French film 'Tell No One' staring Francois Cluzet.
I love French movies. And I love how much importance France places on sustaining their national film culture, which keeps it always interesting and moving forward.
There's a long and proud tradition of dazzling art cinema in France, but these days a major French film is almost as likely to satisfy broader English-speaking audiences.
As I mentioned in my blog about 'Yuppies In Peril' movies a few weeks back, the French are now the premiere proponents of certain commercial genres previously dominated by American cinema.
Next week I will be in Paris to participate in a four-day press event covering all the major French movies receiving a global release over the next year. Many of these films will be featured in next year's Alliance Française French Film Festival, which kicks off in Auckland in late February.
Thanks to the AFFFF's profound ability to identify this country's best film journalists (hello!), I am being flown to Paris by a wonderful organisation called uniFrance, which exists to promote French cinema internationally. This is the life I have chosen, this is my burden to bear.
To prepare for the huge pile of interviews I will be conducting with various French filmmakers and actors - I am about to fulfil my lifelong ambition of being in the same room as Juliette Binoche! - I have been watching all their new films on screener DVDs.
In the last week, I have watched 17 new French movies. I have about a dozen more to view before I leave. Taking in a country's major cinematic output from a single year in what is feels like one sitting is unlike any other viewing experience I can recall. It is a heady time. It is a romantic time.
Watching all these upcoming French films - recurring themes: romantic fantasy versus romantic reality; fathers and sons; the children of immigrants - got me thinking about my favourite French movies from the last 10 years or so.
Please allow me to now share with you my five favourite French films from this period. These are not necessarily the definitive French films from this time, just the ones I love the most.
1. Tell No One (2006)
Disgustingly talented actor/writer/director Guillaume Canet (whose sole excursion into English language cinema was as the guy Leonardo DiCaprio cuckolds in The Beach) adapted Harlan Coben's American novel into this stunning Paris-set thriller.
François Cluzet (The Intouchables) stars as a doctor tormented by the unsolved murder of his wife eight years earlier, for which he was the prime suspect. The discovery of some bodies opens up the case again, and starts to challenge the doctor's presumptions about what occurred.
Tell No One effortlessly generates the thrills many English-language equivalents struggle with in this genre, but also tells an affecting, human story with deeply felt performances.
Canet's direction is stylish without being overly glossy, and the director earned points from me by casting himself in a tiny, detestable role. One of the best films of the past decade from any country.
3. Caché (Hidden) (2005)
Director Michael Haneke is Austrian, but makes many of his films in France these days. He's one of the most well-regarded directors alive, and gained widespread acclaim for last year's devastating drama Amour.
He appears incapable of making an insignificant film, but my favourite remains this excruciating thriller from 2005.
Haneke's clinical; precise filmmaking skills are disturbingly well-suited to this tale of a well-to-do couple Parisian (Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil) unsettled by a series of tapes featuring footage taken outside their house that they receive in the mail.
Tension was never more assuredly or skilfully built over two unbearable hours. Unbearable in a good way.
3. A Prophet (2009)
Writer/director Jacques Audiard (The Beat That My Heart Skipped; Rust and Bone) set a bold new standard for prison movies with this searing drama anchored on a star-making central performance from Tahar Rahim.
He plays Malik, a young Frenchman of Algerian descent who is sent to jail for petty crimes. Despite being pretty green when he goes inside, Malik eventually rises within the complicated hierachies of the prison system to become a kingpin in his own right.
The arc may sound familiar, but what I loved most about A Prophet was how it created a completely new dynamic for portrayals of prison life in movies. It made me realise the degree to which my perception of prison was determined by cinematic clichés.
Audiard said at the time of the film's release that it wasn't about offering moral guidance, but "creating icons, images for people who don't have images in movies, like the Arabs in France".
He very much succeeded - this is a straight-up French-Algerian Scarface.
4. Swimming Pool (2003)
The masterful François Ozon (8 Women; In The House), whose films all possess the delicately specific composure of an oil painting, directed this sun-drenched neo-noir the simmers with unspoken sexual tension.
Charlotte Rampling (Dexter; Never Let Me Go) plays a wizened, suspicious novelist who squares off against a lithe, furtive stranger played by Ludivine Sagnier (The Devil's Double) at an isolated summer house in Southern France.
Overflowing with the kind of lush ambiguity that many directors struggle with, Swimming Pool frustrated some with its contradictions, but I lapped up every moment.
The film initially plays off noir-ish conventions before mood and tone take precedence over logic. It was clearly the only way to go.
Sagnier later created a similar dynamic with Kristin Scott Thomas in 2010's Love Crime, also very much worth a look.
5. Malefique (2002)
This criminally underseen fantasy horror film is one of the few movies to ever actually live up to the oft-used description "a feature-length Twilight Zone episode". I'm a giant fan of Rod Serling's landmark '60s anthology show, but most films it inspires trip over themselves - not this one.
Malefique concerns four very different prisoners who discover a book of black magic in the wall of their jail cell. They attempt to use it to break-out, but things go awesomely wrong.
I'm a bit too squeamish to embrace recent French shock-horror breakouts like Inside (2007) or Martyrs (2008), but Malefique felt like it was made just for me. Plus it is pretty disturbing in its own right.
Agree? Disagree? Jealous? Sorry for boasting. What are your favourite modern French movies? Comment below!