Fitoussi: Folies Bergère (2014)

Folies Bergere isn’t, as the title might suggest, about the legendary nightclub, or the glamorous fin-de-siecle Parisian lifestyle that it suggests. Instead, it’s about a literal bergere – or shepherdess – whose follies puncture and play around with the haute aspirations of arthouse French cinema, to the point where it almost feels as if it’s been made just to punk a French Festival lineup. As Brigitte Lecanu, Isabelle Huppert is more or less in Bovary parody mode, dreaming of a life beyond her husband Xavier (Jean-Pierre Daroussin) and his swine farm that takes her up to Paris for the weekend, where she has a brief flirtation with one of their young rural neighbours, along with a businessman that she meets in her hotel. At one level, that makes it a bit of a vicarious Parisian holiday for her audience as well, but it’s a holiday that skewers Paris’ highbrow pretensions as it unfolds, taking us through a late New Wave city – Brigitte’s younger lover works at American Apparel – that doesn’t really feel that exotic, or even that cultured, and certainly doesn’t guarantee the kinds of endless erotic satisfaction and rumination that you find in so many films made about French people for foreigners. In some ways, that brings it closer to Godard and Truffaut’s cityscape than a more nostalgic tribute, tapping into their peculiarly free-floating, pulsating sense of exuberance, as director Marc Fitoussi sets Huppert’s body and face to the most retro moments of recent dance music – the original French title is La Ritournelle, after Sebastian Tellier’s nu-disco classic, although most of the music was released in the last year – until she feels quite ageless and free, finding her youth so unexpectedly and joyfully renewed that she doesn’t even really have to look back upon it. And joy is very much the register and point of the whole film, which is comic in a grand, quite old-fashioned way, beginning and ending happily, and giving Huppert license to put aside her masochistic austerity to just goof off and have a good time with one of the most contagiously silly characters of her career.