia Ducournau
4.Carré 35, Éric Caravaca
5.Petit paysan, Hubert Charuel
Villa (La) Robert Guédiguian

2018
1.MEKTOUB MY LOVE : CANTO UNO de Abdellatif Kechiche
2.JUSQU'A LA GARDE de Xavier Legrand
3.FRERES SISTERS (LE) de Jacques Audiard
4.DOULEUR (LA) de Emmanuel Finkiel
5.AMANDA de Mikhaël Hers

2019
1.Les Misérables de Ladj Ly
2.Portait de la jeune fille en feu de Céline Sciamma
3.J’accuse de Roman Polanski
4.J’ai perdu mon corps de Jérémy Clapin
5.Gloria Mundi de Robert Guédiguian

2020
1.LES CHOSES QU'ON DIT, LES CHOSES QU'ON FAIT, Emmanuel Mouret
2.ADOLESCENTES, Sébastien Lifshitz
3.ADIEU LES CONS, Albert Dupontel
4.ANTOINETTE DANS LES CÉVENNES, Caroline Vignal
5.LE SEL DES LARMES, Philippe Garrel

2021
1.ONODA de Arthur Harari
2.ANNETTE de Leos Carax
3.ILLUSIONS PERDUES de Xavier Giannoli
4.ÉVENEMENT (L') de Audrey Diwan
5.À L'ABORDAGE de Guillaume Brac

[domino harvey]

En corps reminded me a lot of Klapisch's Ni pour, ni contre (bien au contraire)-- lots of style and confident filmmaking, but zero dramatic stakes whatsoever. A perfectly charming crowdpleaser, though, and I liked seeing François Civil playing such a different role from BAC Nord despite looking like he just wandered over to this set from that one. Best opening credits since the New Pope though!

[tenia]

I'm currently catching up with 2023's Césars nominees and winners, and am curious about what would domino do with some of these, in particular L’innocent which felt like such a typical mediocre “very French” movie.

On a side note, we watched En corps a few days ago, and despite our overall positive feelings towards Klaspisch' filmography overall, it felt like one of his least interesting movie. Disjointed, never really funny nor close enough to properly written, it's also a movie that spends way too much time explaining out loud metaphors already way too obvious, adding unsubtlety to unsubtlety.

The underlying issue is that it's a very trite story to begin with, and one that constantly feels like a Parisian bourgeois fantasy at that, where everyplace offers either a view on the Eiffel tower or the Sacré-Coeur, where the biggest problems one can have is a Wi-Fi problem and where you need to go to Bretagne to find back "grounded roots" vs "classical ballet which is more about dreaming". Yeah, right.
It doesn't help that despite being 2 hours long, the utmost majority of the characters are paper-thin at best, awful caricatures at worst, like Podalydès' father figure.

That the movie seemingly has no idea how to blend seamlessly all this together just tops it up, starting with an opening that is either 1h30 too short or 10 minutes too long, followed by a Total Recall-esque opening credits that I'm still trying to figure out what it has to do with anything.

Fortunately, Pio Marmaï saves his scenes, but it's like 5 minutes total, so less than Muriel Robin's Captain Obvious screentime.

[domino harvey]

Ha, I thought the film peaked with the aforementioned first ten minutes and opening credits. I do think they serve a narrative function, but only in retrospect

Spoiler

with the classically trained ballerinas captured participating in a highly stylized version of the bombastic modern dance the protagonist will embrace later in the film

Agree 100% with you on Podalydes’ character in the film though— a complete waste of a great actor stuck in the most cliched archetype imaginable. One of the worst written characters I’ve seen in a film in recent memory

I really wish the film had leaned into the dramatic possibilities of her never being able to dance again and stuck in a food truck serving other dancers, but I guess that was asking too much from fluff like this! Plus then, boom, more Marmai too!

[domino harvey]

Bedos' next film (which somehow doesn't star his ingenue) will pick up the mantle and it has one of the greatest titles I've ever heard: OSS 117 : Alerte rouge en Afrique noire. Given Bedos' clear 70s fetishism in his first two films, I imagine he'll fit right in with the late 60s spy film aesthetic. I kind of doubt this will be the great film I think we'll eventually get from Bedos, but I'll still be watching it (especially since Pierre Niney, memorably called "Dujardin Lite" in 20 ans d'ecart, will star alongside Dujardin!)

Finally caught up with this and thought it ranked somewhere between the first and second, though I'm aware it received a hostile reception from French audiences and critics alike. I won't argue against complaints that the anticolonial jokes are on the nose, but it felt fully in line with the racial critiques of the second film (and Dujardin's futile attempts at not being racist are hilarious) and while I think Bedos chickens out with the Niney punchline (if French cinema also relies of focus groups, surely this is a product of that), he doesn't flinch with the ironic tone of the overall finale here. The icy reception was perhaps an example of mocking the audience who would show up for this film while not offering something the audience who would be sympathetic wants to see? Also clearly the target here is more late 70s/early 80s Bond than the 60s chic of the first two OSS reduxes, which Bedos is able to showboat within stylistically but which feels very familiar. Some good laughs, some groaners, another three star "Not quite reaching your potential" You Tried sticker for Bedos' directorial efforts from me

Also recently discovered Calmos, a YouTube film channel that has a series of videos about French comedies, which has a good video essay explaining the French comic tradition of the first OSS 117 Dujardin film (Not all of this channel's videos are subtitled, but this one is, and the one on Bacri/Jaoui is as well)

[tenia]

The issue we had in France with the movie actually mostly had to do with Bedos taking against the newer generations with a simplistic message à la "ah, the good ol' times", in line with his personal not really progressive views, even if it means in the end siding more than ever with OSS instead of making him the butt of the jokes (which was argued is quite a wrong turn following the past 2 movies).

In the end, OSS is legitimised feeling it was better before (and Niney's fate symbolised how the previous generation knows and the new one is stupid) when one could make dirty jokes to women and be racist instead of being now in a world where anti-racism makes white privileged males the bagage-bearers instead of the bagage-bearers themselves. It also was, as depicted in the movie, a supposedly more exciting world instead of the dull job OSS gets into when switching to an IT desk job.

It's also not nearly funny enough for such a long movie.

[domino harvey]

I greatly enjoyed Tavernier’s Capitaine Conan. This is a dirty, unvarnished, and complicated companion piece to War Hunt, with a more sympathetic gonzo marauder to complicate audience response. I particularly liked the film for how it essentially transposed a “dirty cop” policier into a WWI battlefront narrative. The comradeship between the two leads is unlikely yet believable and earned, and the film delighted me by never going into the obvious plot threads these kind of head-butting collisions could lead to. Some terrific controlled chaos in the battle scenes too, some of the best I can recall, and Claude Rich is hilarious as the comic relief gourmand general

[domino harvey]

Caught up with this year’s winner, La Nuit du 12, and thought it was awful and surely amongst the worst films to ever win the top award. A total nothing procedural that screeches everything (or what precious little is here that could be called everything) to a halt a good six or seven times to express Social Consciousness and/or Important Zeitgeist Signaling by literally having characters say, aloud, “There’s something wrong between men and women” and/or lament slut shaming, in what amounts to the least subtle filmmaker handholding I’ve seen since the heyday of Stanley Kramer

[domino harvey]

First post updated with this year's nominees:

2023
Anatomie d'une chute (Justine Triet)
Chien de la casse (Jean-Baptiste Durand)
Je verrai toujours vos visages (Jeanne Herry)
Le procès Goldman (Cedric Kahn)
Le Règne animal (Thomas Cailley)

[domino harvey]

2024
Emilia Perez (Jacques Audiard) Netflix
En fanfare (Emmanuel Courcol)
L'histoire de Souleymane (Boris Lojkine)
Le comte de Monte-Cristo (Matthieu Delaporte/Alexandre de la Patelliere) RA Samuel Goldwyn
Misericorde (Alain Guiraudie)

First post updated with this year's nominees. L’amour ouf somehow got THIRTEEN nominations but missed the big one-- what the hell happened there

[Never Cursed]

2024
Emilia Perez (Jacques Audiard) Netflix
En fanfare (Emmanuel Courcol)
L'histoire de Souleymane (Boris Lojkine)
Le comte de Monte-Cristo (Matthieu Delaporte/Alexandre de la Patelliere) RA Samuel Goldwyn
Misericorde (Alain Guiraudie)

First post updated with this year's nominees. L’amour ouf somehow got THIRTEEN nominations but missed the big one-- what the hell happened there

FYI Misericorde is with Janus/Sideshow and will be theatrically released in March of this year in the states, and Le procès Goldman can be rented on Amazon. If you want/think it would be useful, I can double-check other recent titles

[domino harvey]

Yeah, if there are any I missed, that'd be great!

[Never Cursed]

Yeah, if there are any I missed, that'd be great!

2011
La Guerre est déclarée (Valérie Donzelli) - streaming on Amazon Prime w/English subtitles (as Declaration of War)

2017
Barbara (Mathieu Amalric) - streaming on Amazon Prime w/English subtitles
Le Brio (Yvan Attal) - streaming on Amazon Prime w/English subtitles in Great Britain and Ireland (or using a VPN)

2018
Pupille (Jeanne Henry) - streaming on Amazon Prime w/English subtitles (as In Safe Hands)

2019
J’accuse (Roman Polanski) - streaming on HBO Max with English subtitles in Poland (or using a VPN, under English title An Officer and a Spy)
La belle époque (Nicolas Bedos) - streaming on HBO Max with English subtitles in Poland (or using a VPN)
Roubaix une lumière (Arnaud Desplechin) - streaming on Madman's website with English subtitles in Australia (or using a VPN)

2020
Antoinette dans les Cévennes (Caroline Vignal) - streaming on Amazon Prime w/English subtitles in the United States (or using a VPN, under English title My Donkey, My Lover & I)
Été 85 (Francois Ozon) - streaming on Amazon Prime w/English subtitles in the United States (or using a VPN, under English title Summer of 85)
Adieu les cons (Albert Dupontel) is on Netflix France. I couldn't get into my Netflix account on my computer to test it with a VPN, but it might have English subtitles.

2021
BAC Nord (Cedric Jimenez) - streaming on Netflix worldwide under English title The Stronghold
Illusions perdues (Xavier Giannoli) Music Box blu-ray now out, also streaming on Amazon Prime
Onoda, 10,000 nuits dans la jungle (Arthur Harari) Third Window Films blu-ray now out, also streaming on Amazon Prime in the United Kingdom and Ireland (or using a VPN)

2022
En corps (Cedric Klapisch) - streaming on Amazon Prime w/English subtitles in the United States (or using a VPN, under English title Rise)
La Nuit du 12 (Dominik Moll) - streaming on HBO Max with English subtitles in Poland (or using a VPN, under English title The Night of the 12th)

2023
Chien de la casse (Jean-Baptiste Durand) - streaming on Amazon Prime w/English subtitles in the United States (or using a VPN, under English title Junkyard Dog)

First of all, a COLOSSAL hand to streamwithvpn.com for providing most of this information. I'm just the middleman, really. That website does everything that I wish so, so many other "check to see if this is on a streaming service" sites would do. I can safely recommend using it to anyone who wants to track down a streaming copy of a new release worldwide. It tells you exactly in which countries a particular film is present on a particular service and lets you search by whatever language title you want (though really generic titles might be harder to find). It indexes more streaming services than the ones mentioned above, too: those of you with Mubi, Canal+, or Spanish FilmIn subscriptions might want to take a look for some of the titles not listed.

Second, in the interest of transparency, I tested all of the HBO Max streaming copies, but not any of the rentable ones. Some of those in the latter category might not work if you are connecting through a VPN or if your payment processor isn't local - I don't know! Using ExpressVPN in the United States, I was able to play all of the HBO Max Poland titles listed above with English subs and without issue (though obviously the quality of the image might depend on your internet speed). I was able to get a 1080p stream continuously, but I'm in a place with a very good internet connection right now.

[domino harvey]

Wow, thanks for this, I've updated the post. Also, if you're already doing VPN stuff, set your country to France and be amazed at how many older French films (with English subs!) there are on Netflix, as France requires the service to legally offer a certain percent of French films overall.

Chien de la casse is left over from last year's MyFrenchFilmfestival, as Amazon forgot to take down all of last year's titles

[domino harvey]

This year’s nominee L'histoire de Souleymane is surprisingly getting a Blu ray release from Kino next month

[Never Cursed]

This year’s nominee L'histoire de Souleymane is surprisingly getting a Blu ray release from Kino next month

It was in theaters here in New York for a little while. Apparently Sean Baker was a part of getting the film US distribution (which makes sense, as it sounds quite similar to Take Out)

[domino harvey]

L’amour ouf somehow got THIRTEEN nominations but missed the big one-- what the hell happened there

This got both a 4K and a Blu release in France and like his first film as director, it has English subs. Unfortunately I can find no American retailer or seller who has it available, so I’ll have to wait for the tariffs to fade away because there doesn’t appear to be a way for me to purchase it from France

[domino harvey]

Le comte de Monte-Cristo is entertaining only in as much as the source material is entertaining, but nothing brought to this does anything with these parts (and an argument could be made that nothing was even brought to this material). This looked very much like three episodes of prestige television and while three hours breezed by, I suspect watching any other treatment of the source text would offer the same return, so it feels unfair to let this adaptation receive that credit. Also Vassali Schneider has Gen Z face and it was distracting! Lord help us as this becomes more and more of a problem (all the more reason to join me in mostly staying in the distant past)

[knives]

Caught up with this year’s winner, La Nuit du 12, and thought it was awful and surely amongst the worst films to ever win the top award. A total nothing procedural that screeches everything (or what precious little is here that could be called everything) to a halt a good six or seven times to express Social Consciousness and/or Important Zeitgeist Signaling by literally having characters say, aloud, “There’s something wrong between men and women” and/or lament slut shaming, in what amounts to the least subtle filmmaker handholding I’ve seen since the heyday of Stanley Kramer

You’re 100% right, but I nonetheless enjoyed the motions of the procedural whereas most modern ones leave me wanting.