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If the summer weather is anything like the last couple of months of spring we expect to see you indoors with a aran jumper on, quite possibly with us . The schedule for the summer is:
8th June – The Artist
13th July – Le Harvre
10th August – Drive
Remember, these are on a FRIDAY now, and there’s dinner and a drink included. Rather good films, please come along.
Panini or Pizza, with potato wedges & salad
PLUS A glass of beer, wine or hot drink
AND entrance to the film
ALL for £7.50
Levenshulme Film Club on Friday – The cafe opens at 6pm not 7pm as previously stated. The film still starts at 7.30pm
LFC Present: Potiche (15, 103m, French) 7pm Thurs 8th Feb
Dear All -
A feisty French wife takes on her husband’s business and triumphs…
Catherine Deneuve stars in Francois Ozon’s stage adaptation, a hilarious French comedy of deliberate naffness, says Peter Bradshaw
Farce in the factory … Catherine Deneuve.
If Hillary and Tenzing were to erect a tent at Everest’s peak, on stilts, the overall effect could not be more high camp than this bizarre and often hilarious 1970s-set drawing-room comedy from French film-maker François Ozon, and starring a resplendent Catherine Deneuve. It is a period pastiche executed with brilliant attention to detail and a weird, suppressed passion, like a sitcom in a bad dream. A batsqueak of strangeness is audible above the dialogue and perky orchestral score, and something odd occasionally peeps out from the soft furnishings. Buñuel might have taken it further; Ozon coolly leaves it at the garish, minutely rendered surface level. There is, however, more than enough here to generate comedy, satire and shrewd comment on what might be going on in the collective mind of Giscard d’Estaing’s France, or Sarkozy’s France.
Deneuve is demure, poised, twinkly-eyed, conveying a sense that all her character’s responses to life are being held tactfully in reserve. She plays Suzanne Pujol, a “potiche“, or trophy wife. Mme Pujol’s household is wealthy but not super-rich. Her cantankerous and reactionary husband Robert (Fabrice Luchini) is the president of the factory Suzanne’s father originally founded; his aggressive and insensitive management style has done nothing to cool a growing atmosphere of unrest.
This factory makes umbrellas, and Ozon naturally wants to evoke the memory of a young Deneuve in the 1964 movie The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, although this is adapted from the 1980 stage play by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy in which the umbrella factory was also featured. It is a piece of French “boulevard theatre”, a staid convention whose nearest Anglo-Saxon match is perhaps the American “dinner theatre” or the Whitehall farces of Brian Rix.
Suzanne’s daughter Joëlle (Judith Godrèche) is as rightwing as her father; her student son Laurent (Jérémie Rénier) is a trendy lefty. Worldly Suzanne accepts the fact that her husband is having an affair with his mousy and resentful secretary Nadège (Karin Viard), but when Robert’s health is shattered by a violent strike, Suzanne has to take over the factory, and does so with the help of a secret ex-lover, the communist mayor Maurice Babin, tenderly played by Gérard Depardieu. She is a glorious success, but her personal life is now in uproar.
When I first saw Potiche at the Venice film festival last year, it seemed so intensely French that there could not possibly be any British equivalent. (It is similar to, but far more satisfying and rounded than Ozon’s other stage pastiche, 8 Women, from 2002.) I mused on something similar by Michael Winterbottom – like Ozon, a prolific, wide-ranging director – who might direct a piece scripted by Julian Fellowes. Actually, there are hints here of Benny Hill and Carry On in the broad comedy style. When Robert lies ill, Nadège bustles into his sick-room with some of her homemade broth. “I thought I would give you my speciality,” she beams. “Yes,” says Robert thoughtfully, undoing his pyjama trousers, “… perhaps it will do me some good.” “I meant my soup!” snaps Nadège. Ozon might have been tempted to put in a trombone parp.
Everything in Potiche throbs and shimmers with naffness: its furnishings have a kind of retro-porn look, without the sex – without the explicit sex anyway. Ozon supercharges its datedness, and its parochial quality, with a meticulous observational intensity. Yet it can also upend expectations. When Laurent begins work as a designer at the factory, he develops swishy, campy mannerisms but a final reveal, which appears to point to Laurent’s gayness, actually discloses something other than homosexuality. When Deneuve is seen doing some stately jogging at the beginning and end of the movie in her chi-chi tracksuit, sighing at the deer and squirrels she sees, and even writing little verses, we are invited to laugh with, not at her. In fact the whole movie stays the same side of the laugh-at/laugh-with borderline. It is superbly acted and designed. Generally stage adaptations taken from this kind of material lose their way when they have to venture out through the French windows into the world beyond. But the scenes outside the factory gates, the tatty, fag-ashy factory conference room, Babin’s office, the cheesy disco nightspot – they are all brilliantly presented.
Potiche comes to a dramatic point when Robert Pujol ferociously rejects any pay rises. “To earn more, they have to work more!” he yells, a line that could have been scripted for him by President Sarkozy himself. But it is Mme Pujol who is to cultivate a political career. With her swept-up hair and queenly manner, she might be aping a certain British party leader – in style if not ideology – who in 1977 was beginning to make her presence felt. British politicians are not mentioned, but, tellingly, British shareholders make up an important voting bloc on the company board.
Every day, the French public are presented with the curious spectacle of President Sarkozy being towered over by his beaming wife, Carla Bruni, a figure whose public profile is vigorously independent of his. Once modish and exciting, the Sarkozy reign is reportedly beginning to look dated and tiresome. There is something absurd in it, something absurd in all power couples, or the power relations in all marriages. Potiche is a potent comedy for these conservative times.
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LFC is a not-for-profit community cinema project that is open to everyone. We’re looking for volunteers - if you’d like to get involved e-mail this address or call Tom on 07833 461222.
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Just a quick amendment:
Levenshulme Film Club on Friday – The cafe opens at 6pm not 7pm as previously stated. The film still starts at 7.30pm
Dear All -
It’s a New Year and at LFC we’ve decided to try a new format for film evening…
Dear Film Lovers,
There will be no film this month. LFC screenings will re-start for 2012 on Thursday 9th February (film TBC) and will be on the second Thursday of the month thereafter.
We are in need of volunteers to help run the club to ensure its long-term sustainability. Please do get in touch if you would like to get involved in the club (choosing and sourcing films, advertising and promoting, helping on the door etc.).
I am also always open to suggestions of films to show and ideas for improving the club / general experience!
See you in February!
Tom, John and Jen
Water for Elephants (Cert 12A, 120 min) Thursday 8th December Doors open 7pm. Film starts 7.30pm. £4.50. Set in Depression-era America, a veterinary student abandons his studies after his parents are killed and joins a travelling circus as their vet. For anyone who’s ever longed to see Reese Witherspoon astride an elephant, this is the film for you…
Meet Me in St Louis (Cert U, 113 min) Thursday 3rd November (NB not the 2nd Thursday of the month this time!)
With an special introductory talk by Rt Hon Sir Gerald Kaufman MP author of a book on the making of the film
Doors open 6.30pm. Talk starts 7pm. £4.50 (£2.50 Concessions).
An all time classic musical starring Judy Garland
Review by Time Out
Minnelli’s captivating musical still comes up fresh as paint with each successive viewing, as charmingly, romantically nostalgic as an old valentine. One reason, quite apart from the wit and warmth of the characterisations or the skill with which Minnelli integrates the numbers, is that the seismic little shudders of dismay that shake the St Louis family of 1903 – threatened with a move to New York, where father has a better job waiting – seem to hint at the end of an era and the disappearance of a world where such uncomplicated happiness can exist. It’s a feeling which the self-enclosed formality of the film encourages, with its division into four acts, each introduced by a filigreed tintype from the family album which gradually springs to life. One of the great musicals.
APOLOGIES!
…to anyone who came to see Senna last month and had difficulty seeing the subtitles. We will ensure that this the positioning of the screen / subtitles is addressed for future films with subtitles.
Next Showing…..
Thus 8th December – “Water for Elephants”
