LFF reviews: The Class/A Perfect Day/A Christmas Tale

I’m lumping these three foreign films together because they were all more than slightly disappointing. The Class (or Entre les murs) won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes festival.

Based on a script written by a real teacher (who then acquits himself superbly in the lead role), this is the story of the academic year as experienced by a class of kids (real kids, not actors) and their French language teacher.

Set in an inner-city school, with children drawn from different races and religions, this touches no new ground for a British audience well versed in the likes of At The Chalkface and Teachers. The cinema verite style is something of a hinderance too.

It’s well made, well-acted – but has nothing new to say.
Score: 6

A Perfect Day is anything but – don’t be fooled by the name or the poster! This Italian melodrama, while beautifully shot and acted, is really quite depressing.

Borrowing from Tarantino and Arriaga, there’s multiple connections between the characters that seems to serve the script in no positive way.

Isabella Ferrari suffers exquisitely as the single working mother with two kids by her estranged wifebeating husband – who is a cop. There’s no set-up, so we don’t see any of the former couple’s history – which makes them hard to care about.

Horror upon horror is heaped upon Ferrari until her depressed husband does the inevitable and takes his life as well as those of the kids.

Pointless, really.
Score: 3

A Christmas Tale is written and directed by Arnaud Desplechin. Before the screening, he said the film was partly inspired by Wes Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums – that was the first and only warning! This marathon 150 minutes of dark French so-called humour, anchored around a family Christmas, left me cold.

Catherine Deneuve, at her detached best, is the matriach of the family, hit with a fatal illness. The patriach, a wonderfully resigned Jean-Paul Roussillon, calls the clan together, part in hope of finding a bone marrow donor among the family, and part in hope healing old family wounds in the light of the bad news.

The principal wound is one of the script’s key problems: the reasons for the estrangement between the daughter, the beautifully depressed Anne Consigny, and her eldest brother, played to the manic hilt by Matthew Amalric, is never adequately explained, ensuring we can feel no sympathy for her and the long-term impact it has on the family.

Once again, as with the previous films, it’s all done with style and class and intelligence – but no humanity. So, in the end who cares? Er, I certainly didn’t.
Score: 3