99. White Material (Claire Denis)
Isabelle Huppert continues her long streak as France’s toughest and greatest actress in a seemingly effortless and unsettling portrayal of a coffee plantation owner in an unnamed colonized African country who is obsessed with finishing her harvest despite the unraveling and chaos of the social structure. This is the masterpiece of the French Festival. It’s a film rich with ambiguities and points of view, and vivid in the smallest details and in the landscapes of this soon to be forsaken land. This is the most frightening and insightful film I’ve seen of all the movies trying to come to grips with the chaos of post-colonial Africa.

98. Leaving (French – Catherine Corsini)
Explores in short, and often blackout scenes, moments of a wealthy wife and mother falling headlong into a passionately sexual love affair with a working class builder. It also explores the fine line between clever and stupid. Kristin Scott Thomas is as good as she can be in this melodrama – and we’re collectively proud of actresses willing to get naked at 50. Sergi Lopez, who usually plays villains, nicely underplays the lover, but is he really worth all this? Her final dissolution is preordained by a gunshot we hear at the start of the film. This precedes the story, which is then revealed in flashback. It’s a nice touch. But it really is just becomes a tale of a mentally ill women. There’s no real reason for the affair (unless she really likes a good hairy butt). What about her kids, her practice, her background, her relationship – anything? We see it all, and there are some fun and squirmy moments. But in the end it just doesn’t add up, and it’s strains credibility in a big way.

97. Two for the Wave

96. Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont)
Dumont explores the fine line between martyrdom, fanaticism, faith, and delusion in this meditative (some will call slow paced) look at a young Christian fanatic who befriends a group of ‘terrorist’ Muslims. Throughout there’s a degree of sexual threat and violence so present in his films, as well as the very physical presence of nature, of weather, of the elements. It’s an edgy mix, yet most of the time we’re looking at the world through the vulnerable searching eyes and face of Julie Sokolowski as Céline/Hadewijch, the latter being a 13th century mystic who also sublimated courtship for a love to God, and who also took no vows as a nun. As Celine, the girl is sent from the convent for being too extreme in her devotion. She begins to naively explore the real world. Like the earlier poet and mystic Hadewijch – into whom she slowly seems to be transforming – Celine is also from a very wealthy family, a fact that sets up another set of questions and contrasts in this contemporary context. I love looking at the faces director Dumont offers up, and as always he sets up situations that call out for argument and conversation. The ending is sudden and unexpected, and you are left to question not only what might happen next, but to where exactly has the director led us.

95. Making Plans for Lena (French – Christophe Honoré)
Airless, complex, chattering, dysfunctional, and destructive – and I mean that in a good way. That is to say it’s what the director intends. The audience will measure its own family delusions, illusions, ideas of love, and ability to survive against these mostly unsympathetic characters. I liked it, but didn’t enjoy it. This is something the French do well. Featuring the Chiara Mastroianni, daughter of Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve, who mostly got her father’s looks, which she uses bravely and unglamorously in this film written for her.