FIDELITE ET MALADIE.(The French Film Festival)

JUST BEFORE Bertrand Tavernier's 1999 visit to Australia the French director was involved in a very public clash with Steven Spielberg. When Tavernier was here, both men were playing it down, but it had been pretty spectacular, nothing less than a complaint from the American that French support for their film industry violated the principles of the free market. Tavernier's reaction had been explosive. He pointed out that France had only a fraction of its own market, which was swamped by American product. Tavernier was a formidable adversary. A staunch nationalist, he had even proposed legislation to make it illegal for French critics to disparage local films. Still, Tavernier was no crude anti-American. He had written with distinction on Hollywood cinema and had warm personal relationships with figures like Martin Scorsese.

Just how the breach was mended is not clear. My guess is that Spielberg felt he had been used and certainly he didn't want a breach with France's greatest living director, so everything was smoothed over and the French government have continued to support their own films. Some of the fruits of this decision have been touring Australia in a French Film Festival curated by Shane Danielson. They are drawn from one of the best years for French movies in decades. It all makes for fascinating viewing plus an important lesson for Australian production and exhibition overwhelmed by mass releases from the USA.

American cinema remains one of the great cultural forces in the world but it is not the industry it was even thirty years ago. With honourable exceptions commercial pressures are imposing a narrow adherence to formula and stereotype. The rich ambiguities found in genre films and relished by commentators like the young Martin Scorsese and Bertrand Tavernier are no longer to be found. Scripts are finely honed but have few grace notes and the rigorously logical narratives progress relentlessly. This can still result in fine if limited film-making. The French Film Festival reminds us there is another way.

FOR ME the key film in the festival was Agnes Joui's Le Gout des Autres (The Taste of Others). The film harks back to classics such as Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game Where seemingly random events involving loosely connected characters comment on each other. The Taste of Others is much more benign than Renoir's dark masterpiece. The main plot concerns a narrow-minded bore played by Jean Pierre Bacri. He is wealthy, owns a successful business and is defiantly blind to anything remotely connected with culture. This all changes when he sees a local actress (Anne Alvaro) in Titus and is profoundly moved. At first he handles the situation with ludicrous clumsiness. "I usually don't like plays," he babbles. "So why go?" "No, you don't understand." But he perseveres and finds the courage to remake his life so that even his new-found artistic friends come to acknowledge his taste and integrity.

Joui manages the subtle shifts in her own and actor Jean Pierre Bacri's script superlatively. Not the least of her achievements, one she shares with Anne Alvaro, is to make the theatrical experience as moving to us as it is to the character. There are numerous sub-plots. The businessman's bodyguard has an affair with a pot-dealing waitress which at first seems to be going nowhere in particular but then surprises us with its humanity and pathos. The Taste of Others reaches no final resolutions, although there is great warmth in its gentle, affirmative ending. Open film-making at its very best.

Equally fine is Michel Deville's La Maladie de Sachs. The film covers territory--the life of a country doctor--that is the staple of dozens of BBC television series, but somehow Deville makes it all very different. One of the themes is the way caring for others can cause a loss of identity. Deville portrays this in a narrative where the doctor's actions are viewed through the eyes of the village, his patients, his lover and finally himself. Plot lines begin, stop suddenly, are taken up again: sometimes they are resolved or just left open. An American producer or possibly even an Australian would regard this as a recipe for incoherence and in less accomplished hands it undoubtedly would be. But Deville and a fine ensemble cast, headed by Albert Dupontel in a powerful and nicely understated performance as Sachs, make it all work. Indeed this defiance of conventional linear narrative, and insistence that life is a mosaic with its own unity, give the film an integrity and fidelity to experiences as they are lived light years away from standard formulas.

Closer to traditional forms is Tout Va Bien, On s'en Va (Everything's Fine, We're Leaving). Writer-director Claude Mourier employs the hardy perennial of the return of a long-absent father, played by Michel Piccoli, to explore the relationships between three sisters (Miou-Miou, Sandrine Kiberlain and Natasha Regnier). For Mourier it was not the plot. itself that was important, it was the characters. "What I tried to evoke," he writes in the production notes, "is the rape of this intimacy [between the sisters]. It is the violence with which this father interferes with this intimacy and his daughters' lives. It is the violence of this predator I wanted to film." This he does in long takes where the life of his characters seems to be simply observed. Performances are uniformly excellent. Piccoli's father is in turns darkly opaque and pathetically Vulnerable as he copes with the onset of Alzheimer's. The film would have benefited if the exposition scenes had been placed a little earlier and it promises more than is delivered. Still, the emphasis on character and the ambiguity of human relations is welcome even if the final resolution verges on melodrama.