Winter Boy (Christophe Honoré, 2022)

In the 20 years since Christophe Honoré directed his first feature film (Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard), he's proved himself to be both prolific and remarkably consistent; perhaps the only real misfire in Honoré's filmography to date is 2004's My Mother, an unrelentingly grim Georges Bataille adaptation that could quite easily have derailed its director's then-incipient career.  Yet, for all its faults, My Mother starred the incomparable and ever-watchable Isabelle Huppert, and since that film Honoré has proceeded to work with a clutch of other high-ranking members of French acting royalty, including Marie-France Pisier (Inside Paris), Catherine Deneuve (Beloved), Carole Bouquet (On a Magical Night) and, for his latest film, Juliette Binoche.  Both Binoche and the superb Irène Jacob—a French icon Honoré is yet to work with—starred in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours trilogy, and in Winter Boy Binoche's on-screen son is played by Jacob's real-life son Paul Kircher.

In Winter Boy, Kircher's Lucas is edging his way through his final year of school and can't wait to leave his sleepy Alpine home town for the big city.  Yet the sudden death of Lucas' father (Honoré himself) throws the family—rounded out by Binoche's Isabelle and eldest son Quentin (Vincent Lacoste)—into grief and disarray.  As it happens, Lucas does make it to the city, and somewhat sooner than expected, as artist Quentin already lives there and agrees to put his brother up for a short while.  Upon his arrival at Quentin's flat, Lucas becomes a source of irritation for his busy older brother and takes to wandering the streets; his time spent doing this serves a dual purpose, as it allows Lucas to explore the city while keeping out of Quentin's way.  Lucas becomes acquainted with several of the people in his brother's life, and he forms a particular bond with Quentin's flatmate Lilio (the excellent Erwan Kepoa Falé), a sensitive would-be artist who serves as something of a surrogate brother to Lucas, who tends to clash with Quentin on the rare occasions that their paths cross.

While this metropolitan drama is playing out, there's an elephant in the room in the form of Isabelle, who has been left alone to deal with her newfound widowhood.  Isabelle takes a back seat for much of the narrative, and mainly exists as a source of support for her two children—particularly Lucas—as they navigate the choppy waters of loss and grief.  Yet when Honoré turns his gaze to Isabelle, the sense of bereavement is almost palpable, with Binoche delivering an immaculate turn as a woman who has ultimately failed to distract herself with the needs of others.  It would be far too easy for Binoche to dominate the proceedings, especially opposite a newcomer like Kircher, but instead she calibrates her performance perfectly; Honoré, like the rest of us, is seemingly acutely aware of just how difficult it is to hide La Binoche in a film, and here he effectively harnesses his star's considerable skills.   

Much will be made of Binoche and Kircher's fine performances, but it is also worth noting Vincent Lacoste's impressive work in Winter Boy; sandwiched between two more eye-catching turns, Lacoste invests his character with real depth, and his performance here underlines why he appears to be the current go-to actor for Christophe Honoré—even if he's only halfway towards notching up the number of Honoré-directed performances that both Chiara Mastroianni and Louis Garrel have on their respective CVs.  As for Honoré's own filmography, Winter Boy may well stand as his most poignant work thus far; while many of his previous films—such as Love Songs, Sorry Angel and Beloved—contain more than a touch of pathos, Honoré's new film is directly informed by the death of his own father, and as such contains moments that are almost unbearably moving.  This is top-tier Honoré, and one of 2022's cinematic highlights.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Coma (Bertrand Bonello, 2022)

Three years on from his excellent Zombi Child, Bertrand Bonello returns with his latest feature, Coma, which screens today and tomorrow as part of the London Film Festival.  The film serves as the final instalment of the director's loose trilogy on youth which began with 2016's Nocturama, and it's a strangely moving affair; there's an added poignancy from the fact that it features the late Gaspard Ulliel's last performance.  Compared with its two predecessors, Coma is something of a scaled-down work, which isn't too surprising when you learn that it was made during lockdown.  As with a number of other filmmakers, Bonello has used the constraints imposed by COVID-19 to his advantage, with the necessarily smaller canvas leading the director to some fine creative choices.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, screen technology—which, during lockdown, gave so many of us a much-needed window to the world—is at the centre of Coma, as its bedroom-bound main character looks to connect with others.

That protagonist, impressively played by Bonello's Zombi Child star Louise Labèque, is a nameless teenage girl grappling with one of the early lockdowns enforced by France as COVID spread around the world.  We observe her as she spends her days glued to various screens, in the process catching up with her friends via Zoom calls and taking in various YouTube clips.  Her attention is drawn to one influencer in particular, Patricia Coma (Julia Faure), a rather disconcerting presence whose videos cover a range of topics, although she's frequently seen peddling the Revelator, an electronic toy that will be instantly familiar to everyone who has ever played memory skill game Simon.  The girl is soon in possession of one of these devices, although it's not clear how she obtained it; as the long days allow our protagonist to master the game's lengthy, complex sequences, it appears that the Revelator may have a purpose beyond simply testing short-term memory.    

Among this sea of gadgets, however, there is a refreshingly analogue activity in the form of an ongoing stop-motion melodrama performed by the girl's Barbie dolls (voiced by the likes of Bonello alumni Ulliel and Louis Garrel), whose story is punctuated by eerie, inappropriate canned laughter that brings to mind the anthropomorphic rabbits of David Lynch's Inland Empire.  Yet Coma's strangest passages emerge when the girl goes to sleep, as during the night she is transported to an unsettling twilight world, one largely populated by the dead.  Patricia Coma, who as far as we know is still alive, can also be spotted in this realm; moreover, the YouTuber tells the girl that this is the only location where it's possible to exercise free will.  With this in mind, it really does appear that, as Brian Molko of Placebo once sang, "the only place you're truly free is cosy in your dreams".

Clocking in at just 80 minutes, Coma is as modest temporally as it is spatially.  It is, however, a deceptively slight affair in which Bonello manages to cover a great deal of ground, with subjects ranging from climate change and COVID to the roles both technology and Gen Z will play in the planet's future.  With its multiple ways of facilitating its protagonist's escape from the restrictions brought about by the pandemic, Bonello's endearingly hopeful film skilfully captures the essence of what it was like to be a zoomer in lockdown.  For many of us during that time, the world got so much smaller—yet it can be argued that teenagers were among the most tech-savvy, and as such were well-equipped to rapidly identify ways in which to get a sense of the world beyond the proverbial four walls.  Sincerely presented as a letter to Bonello's teenaged daughter, Coma is a haunting, memorable conclusion to a fine trilogy.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Our Men (Rachel Lang, 2021)

In Christophe Honoré's superb 2007 film Love Songs—arguably its director's finest work—Louis Garrel, in a scene as moving as it was unusual, employed the NATO phonetic alphabet to convey the death of his girlfriend.  In a remarkable coincidence, and for very similar reasons, Garrel also uses the same code, "Delta–Charlie–Delta" ("décédé", meaning deceased), in Rachel Lang's Our Men, where its use is no less haunting.  In Our Men, Garrel stars as Maxime, a French foreign legion commanding officer who's leading a tricky mission in Mali; when one of his men is killed during an ambush by Islamic insurgents, it's down to Maxime to report the death and here, as in Love Songs, Garrel puts his intense features to good use as he grimly relays the news.  

Garrel's turn in Our Men provides a reminder of both the sort of part he's been offered in recent times, and how these roles differ from his work as a younger man; his early appearances in the likes of Honore's Ma Mère and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers saw the actor cast as louche, erratic types, but more recently the tendency has been to match him with relatively upright roles, such as when he played Alfred Dreyfus in Roman Polanski's absorbing J'Accuse.  The steady Maxime is a fairly typical part for the Garrel of today, even if the actor can still rise to the challenge when tasked with channelling his inner weasel, as evidenced in Woody Allen's most recent film, Rifkin's Festival.  But Garrel has done well to avoid the sort of typecasting that once seemed inevitable, and he's always an engaging, watchable presence.  Maxime's wife, Céline, is played by the excellent Camille Cottin, a performer who, like her co-star, has worked with Christophe Honoré; also as with Garrel, Cottin has successfully edged away from her earlier roles, with a recent string of dramatic parts demonstrating a range beyond comedy.  

While Garrel and Cottin are the two biggest stars in the film—which also features Lucie Debay and Claire Denis mainstay Grégoire Colin in supporting roles—their characters make way for a younger couple, Ukrainians Nika and Vlad (Ina Marija Bartaité, Aleksandr Kuznetsov).  The taciturn Vlad is under Maxime's command, and Nika, who has only recently arrived on the army base in Corsica, soon befriends busy, affable lawyer Céline, who asks Nika if she would be interested in babysitting her and Maxime's son; it is through this job that Nika gets to know some of the other legionnaires' wives.  With Vlad away on duty, Nika cuts a rather lonely figure, and even on the few occasions when Vlad returns home, he seems distant and is reluctant to discuss Nika's hopes of starting a family.  Vlad does buy a puppy, however, and this very cute canine does provide good company for Nika as she fills her long days.  But Nika still feels rejected by the absent Vlad, and the welcome attention she receives from another man leads to a rather predictable complication.      

With its focus on the soldiers' partners in general and Nika in particular, Our Men may surprise those expecting to see wall to wall scenes of warfare; while the film does indeed spend some time "over there", the combat never feels especially authentic, so it's probably just as well that the real meat of the story takes place away from the warzone.  Our Men, which screens this weekend at the London Film Festival, is a strong film, but sadly it seems inevitable that its release will be overshadowed by the death of its young star: six months ago, Ina Marija Bartaité was killed when a drunk driver knocked her off her bicycle.  This tragedy occurred ten years on from the untimely death of Bartaité's mother Yekaterina Golubeva, who, as well as starring in Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms and her partner Leos Carax's Pola X, appeared in two films by the aforementioned Claire Denis.  It is not inapt to suggest that Denis' Colin-starring Beau travail—one of the most memorable films about life in the foreign legion—would form a fine double bill with the engrossing, affecting Our Men.

Darren Arnold

Images: BAC Films

On a Magical Night (Christophe Honoré, 2019)

On a Magical Night marks the sixth collaboration between director Christophe Honoré and actress Chiara Mastroianni, and it follows the general rule that these two are at their best when working with each other.  While Love Songs remains the pinnacle of the pair's work together, On a Magical Night - which reunites Honoré and Mastroianni for the first time since 2011's Beloved - sees the two drive each other on to good effect.  Mastroianni picked up the best performance award in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section for On a Magical Night, a film which sees her equal Louis Garrel's record of half a dozen stints in front of the camera for Honoré.  The cast is rounded out by Vincent Lacoste (who returns from Honoré's previous film Sorry Angel), the excellent Camille Cottin, Benjamin Biolay, plus some serious star power in the form of the welcome presence of Carole Bouquet, who doesn't make enough films these days.

Mastroianni's Maria has been married to Richard (Biolay) for 20 years, and the couple have now hit a wall in their relationship.  Following a major argument, Maria moves out of their apartment, but doesn't go very far - in fact, she checks in to the hotel directly across the street from the marital home.  From her room in the hotel, she can watch Benjamin moping around in the aftermath of their row; the particular room Maria's holed up in - 212 - carries significance, as its number is shared by a section of civil code which outlines spousal obligations.  So far, so straightforward, but events take a strange turn when Maria is visited by a ghost from the past in the form of the young Richard (Lacoste).  From this younger version of her husband, Maria learns all about Richard's first love Irène (Cottin), who soon joins the couple in the hotel room.  Like Richard, Irène has also turned the clock back, and appears to be the age she was when she and Richard were in a relationship.  All of this gives the initially baffled Maria - who remains her actual age throughout - plenty to think about as she considers both the state of her marriage and her next move.

As a studio-bound affair featuring just a handful of actors, On a Magical Night could quite easily be a play (and Honoré is no stranger to theatre), yet at no point does it feel stagey.  While much of the action takes place in the hotel room, Honoré lets his film breathe via a late seaside scene and, most memorably, the road which separates Maria's hotel and apartment.  Shots of this avenue play a big part in creating the film's wonderfully rich atmosphere; as the snow begins to fall on this quiet street - which prominently features a seven-screen cinema - the beauty of the mise-en-scène is something to behold.  However, the icy spectacle also serves to remind us that Richard and Maria are in the winter of their relationship, and it's going to take a mighty big snow shovel to dig them out of it.

While there isn't a weak link among the small cast, and Mastroianni is as good as we've come to expect, it's actually Camille Cottin who steals every scene she's in; since starting off in a series of two-minute sketches for TV, Cottin has racked up an impressive list of film credits and has shown that she has range beyond comedy, with her turn as a no-nonsense detective in Iris proving how good she can be in a serious dramatic role.  While On a Magical Night certainly falls on the lighter side of drama and has some gently humorous moments, Cottin expertly brings out the pathos in her character, yet is always ready to utilise her impeccable comic timing when required.  But to focus exclusively on Cottin would be to do a disservice to Honoré and the rest of his fine cast, who have here created an atmospheric, intelligent and engaging work, one which could even be said to be rather - ahem - magical.

Darren Arnold

Images: image.net