Tuesday was a day of mellower pleasures at the Edinburgh Film Festival, from an idle sun-soaked writing break in the park, to a chance conversation with Paddy Considine and Shane Meadows (both as smart and affably bloke-ish as you’d expect) outside the theater, to, most importantly, a trio of quietly impressive, character-oriented foreign-language titles.
Two of them — France’s “Séraphine” and Chile’s “The Maid” — were decorated earlier this year with glittering prizes from the Césars and Sundance, respectively. Typically, the strongest of the three (and one of the best of the festival, not to mention the year) comes with no such accolades, having played inexplicably out of competition at Venice last year.
35 SHOTS OF RUM (***1/2)
Call it coincidence, but the finest films of this year’s festival have all come from the hands of female filmmakers. However, if Andrea Arnold’s and Kathryn Bigelow’s new efforts found them substantially broadening their canvases to knockout effect, “35 Shots of Rum” (which also played last night at the LA Film Fest across the pond) is an immaculate miniature from a master filmmaker; wispy at first glance, the film deftly accumulates tiny environmental and character details to create a richly satisfying tableau of restless lives.
The film takes a leisurely approach in setting up its narrative components, very gradually teasing out the connections between an initially disparate set of working-class black Parisians to form an accidental family of sorts: a widowed father and his bright college-going daughter, and two of their neighbors, each of whom carries a long-held torch for father and daughter, respectively. Little happens between them in the way of grand dramatic incident, though it becomes poignantly clear that Denis has captured them all at a frail transitional point, as parent and child need to separate and form lives independent of each other.
This is the Denis in the loosely humanist mode of “Friday Night” rather than the more austere formalism of “Beau Travail,” but that’s not to say the filmmaking is anything less than impeccable: Agnes Godard’s limber, honey-toned lensing and the incisive editing reach perfect synthesis in a centrepiece dance sequence that is one of the most beautiful scenes of the year, while the score by veteran hipsters Tindersticks is no less of a pleasure.
It goes without saying that the ensemble playing, from a collection of faces typically handpicked by the director for maximum expressiveness, is exemplary too – Nicole Dogue, as the kindly yet weary taxi-driver neighbour learning to let go of her affections, is a heartbreaking standout. Nonetheless, this is really Denis’s showcase: few filmmakers have her ability to tell a story within a single shot, let alone 35 of them.
SERAPHINE (***)
Martin Provost’s languid, visually rich biopic of the under-acknowledged French painter Séraphine de Senlis beat some heavyweight competition (including “The Class,” “I’ve Loved You So Long” and “A Christmas Tale”) to take top honors at this year’s César awards. As finely wrought and beautifully performed as the film is on its own terms, I’m a little puzzled as to why; one suspects the highly endearing characterization at its centre warmed enough voters’ hearts to overlook some choppy scripting.
Provost deserves credit for astutely scaling and framing his story, avoiding the standard biopic trap of cramming in too much incident: we are introduced to the title character already aged 50, an avidly religious and slightly mentally impaired cleaning lady who spends her every spare moment formulating her own paints from pigs’ blood and candle wax and creating dazzlingly intricate, highly stylized nature-themed images on spare squares of board.
Séraphine’s work is discovered by one of her cleaning clients, renowned German collector Wilhelm Uhde, setting in motion a long-term patronage cruelly interrupted by the First World War and the financial crisis of the 1920s – while Séraphine herself spirals into irremediable insanity. A classic story of artistic genius going largely unrecognized in its own time, “Séraphine” plays pleasingly like fiction, with Provost emphasizing atmospheric over historical detail, and Yolande Moreau’s committed, often wryly funny performance providing an easy emotional access point.
Unfortunately, particularly with regard to its secondary characters, the screenplay has some distracting lapses in continuity that keep certain dramatic developments very much at arm’s length. (A somewhat significant character’s death is brushed off as an aside.) Compensating for this is the film’s lyrical aesthetic sensibility, with Laurent Brunet’s own painterly, nature-hued lensing offsetting the more vibrant excesses of the central paintings, and an exquisitely judged conclusion. Having missed eligibility last year by a single day, the French would do well to consider this gentle, compassionate piece when deciding on this year’s Oscar submission.
THE MAID (***)
Following on from last year’s wickedly comic Oscar submission “Tony Manero,” Sebastian Silva’s microscopically focused character study “The Maid” continues a rich vein of socially investigative Chilean cinema. Silva’s film, which won the Grand Prize (as well as an acting citation for lead Catalina Saavedra) at Sundance earlier this year, should reach a broader audience than the similarly wry but more abrasive “Manero,” while another berth on the Oscar longlist (at least) looks likely.
Patiently probing the modest day-to-day existence of Raquel, a long-serving maid in a cheerfully noisy upper-class family household, the film starts quite brilliantly, painting the contrast between the glum, borderline-sociopathic servant and well-meaning but unavoidably condesecending employers in deft, ironic strokes, laudably refusing to take sides in this microcosmic class war. We’re used to seeing master-servant relations portrayed in an “Upstairs, Downstairs” fashion, but the close integration of a live-in servant in contemporary suburbia mines subtler tensions that go large when the family decides to take on a second maid.
At this point, the film appears to be heading towards grimly funny thriller-black comedy territory, but Silva takes a sharp turn into kinder waters in the second half, as an unexpected friendship begins to thaw this deeply internalised, unhappy woman. It’s a development that evidently made the film more Sundance-friendly, though it also slightly undoes Silva’s hitherto drum-tight rhythmic command of his material; fortunately, Saavedra’s sharp, silently compelling performance doesn’t waver.