Tag: france

The Real Joan of Arc

  By

★★★
“Live to fight another day?”

Pun mot intended, but the reality is, we know very little for sure about Joan of Arc. Not even what she looked like in detail, for there are no surviving portraits of her, dating from when she was alive. The facts about her life are equally as uncertain, because everything about Joan was subject to spin, depending on who was talking, when they were saying it, and what agenda they sought to achieve. Because everybody involved had an agenda of one kind or another: either elevating Joan up to the level of literal sainthood (finally achieved in 1920, almost half a millennium after her death), or tearing her down, as a tool of the Devil. Even basic facts – was Joan a shepherd when she was young? – are uncertain, with contradictory testimony. 

It’s really in that light you need to view all this documentary shows. Indeed it largely opens by admitting to the above. This opens the door to questioning the standard narrative, in which Joan is a humble farm-girl, who heard divine voices and was inspired to lead France to fight back against the English invaders. However, I was also left with as much doubt about the alternative suggestions the film provides, because the evidence for them is little if any less sketchy. These theories are certainly interesting – and from a secular viewpoint, elements are perhaps no less plausible than the “voices of God” explanation. On other hand, it feels as if they raise as many questions as they answer. 

The first is the suggestion that Joan was actually of noble birth, perhaps an illegitimate child. This could explain things like her reported ability to ride and wield a lance, and speak “proper” French, rather than the coarse dialect of her village. She was, in effect, created for the specific purpose of becoming a figurehead. It’s an intriguing idea – though given events unfolded over a period of several years after she came to public attention, whoever was responsible clearly had to be playing a remarkably long game. It is, though, small beer beside the theory which occupies the second half: Joan was not burned at the stake, but survived, resurfacing a few years later as Jeanne des Armoises, getting married and living a whole second life.

Yeah, big if true. The evidence for this begins with alleged oddities around her death. Joan’s head being covered on her way to the stake; an unusually high pyre; hundreds of English soldiers keeping the locals at bay. Yet there were a lot of people who were present, and subsequently provided, albeit years later, sworn testimony as to her fate. It would have been a remarkable cover-up, to put it mildly. I’m more convinced by the second element: someone, representing herself as Joan, did resurface a few years later, even getting as far as the royal court and meeting Charles VII of France. However, most accounts agree that de Armoises ended up admitting to the fraud, being unable to tell the King information Joan would have known.

I still enjoyed watching this, and the intellectual exercise it provided. It’s always good to keep an open mind about history, and contemplate alternative scenarios, whether they pan out or not. Though some of the recreations leave a little to be desired, this is a decent, well-assembled piece, with good “talking heads”. It did give me pause for thought, and no documentary which does so can be considered a failure. 

Dir: Martin Meissonnier
Star: Marcel Gay, Francoise Michaud Frejaville, Colette Beaune, Philippe Contanime
a.k.a. Vraie Jeanne, fausse Jeanne 

Joan the Maid, Part 2: The Prisons

  By

★★★
“Eventually. Again.”

Just as part 1, The Battles, meandered its way towards anything approximating conflict at a pace charitably described as leisurely, so anyone expecting hot Joan of Arc saint-in-prison action will probably want to get a cup of coffee. It’s around an hour and fifty minutes into this before Joan is even captured. Though as the whole thing does run for 176 minutes, there’s still plenty of time for subsequent events. But when the title says “prisons,” it means exactly that. Joan of Arc’s trial, an event that is typically depicted at length in most versions, is here discarded with a single intertitle. One moment, she’s standing on a ship being sent to the English, then there’s a caption “after four months of trial,” and the next scene sees her being sentenced.

This seems like Rivette, through and through. He doesn’t care what anyone else is interested in. He’s going to show the elements of the story which he wants to depict. I can understand where this approach comes from, simply because the trial of Joan is such a fixture of the story. If you can’t find anything new to say about it, why say anything at all? On the other hand, I’m not sure we needed to see, in its place, extended coverage of the coronation of Charles VII of France, apparently unfolding in real time. With Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral just a couple of weeks prior to viewing this, I had already reached my quota of royal pomp and circumstance for the month.

This does mark a turning point in the movie though. Thereafter, it becomes increasingly clear that Joan is losing her influence, being ignored or sidelined. After you have made a king, what more do you have to offer? She is fobbed off on to trivial, inconsequential missions, and Joan is ill-suited to survive the intrigue of court life. Her lack of value in a post-coronation world is driven home by Charles’s failure to ransom Joan after her capture; a price the English are happy to pay. “After four months of trial,” Joan is clearly broken, but they still aren’t done with her yet, intent on forcing her to become a relapsed heretic, with all the stake-related consequences.

Bonnaire is, as in the preceding entry, the main reason to watch this. The heroic confidence exhibited on her way up, is now replaced by a tragic sense of impending doom, which even Joan seems intuitively to sense. It’s all very naturalistic in approach, with Rivette keeping things simple to the point of sparseness. This does lead to the result feeling quite “dry”, and for a movie approaching three hours, there’s not a lot of emotional impact. Indeed, given the lack of spectacle, the movie puts almost all its weight on the shoulders of Bonnaire, and it’s fortunate her performance is up to the task. If it hadn’t been, this pair of films would have made for a very, very long six-hour double feature. 

Dir: Jacques Rivette
Star: Sandrine Bonnaire, André Marcon, Jean-Louis Richard, Marcel Bozonnet

Joan the Maid, Part 1: The Battles

  By

★★★
“Eventually…”

The above refers to the title, and in particular “The Battles”. It is a solid two hours before anything more than handfuls of English and French troops lobbing rocks at each other show up. So if you are here for large-scale spectacle, keep on walking. You will be disappointed. I had a certain idea of what to expect, having seen Rivette’s immediately preceding film La Belle Noiseuse. Admittedly, I saw it largely because I had the hots for Emmanuelle Beart at the time. Otherwise, a four-hour movie, containing lengthy sequences of real-time painting would probably not have been on my radar. But I kinda liked its languid pace (the copious Beart nudity didn’t hurt, let’s be honest!), and so was prepared for things in this to unfold at a similarly leisurely pace.

They do. If you’re more interested in Joan’s character and personality, rather than her deeds and actions, this will rank higher than the above score. Its main strength is Bonnaire, whose depiction is probably the most competent portrayal of Joan that I’ve seen. She may not know how to read or write (there’s a nice scene where she learns how to “draw” her signature), but she is not stupid. Despite the religious visions, she is thoroughly down to earth, and does not take any guff from anyone. For instance, she slaps the hell (literally) out of her brother after he takes the Lord’s name in vain. It’s a Joan who is easy to like.

Indeed, from a secular point of view, it may be the best depiction of why she could lead an army. Some other versions lean heavily on the “God told her to”, almost as their sole justification. But here, even the non-religious should get an idea of why The Maid was able to inspire loyalty in those around her. Yet, she isn’t an emotionless automaton either, getting upset when the British yell taunts at her. To be honest, however, those scenes could not avoid reminding me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I suspect Rivette may not have seen it, though who knows? Maybe it’s the deadest of deadpan tributes to John Cleese.

If this film gets the heroine almost exactly right, the same sadly can’t be said for some of the other elements. There’s a clunky framing structure, almost documentary like, with people recounting events as if they had previously happened. It took me out of the movie every time it happened. When we eventually do get to those promised battles… Yeah, they probably shouldn’t have bothered. It’s clear Rivette’s heart isn’t in them. For instance, the French break down a section of wall, only for the soldiers scaling next to it, to ignore the gap completely. There’s not even much sense of either climax or resolution, since we know there is another entire movie, waiting in the wings. Bonnaire makes this worth a look, yet I was left wishing for a combo of this with The Messenger.

Dir: Jacques Rivette
Star: Sandrine Bonnaire, Tatiana Moukhine, Baptiste Roussillon, André Marcon

La merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d’Arc

  By

★★★★
“Merveilleuse is the word for it.”

I generally make it a rule not to review foreign movies without subtitles, simply because it’s difficult to judge them reasonably if you can’t understand them. I made an exception for this 1929 French film for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s silent, so comprehension is limited only to the intertitles: I can read the language better than I can understand it spoken. Also, it was approximately the eleven millionth version of the Joan of Arc story I’d seen in the past month:  I think I had a pretty good handle on the plot by this point. Boy, am I glad I did, because it’s the best silent film I’ve seen, albeit in my quite limited experience of them.

History has largely forgotten this version, in favour of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. Both movies were produced concurrently, interest in the topic apparently having been spurred by the canonization of Joan at the start of the twenties, and the approaching 500th anniversary of the events in her life. However, delays during filming meant this adaptation was beaten to the cinema by Dreyer’s. It perhaps was also impacted commercially by the arrival of the new-fangled “talkies”, leaving silent movies like this looking old-fashioned. Half a century later, the film was eventually restored, and can be found on YouTube as well as the Internet Archive.

At over two hours long, it’s certainly epic, yet is almost constantly engrossing. Its main strength is Genevois in the role of Joan, who has an incredibly impressive face, which more than counters the lack of dialogue. She was only 15 when the film went into production, but already had a decade of experience in making films, including another silent epic, Abel Gance’s Napoleon. It was quite a stressful production, with the actress enduring heavy costumery. She said, “They made me a very light suit of armour, but I ended up with real armour. At the Battle of Orleans I had to wear a 22-kilo suit of chain mail. As soon as I finished a scene, they would lay me down and I would sleep on the ground because I couldn’t take the weight.”

Those battle scenes are extraordinary, especially for the time, overcoming the constraints of the 4:3 aspect ratio. The siege at Tourelles is a phenomenal set piece, involving 8,000 extras, largely recruited from the French army. There’s additional poignancy to the spectacle, Joan realizing the horrors of the battlefield, which have been unleashed as a result of her actions. While I’ve yet to see the Dreyer version (by most accounts, it seems rather talky for a silent!), it’s hard to imagine anyone improving on Genevois’s performance. Inevitably, things do become a bit of a slog during the trial; the dialogue heavy nature of those scenes are always going to be tough. Yet even here, there are moments of exquisite beauty; Joan sat, her head bowed, as her accusers file out past her.

Then there’s the burning at the stake, another scene which came uncomfortably close to historical accuracy for Genevois. “The moment the wood caught fire I yelled ‘It burns!’ [The director] Marco was so sure I was afraid, that he did nothing at all. All of a sudden the cameraman, Gaston Brun, shouted ‘She’s burning!’ and everyone ran towards me, because I was tied up and couldn’t budge. I was very frightened.” Even putting that aside, there’s no denying the emotional wallop it packs, particularly in the extended shot of Joan walking towards her death: Simone’s face, again, sells this in a way which left me genuinely distraught. This doesn’t happen often, and never before while watching any silent movie.

de Gastyme then simply stops the film. It’d seem an abrupt ending almost anywhere else; here, it acts as a force-multiplier for Joan’s death, letting it resonate in the silent darkness which follows. Finally, I have to give credit to the sadly unknown composer who provided the score accompanying the movie. It’s top-tier stuff, complementing and enhancing the on-screen action to great effect, whether rousing the blood during the battles, soaring to the heavens for her visions, or mourning the inevitable fate of the heroine. Over its 125 minutes, this hits all the expected moments with precision, and Genevois – who retired from movies at the ripe old age of 23! – deserves to be far better-known in ranks of actresses to have taken on the iconic role of Joan.

Dir: Marco de Gastyne
Star: Simone Genevois, Fernand Mailly, Georges Paulais, Jean Debucourt
a.k.a. Saint Joan the Maid

Helga, She-wolf of Stilberg

  By

★★
“Great poster. Shame about the film.”

I guess this shows that the concept of the “mockbuster” is not something invented by The Asylum. This came out in 1978, the year after the Ilsa franchise had come to an end with Tigress of Siberia. But France apparently decided it wanted to get into the act, and created its own knock-off Ilsa, in the shape of Helga (Longo, who has a cameo early on in Bruce Lee’s Way of the Dragon, and was also in War Goddess). What this does, is mostly act as proof of just how damn good Dyanne Thorne was in her role. She may have been unable to pronounce “Reich” consistently, but she went at the part with gusto, and had an amazing amount of presence, essential to the job. Longo simply doesn’t, and as a result, this is largely pedestrian and dull.

Opening with a sprightly and thoroughly inappropriate intro tune, we find ourselves in a cabinet meeting in an unnamed dictatorship. Names like “Helga”, as well as the angular uniform patches, suggest somewhere Fascist, but the bearded, cigar-smoking leader and his #2 called Gomez indicate a Cuban influence. Whatever. Helga is assigned to run the castle turned political prison in Stilberg, which appears to contain… Oh, maybe a dozen female inmates, tops, who are occasionally shipped out to a nearby farm. Though what they do there, apart from getting sexually harassed by the farmer – called “Doc” for no apparent reason – is unclear. The latest prisoner is Elisabeth Vogel (Gori), daughter of a rebel leader. Helga is intent ob breaking her, but Elisabeth has her own plans, assisted by a guard (Allan) who is secretly on her side.

Let’s be clear: Helga would be chewed up and spat out by Ilsa, in about five seconds. To start with, there’s her fashion sense: we first see her in a floral dress more befitting a PTA meeting. Ok, it’s a cabinet meeting, but would Ilsa have cared about that? While Helga does eventually slide into a pair of tight leather pants and a red shirt, if you’re going to embrace the S/M aesthetic, you need to do so wholeheartedly. But the most embarrassing scene sees Helga break down in tears on her bed, just because a prisoner has said some mean things to her. C’mon. What self-respecting villainess would ever do that?

There is an underwhelming lack of imagination in the sadism here too. No medical experiments or hanging them on blocks of ice here, just some light whipping. The nudity is copious, with forest in Amazonian quantities, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. But it, too, is almost as tedious as the over-frequent shots of truck convoys, going from castle to farm – or, for a bit of variety, farm to castle. I will say, the production values are decent, and the castle is a better location than Ilsa managed (recycled sets from Hogan’s Heroes!). But the pretty sheen cannot conceal the boredom and lack of invention at its heart.

Dir: Patrice Rhomm
Star: Malisa Longo, Patrizia Gori, Richard Allan, Dominique Aveline

Arcane – League of Legends: Season 1

  By

★★★½
“A tale of two sisters.”

I’ve never played League of Legends, but the good news is, you don’t need to, in order to enjoy Arcane. While that may provide some extra depth, it works perfectly well on its own. There is a degree of over-familiarity with the high-level scenario, which is Generic Fantasy Plot #3. Per Wikipedia’s premise, “Amidst the escalating unrest between the advanced, utopian city of Piltover and the squalid, repressed undercity of Zaun…” Yeah, it’s class war time again, cut from the same basic stamp as Mortal Engines, Alita: Battle Angel and The Hunger Games. To this series’s credit, it does show more nuance than some, with good and bad on both sides of the divide. Perhaps a bit too much though, as there were points where it felt like new characters were being thrown at the viewer, even late into the nine-episode series, when the time might have been better spent developing existing ones.

The central pair are sisters Vi (Steinfeld) and Powder (Purnell), orphaned after a failed rebellion. They’re brought up by the leader of the rebellion, and subsequently get entangled in the web of crime, politics, magic and science which powers both sides of the divide. There’s a lot going on here: simply summarizing it would fill the rest of the article. But there are a couple of key points. Powder becomes estranged from her sister, changes her name to Jinx, and goes to work for crime lord Silco (Spisak). Scientist Jayce Talis (Alejandro) creates a technology called Hextech: this (Generic Fantasy Plot #7…) allows for the control of magical energy, which can used for good or evil. It also does… well, whatever the plot needs, from curing illness to blowing things up. Intrigue ensues. A great deal of intrigue.

I did appreciate the script’s complexity, which stands in contrast to most video-game adaptations. I think the greater length (9 x 40-ish minutes) than a movie, gives the writers time to explore things in more depth, and I can’t complain at all about the overall world-building, either in story or artwork. Its French origins perhaps explain the look, which sometimes resembles a bande dessinee. Indeed, the show does almost all the big things right, from animation that’s top-notch, through good voice-acting, and some very well-constructed fight scenes. Vi does not mess around, and proves more than capable of going toe-to-toe with the biggest and baddest both Piltover and Zaun have to offer. Animated combat often lacks the impact of live-action – it’s an almost inevitable result of the medium – but that is not the case here. Blows pack a real punch, if you see what I mean. 

However, there were a number of elements which did hamper the show, and for me, left it short of Seal of Approval level. I mentioned above the reliance on over-familiar tropes. This extends to dialogue which sometimes topples over into clichés, e.g. Vi telling Powder, “What makes you different makes you strong.” Pardon me if I roll my eyes and quote Chuck Pahluniak in response, “You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.” I also didn’t like the use of indie rock and rap music, finding it too distracting and not a good fit for the environment. I like Imagine Dragons as much as the next person, but… This felt too much like a soundtrack CD in search of a film. Contrast the fight at the end of episode 7 (I think?), accompanied instead by orchestral music, which is perhaps the best in the entire show.

Still, there are absolutely no shortage of strong female characters, even past the sisters. For example, Caitlyn Kiramman, the daughter of a noble family who taken on the difficult job of policing the streets, or Mel Medarda and her mother. While the society portrayed in the show has its issues, gender (and race) don’t appear to be among them, rarely even cropping up. I’ve tended to skip a lot of the Netflix animated shows, for one reason or another, but this definitely was not a waste of time. The way it finishes though… I can’t discuss it in depth for spoiler reasons. But if they hadn’t already announced a second series is coming, I would be severely peeved. I hate that kind of ending in books, and it works no better in a TV show. Do better next time, please.

Dir: Pascal Charrue, Arnaud Delord
Star (voice): Hailee Steinfeld, Ella Purnell, Kevin Alejandro, Jason Spisak

Sentinelle

  By

★★★★
“Jane Wick, but it’s complicated.”

Klara (Kurylenko) is a French soldier who returns home after a tour of duty in the Middle East. But the homeland security mission to which she’s assigned – basically, patrolling sea-fronts and shopping malls – hardly seems like a credible use of her talents. However, she’s also suffering from PTSD, and it’s easy to see why the authorities decided she was better off kept away from the front lines. Then Klara’s sister, Tania (Lima), is found on the beach in a coma after having been raped. The evidence points to Yvan, the son of prominent Russian businessman, Leonod Kadnikov (Nabokoff). But the cops can do nothing, as the Kadnikov’s have diplomatic passports. Klara, needless to say, operates under no such restrictions and vows that if the justice system won’t make the perpetrator pay, then she will.

On the one hand, this is a straightforward revenge flick, though it’s revenge by proxy, with Klara not directly the victim. However, what I liked is that, while she obviously has the skill-set to pull off her mission, she’s far from invincible, even if the Kadnikov’s need to fire their security advisor. Indeed, there are points at which Karla’s straight-line approach to the problem, causes more problems than it solves. For instance, contrast the nightclub fight in John Wick with the one here. John breezed through the scenario virtually unscathed, dispatching victims with ease, in a plethora of headshots. Klara spends what seems like an eternity brawling against two opponents, and never even gets out of the bathroom. That said, the violence here packs a genuine wallop, with some startling moments which left me feeling certain someone was going home with a concussion that day. It’s definitely quality over quantity.

Former Bond girl Kurylenko has graced these pages before, in The Courier and The Assassin Next Door, but this is probably her best effort yet. She is in almost every scene, and does a solid job of holding the audience’s attention, with a sympathetic portrayal of a damaged, yet still extremely dangerous, heroine. She also demonstrates her flair for language, switching effortlessly between French, Russian and Arabic. In real life, she speaks English and Spanish too, as well as bits of others. In 2013 on Twitter, she said, “I want to speak ALL the languages.” [She also knows how to say “I love squirrels” in many of them…]

Coming in at a brisk 80 minutes, it does still take a little while to reach the meat of its topic, The assault at the core of the film (which, incidentally, we don’t see – and nor do we need to) takes place not far short of half-way in, though the pace never feels as if it’s dragging. I also have some questions about the ending, which out of nowhere seems to suggest a Nikita-like program of black ops assassins, created by the government out of captured murderers. Though to be honest, I’d not mind seeing such a sequel, and definitely would not want to be the one on whom Klara was unleashed.

Dir: Julien Leclercq
Star: Olga Kurylenko, Marilyn Lima, Michel Nabokoff, Carole Weyers

Soeurs D’Armes

  By

★★½
“Army dreamers.”

This suffers from being almost exactly the same story as the previous feature we reviewed about women Kurdish fighters going up against ISIS, Les Filles Du Soleil. Both focus on a woman who is kidnapped by ISIS after they sweep through her town, and gets sold into slavery by her captors. She escapes, and joins of the all-female units who are battling the jihadist occupation. Bur there is a family member – in Filles, the heroine’s son; here, her younger brother – who is still with ISIS and has become a child soldier for them. Even if you haven’t seen the earlier film, you’ll not be surprised to hear this plays a key role in the film’s climax. The similarities are so startling, I kept expecting to hear this was a remake. It just appears to be a carbon-copy.

There are some differences, the most notable feature being the multinational nature of the women’s group here. As well as local Yezidi Zara (Gwyn), there are two young Frenchwomen, Kenza (Garrel) and Yaël (Jordana), an American sniper (Nanna Blondell, who was in Black Widow), etc. The ISIS are similar: the chief “bad guy” is English, with a strong Northern accent – though I’ve been unable to take English jihadists seriously, ever since watching Four Lions. It’s no easy task for the women’s commander (Casar) to mesh all these different upbringings, experiences and personalities into a cohesive unit.

And extending the similarity to Filles, the film has the same main weakness, and ends up spreading itself too thinly across the multiple stories it wants to tell. None of them manage to acquire the necessary depth, and most of which are more or less obvious. Not helping, the film has an unfortunate tendency to sink into drippy feminism. The montage sequence of the women training, accompanied by a pseudo-empowering “I am woman, hear me roar”-type song, marked a particular low point. More successful in general is the technically impressive action. The film’s best sequence depicts a battle between the women and a platoon of ISIS troops who are chasing a group of fleeing refugees, which includes Zara. It’s beautifully shot and well-staged, with a genuine sense of tension.

Yet, there are other, almost embarrassingly naive moments, such as the women entering a town their side has just bombed, and standing in the middle of the street for a chat, without checking the area has been cleared. I’m not a soldier, but even I know that’s… not wise. Such gaffes aside, it’s mainly the hackneyed and trite storyline that stops this from achieving any real degree of success. There is certainly a fascinating story to be told in the Kurdish women’s battalions and their part in the war against ISIS.  But that’s now two efforts which appear to have barely scratched the surface, or gone beyond the obvious. Particularly here, they seem more interested in political, religious and gender-based point-scoring than telling a good story.

Dir: Caroline Fourest
Star: Dilan Gwyn, Amira Casar, Camélia Jordana, Esther Garrel

Les Filles du Soleil

  By

★★★
“Three into one won’t go”

There’a a good film in here. Actually, there may be as many as three good films in here. But the way in which they are melded together, manages to rob a good chunk of the power and impact from all of them. We begin by following Mathilde H (Bercot), a war journalist clearly modelled on Marie Colvin, down to the eye-patch and traumatic experience in Homs, Syria – Mathilde lost her eye there, Marie was killed. She has just started the process of embedding herself in Kurdistan, covering the locals’ attempt to regain territory taken from them by ISIS. The second story is that of Bahar (Farahani), leader of a Kurdish women’s battalion, who was forced to flee her hometown, losing her son in the process. She has heard rumours he is being radicalized and trained as a child soldier in occupied territory, and will risk anything to liberate him.

But wait! There’s more. For Bahar was also captured by ISIS herself, and held as a sex-slave, until she managed to escape and make her way back across the front-line. Her subsequent recruitment into the military, gives her the chance to take revenge on her captors – both for herself and for the thousands of other women who weren’t so lucky as to regain their freedom. On their own, any of these stories would be fine. The problem is that Husson does a real dog’s dinner of assembling them into a single narrative, and the result weakens all of them. There’s a convoluted structure of flashbacks and side angles, to the point that Mathilde ends up serving little narrative purpose herself. It’s a pity, as in Farahani, the director has found a marvellous actress, worthy of playing the heroine. In particular, she has amazing eyes that are both luminous and expressive. She reminds me a bit of the famous “Afghan Girl” photograph.

Of the three stories, probably unsurprisingly, it’s the most action-oriented one which I liked best. Bahar and her fellow soldiers make their way into enemy territory through a tunnel. It’s mined, yet they have a captured ISIS soldier to guide them past the booby-traps… or will he? It’s almost painfully tense, and a stark reminder that in this kind of war, you can never truly relax, with potential death lurking around every corner. It also helps that Bahar carries herself in a way that seems legitimate and battle-hardened (a bit of a shame the film isn’t apparently interested in the details of how she went from being a wife and mother, to commanding troops on the front-line). But just when this is getting a full head of steam, we suddenly switch to an extended flashback of her time in captivity. This would have worked much better as a chronological narrative. Instead, it’s a fatal blunder from which the film sadly never recovers. Rather than surging towards a climax, it peters out in sadly predictable melodrama.

Dir: Eva Husson
Star: Golshifteh Farahani, Emmanuelle Bercot, Zubeyde Bulut, Maia Shamoevi
a.k.a. Girls of the Sun

Girls With Balls

  By

★★★★
“Guess a new domain name is needed…”

Lurking behind one of the most cringeworthy titles I’ve ever seen, and a trailer that’s not much better, is a very pleasant surprise. Well, at least if you’re a fan of the “splatstick” genre, mixing over-the-top gore and comedy: Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead is the pinnacle of that genre. I certainly am, and consequently found this a real hoot. Girls volleyball team, the Falcons, are on their way home after their latest victory, when they end up diverted into a small town, populated entirely by inbred rednecks (or the Gallic version thereof). After an encounter in the hotel, they find themselves getting a night-time visit, and are soon being hunted down by the village’s residents. However, the biggest psycho may not be among the locals…

Afonso does a great job in depicting the heroines with broad strokes. You quickly establish the egotistical star player Morgane (Azem), up and coming star Jeanne (Daviot), nerdy M.A. (Balchere), etc. They’re all overseen by their distinctly non-athletic coach (Solaro), who treats them as if they were one big, dysfunctional family. Yet these internal tensions often threaten their literal survival. It was clear to me (if not many reviewers!) that Afonso is parodying the slasher genre: he takes it to such extremes, with the girls bickering over boyfriends even as their pursuers are mere feet away. That’s where this differs from the other “women’s sports team in wilderness peril” movie – yes, it’s a genre… well, there are two – Blood Games, which took itself seriously. He does an equally nice job with the villains. For example, rather than having hunting dogs, there’s one local who pretends to be a dog, playing the sound of hounds baying over a bullhorn.

It’s just one of the many times where this film subverts the audience’s expectations, not least in having heroines with their own set of flaws. Also included there is the country-and-western singer who hitches a ride on the team’s camper van, interrupting proceedings to offer sardonic commentary on proceedings. “The players on this team were all kind of hot”, he sings at the start, going on, “Another thing they have in common, is that they die before the end.” [Is he telling the truth? I won’t say…] Inevitably, of course, there’s a rather dumb scene where the girls use volleyballs to attack their enemies, and the climax doesn’t actually stick in the mind as well as many of the scenes which preceded it. The attack chihuahua, or the headless corpse that Just. Won’t. Die.

If you took this seriously, it would potentially be thoroughly offensive – though it’s entirely equal-opportunity in its approach there. Men, women, gay or straight: no-one here gets out alive. Just, for the love of all that is holy, skip the dubbed version on Netflix, and watch it subtitled. I caught a few seconds before lunging for the remote control, and my ears may still be bleeding.

Dir: Olivier Afonso
Star: Tiphaine Daviot, Manon Azem, Louise Blachère, Victor Artus Solaro