Over the past few weeks I have been attending the French film festival and there seems to be a recurring theme in many of the films I have seen. Predominantly it seems to be people time lapsing either forward or backward in their lives, being confronted with either a situation or the realisation that they are not nice people and attempting to deal with the situation for the better before shifting back into their original place in time.
Therese Desqueyroux is an independent women with strong independent thought that the luxury of great wealth allows But even from an early age she seems to accept that she must marry Bernard, the son of another local land owner in order to form an alliance and stronger family fortune. As time progresses, Therese becomes more introverted and reflective of her youth to the point where she attempts to poison her husband in order to escape the life she is trapped in.
In "Another woman's life", we meet up with Marie when she is around 20 and meets Paul for the first time. She is absolutely captivated by him and see her life just beginning but when she wakes up in the morning she has skipped ten years of her life, she is the CEO of a successful company, feared by her employees, a stranger to her son and in the process of divorcing her husband - all before she has had the chance to experience the passion of life. We do not know why she has jumped a decade of her life but we follow her struggles to understand her situation, reacquaint herself with her family and get to know her son, deal with her role in the corporate world as an economic sage and builder of companies and most important of all, she grieves for the loss of her husband and works frantically to head off the divorce that is rapidly becoming a train wreck.
In Camille Rewinds" we see Camille as a 40 something woman, who life is in ruins, the husband she loves is in the process of selling the family home and divorcing her. On New Years Eve, Camille goes to a party of her old school friend and because of the futility of her life at this stage, she is drinking heavily and passes out in an alcoholic stupor right on midnight. When she awakes she is 16 and back in school and has to deal with all the frustrations that bubble to the surface. The absurdity of every day tasks ar a constant challenge to her, riding her bike to school, squeezing into gym clothes, avoiding boys, being lectured at by teachers are made all the more difficult because although all those around her see her as a 16 year old she looks to us and herself as still the 40 year old woman with all the emotions and memories of that 40 year old woman. Key among those memories was the day her mother died of a heart attack and it is this event in her life that is central to her review of her life and the relationship with her parents and the plight she has to try and circumvent the death of her mother. All to no avail. However as we see towards the end of the film, in the same way that Camille could remember her life as a 40 year old women when she was spun back to her teenage years, she could remember the love and affection for her husband whom she met at school all those years later when she returned to her current life. The closing of the film sees Camille reworking her life and affections for her estranged husband and saving the marriage.
In each of these films I cannot decide if it is a coincidental theme of whether the French film industry is in the dramatic throws of a mid-life crisis on is contemplating either it's past successes and failures or the confusion about the path into the future. Clearly the films at this years event are significantly below the standard of the 2012 film festival in my humble view.
Cheers
