Im Alter von Ellen (At Ellen's Age) is a midlife crisis drama featuring stewardess Jeanne Balibar, whose man has strayed. An incident involving a leopard on a tarmac hits her with epiphanic force and she deplanes inopportunely, Steven Slater style, walking away from her job and her settled life. The film mirrors Ellen's upheaved state, flitting about haphazardly until she alights on her new life-direction, itself fraught with danger, and ends on an uncertain note. Shot super-16 and digitally blown up to 35mm, it does little to assert itself visually, but has a certain sense of poetics in its montage.
D'Amour et d'eau fraîche (Living on Love Alone), though shown 35mm, was shot digitally. Fortunately director Isabelle Czajka chose a camera with sufficient resolution to render a coherent big-screen image, if not as aesthetically pleasing as one shot on film. Continuing with the theme of workplace dysfunction, this film features a young girl anxious to make it on her own but hapless on the job. At times caring too much, at others too little, she can't maintain steady employment. A series of boyfriends, however, is willing to toss her a few euros for a roll in the hay. One of these is a petty criminal, and our heroine is drawn into his vocation. Things could end messily....
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In Notre étrangère (The Place in Between), Amy, by appearances a Burkinan adoptee of a French family, pines for her real mother and travels to her birthplace to find her. As in Incendies, to which this film bears some kinship, Amy's dislocation in her ancestral land, where the locals consider her "white", is emphasized when Dioula dialogue remains unsubtitled (though often diegetically translated, not always reliably). Of the two films, Notre étrangère is by far the more soft-spoken in its dramatic turns and its stabs at profundity, perhaps needing a bit more poetic connective tissue, and its colorful videography can't hold a candle to the devastating imagery of Incendies.
Recent festivals have brought us superlative Iranian films like Iron Island and The White Meadows. I'd hoped Circumstance would continue this tradition. But no, the NYU-schooled director has made a mishmash of Iranian, French, and Hollywood conventions, digitally blowing up her super-16 photography to 35mm scope in LA with underwhelming results. Despite its questionable provenance, the end product does show a compositional flair, and contains far more sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll than a pure Iranian production ever could. Chastity, though, can sometimes be a virtue.
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A alegria, whose translation The Joy doesn't quite evoke the Beethoven ditty that plays throughout, fancies itself a Weerasethakulian exploration of the mythic frontier between the man-made and the primordial. It presumes a fascination in the viewer for a bit of local Brazilian folkloric arcana, which might have come to pass were the horrendous video imagery (standard def?) not wholly unsuited to 35mm blow-up.
Glückliche Fügung (Blessed Events) over its 10-month or so story time conveys the emotional experiences of a mother-to-be. Nothing is shown save events directly affecting or affected by our nearly-nameless protagonist. As such, one wonders why a scope frame was chosen over the intimacy of, say, the academy ratio, particularly as the photography was non-anamorphic (just like all the other scope films I saw in this festival--sign o' the times), digitally squeezed into its ultimate format.