Our reviewers select and review the best independent and foreign films on amazon.com, cd universe, and netflix

Let It Rain (France 2008, 110 min, dir: Agnes Jaoui, cast: Agnes Jaoui, Jean Pierre Bacri, Jamel Debbouze).

Is it the director’s revenge to cast your husband as the asshole? Agnes Jaoui is an excellent French actress who directs her second film Let it Rain. Her real life husband, Jean Pierre Barci plays Michel, an oafish video maker who is making a documentary about her.

She’s running for the legislature representing a section of Provence. Actually the district is called Rhone-Alps. We know this because the financial key to many French films making a deal with one of the regions (departments) to promote tourism. They give you production money and you try to feature their landscape, towns, hotels, and restaurants.

Agnes, as Agatha, undergoes a tireless round of family squabbles and minor irritations in her quest to win the election. Michel and his brighter sidekick, Karim (Jamel Debbouze) never seem to be able to say “action” and “cut” in sync.

So it goes. The film has a woman director’s touch in lingering moments between Agatha sister, her children, and a somewhat estranged male companion. One of the standout elements of the film, besides a good catalogue of places to eat and sleep in Rhone-Alps (you can watch this film while open to Trip Advisor)– is the music. Mostly Schubert but supplemented with wild brass band music from Santiago de Cuba. It gives us a taste of the unique sound of this east end of Cuba city usually eclipsed by Havana sounds.

After noting restaurants for your next visit to France, it’s worth a click to iTunes to download a sample from Santiago de Cuba. All your friends will marvel at the range of your tastes.

OSS 117: Lost in Rio (France 2009,  97 min. dir: Michel Hazanavicius, cast: Jean Dujardin, Louise Monot).

James Bond with vertigo teams with an Israeli Mossad operative in a miniskirt to find Nazis in Brazil. He can recognize Jews by their noses and believes his mission is to bring better understanding between Nazis and Jews.

This is the second James Bond spoof that Michel Hazanavicius has directed. The first was OSS 117: Cario, Nest of Spies. The plot of that propels OSS 117:Lost in Rio is an attempt to find a microfilmed list of French who collaborated with the Nazis. But all the really matters is a chance to riff on old James Bond movies, including the split screen images still remembered in old title sequences.

But OSS 117 was actually a French James Bond before James Bond. Author Jean Bruce first invented him in 1949, four years before Ian Fleming published his first James Bond novel. The first movie using Bruce’s OSS 117 character was made in 1957 (OSS 117 N’est Pas Mort). The first James Bond movie was made in 1962 (Dr. No).

Michel Hazanavicius has gone on to make the much-praised The Artist (also staring Jean Dujardin). At first it seems odd that a television comedy, and commercial director should suddenly show up with a film about silent film stars shot in black and white and without dialogue. But if you look more closely at his filmography you discover his first movie, La Classe Americaine, was a compilation of old clips from Warner Brothers dubbed into French.

From a film made up of classic clips to two stylistic parodies of Bond movies to The Artist is a very logical evolution. In all these films the director has managed to recreate the clunky styles of the past without every making them silly.

Welcome (France 2009 110 min. dir: Philippe Lioret, cast: Vincent Lindon, Firat Ayverdi, Audrey Dana, Derya Ayverdi).

There is a peculiar monument in an obscure traffic circle of Sangatte, France that looks like a giant electric shaver. It is actually one of the tunneling machines that burrowed the nearby channel tunnel to England. For immigrants from Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Africa it is as symbolic as the Statue of Liberty.

Sangatte and nearby Calais have become the jihad destination for armies of young men seeking passage to England and the promise of a better life. Their fantasy is hopping a train for the twenty-minute ride to British amnesty on the other side. The reality is you can’t hang on to a train going 160 miles an hour.

The next bet if the trains will kill you is the sea-going ferries that load trucks for England day and night at the port of Calais. But the police have CO2 detectors they can insert into the truck cargo areas to detect clandestine travelers. Bilal (Firat Ayverdi) and his companions try to smother themselves under plastic garbage bags to hide their breath. They fail.

So they become casualties of the immigration system that neither will legitimize them, nor send them back to their war torn countries. They are limbo people roaming the streets of Calais where residents are instructed it is against the law to help them.

Bilal (Firat Ayverdi) must get to England to save his lovely girlfriend Mini (Derya Ayverdi) from a forced marriage to her cousin. If he can’t get there by train or boat, he must swim. As crazy as it is; he is obsessed. Simon is the swim instructor at the municipal pool. Bilal seeks his lost love, Simon has just lost his soul mate: ex-wife Marion (Audrey Dana) has signed their divorce papers.

The improbably friendship between the embittered Frenchman and the romantic young Iraqi could easily descend into bathos, but it doesn’t. Nor does it end well for either of them. Welcome is anything but. And the point of Philippe Lioret’s provocative movie is that the imbalance of human suffering and aspiration knows no boundary.

Beating the odds on Google search has become a complex pastime calling for expert help creating questionable content. From time to time MovieWithMe receives an email from some underpaid internet field hand asking for a post or a link to a blog article they feel is relevant to our users. I’m tempted to reply in Hindi (using Google translator, of course) since I suspect many of the names like Tim or Mary are actually nom d’internet chosen by Mugdha or Gupta.

The latest asks for us to post “14 Movies Every French Major Must See.” The choices are what you might expect of anyone who has leafed through an issue of Cahiers du Cinemas. But I was heartened they included Taxi and La Femme Nikita among the classics. They also squeezed in Le Placard; a perfectly mediocre movie.

The site that has this profound interest in the language skills of French majors is called BestCollegesOnline.com. It provides a way to scan through college sand courses. They also offer “14 Movies Every Journalism Major Must See,” ” 8 Acclaimed Screenplays that were born on College Campuses,”  and “Ten Incredibly Beautiful High Schools that put yours to Shame.”

All of this is useful information for someone, though I’m not sure it makes much difference if you are looking for college credit online. My fourteen movies for French majors would probably concentrate not on classic titles but on pronunciation. Most French movies use too much slang and mumbling that students can not understand. Who knows that shpa really means je ne sais quoi or that un bur is and Arab from North Africa. Few contemporary French films use the classic language, but those few are the ones students should see and hear.

Meanwhile I hope Gupta enjoys this post in case he ever plans to learn French.

The Girl on the Train (France 2009, 105, dir: Andre Techine, cast: Emilie Dequenne, Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Demy, Ronit Elkabetz, Michel Blanc).

Tough enough to make a good film about something real that really happened. Almost as tough to make a film about something real that really didn’t happen. The Girl on the Train never comes to grips with the dark mind of the paranoid imaginer who made up this amazing story; or her motivation. Jeanne (Emile Dequenne) is a young woman in bitter battle with her mother Louise (Catherine Deneuve). She finds her revenge against mother and the world by claiming she has been attacked by black toughs on a suburban commuter train outside Paris.

The commuter lines of the RER go lots of places around Paris. The trouble with Andre Techine’s movie is it doesn’t go anywhere. At the end we learn that she faked the whole episode. That’s disappointing for a film so interesting to watch; and gripping while you still think there’s a truth lurking around the corner.

Where The Girl on the Train becomes even more intriguing is when you look beyond the movie to the event that inspired it. In 2004 Marie Lionie Leblanc claimed that she had been attacked on the RER by a gang of blacks who ripped her clothes, cut her hair, and drew a swastika on her stomach. In the violence they knocked over her infant baby’s carriage. Passengers looked on but did nothing to help.

French politicians wasted no time in condemning the incident and Ariel Sharon told French Jews they had better pack up and immigrate to Israel to avoid this new “wildest Anti-Semitism.” The only problem was: Marie made it all up. No witness every came forward and within days the police proved she was lying.

That happened in 2004. But it echoed a 1987 incident that is almost the flip side. A 15 year-old black girl from Wappinger, New York (less than an hour north of New York City) claimed six white men raped her. Tawana Brawly said several of them were policeman, and one was a district attorney. The politicians went wild.

Black politician Al Sharpton seized upon it as proof of police hatred of blacks just as Ariel Sharon grabbed on to the RER incident as proof that the French hated Jews. Tawana never recanted her story. The grand jury did it for her. They failed to vote even a single indictment.

So the real story of The Girl on the Train should have been more about the mind of the fibber. What kind of person makes up this stuff? In the case of Tawana, and I suspect the same might apply to Marie; it is a hopelessly paranoid individual who can best make human contact by playing the victim. Tawana converted to Islam and moved from Wappinger Falls to tiny Claremont, Virginia. She changed her name, bought an attack dog, and began working as a nurse in a nursing home.

She’s never married, keeps to herself, and rarely ventures beyond Claremont except when she accepts free flights and limousines on returns to New York as a guest at United Africa Movement events.

I wish the film made clearer the pattern of a paranoid mind that understands how to jump on a hot button issue and sprinkle just enough truth to feed the flames. The reward is 15 minutes of fame and a celebrity glow that, if you play your paranoia right, can last your whole life.

Paris (2008,130 min. dir: Cedric Klapisch, cast: Juliette Binoche, Romain Duris, Fabrice Luchini, Karen Viard, Melanie Laurent, Albert Dupontel).

A dozen films share the name “Paris,” but only this one captures this modern city prancing like a transvestite in Seventeenth Century robes. The genius of Cedric Klapisch in all of his Paris-set movies like When the Cat’s Away and Peut-etre is that you feel he lives in the city every day.

And he does. Somewhere in the Thirteenth or the Twentieth arrondissemont, he probably hunches against the winter wind like everyone else schlepping his or her shopping bags home from Monoprix or making the daily visit to the boulangerie, for his stick of “traditionale” French bread. Living in Paris, one understands the Babel the city has always been plus the sense of chubbiness where all the residents feel like members.

Paris captures it all, and strives to show daily life for fishmongers to fashionistas. You won’t see many French films that set scenes at Rungis: the vast produce market outside of Paris. Nor will you see the cafes that stay open all night to serve the market workers. Rarely will you see films that use the new city built in Ivry (near the Biblioteque Nationale). Here it is the backdrop for the story of a working architect.

Karen Viard, playing the owner of the neighborhood boulangerie (bakery), is a stereotype known to every Parisien. The bread counters are always presided over by a precise, perfectly coiffured, middle-aged matron who greets you with her singsong voice every morning. As nice as she seems, she will instantly fire a shop girl who can’t fold a tissue properly over a financier patisserie, and she will urge you to try the new apricot tart but will never give away a free sample.

If Klapisch has one failing in his city view, it is that there are no poor, there are no ugly; there is no brutality. His Paris is made up of middle class, educated, and lovely people. Even the fruit sellers in the neighborhood outdoor market are cute. The vast underclasses of North Africans that surround Paris in the suburbs never intrude into Klapisch’s district.

This is the filmmaker’s blind spot, and it has been so in film after film. Perhaps you can see the high side of life or the misery, but it is difficult to have an eye for both. Within his view Cedric Klapisch does have a unique vision that is a delight to anyone who can appreciate a worldly modern city as a singular planet. His art is a blend of architecture, personality, whimsy and sound. Inventive music tracks are memorable in Paris, as in the earlier films Peut-etre and l’Auberge Espagnole (also in Movie With Me).

And for a man who loves his city there can be no greater respect than to get the directions right. You never see a character in a Klapisch movie turn a corner and step out a mile away. At the end of Paris, Romain Duris tells the taxi driver to take him to the Hospital in Montrouge. The taxi driver replies that a demonstration on Boulevard Richard Lenoir might impede them so he suggests an alternate route. Not only is the route he picks correct, but the director actually shoots the shots out the window along the way. That’s a Paris movie made for Parisiens. After all, they are the final critics Paris is made to please.

A Secret (France 2007, 105 min, dir: Claude Miller, cast: Cecile de France, Patrick Bruel, Ludivine Sangnier, Julie Depardieu, Mathieu Amalric).

A coven of Jews keeps the dark secret of the past from a son who is haunted by dreams of a brother he never had. Sounds like a good programmer for Jewish film festivals but is actually a study in desire and lust that is so original it has to be true.

“Based on a true story” is carried in the main titles. How could you make this up? At Maxime’s (Patrick Bruel) marriage to Hannah (Ludivine Sangnier) he is introduced to his wife’s brother’s wife, Tania (Cecile de France). Cecile is a Belgian beauty who would stir anyone’s loins, and indeed, Maxime goes through his wedding night watching her ass across the dance floor.

If you want to see where this actress came from and the range of what she can do, watch L’Auberge Espagnole also on MovieWithMe.com. She’s an actress with a range far beyond mere seduction.

But in A Secret, that is her role and she’s up for it. Maxime and Tania waltz around each other for several years while Maxime and Hannah produce a perfect son who has all the personality of his mother and all the athletic skill of his father. But Hannah catches on to the heat she’s not part of, and, in suicidal despair, delivers herself and her son into the arms of the Nazis who have conquered France.

Meanwhile Tania’s husband is killed in the war. The last barrier is down and the lovers buzz towards each other like moths to a flame. Their passion produced another son. This one has neither the charm of his mother or the physic of his father. Everybody in the little circle of Jews, that includes neighbor Louise clams up about what happened during the war.

Finally the little boy pieces it all together. The story has the feel of grand opera. Indeed, it would be a good subject. And the movie is less satisfying carrying about the little boy learning of his secret brother than watching the pas de deux of the two lovers circling each other, denying then eyeing, then panting and finally arriving at that luscious moment of sex that would be the opera’s second act curtain. Forget the anemic kid, the lovers are movie enough.

Title: Diva
Year: 1981
Director: Jean-Jacques Beineix
Writers: Beieix and Jean Van Hamme, based on the novel by Daniel Odier, writing as “Delacorta”
Stars: Frederic Andrei, Wilhelmenia Fernandez, Richard Bohringer, Thuy An Luu, Jacques Fabbri, Dominique Pinon

The Story: A romantic young Paris postman secretly bootlegs a performance by an African-American opera diva on the same day that a dying woman hides another tape in his bag, implicating the chief of police in a prostitution ring. Different gangs come after him looking for the two tapes, but he is oblivious, blithely pursuing romances with both the singer and a punky young Vietnamese shoplifter. Soon he finds himself caught up in several harrowing chases across Paris.

Why It’s Great: When one talks of movies from the ’80s, the phrase “style over substance” often comes up, and this movie could certainly be accused of leading that revolution– it’s gorgeously shot but it has little of the social critique of the New Wave. But this movie gives style a good name. This is the look that American schlockmeisters like Simpson and Bruckheimer wanted to replicate, but their soulless big screen car-commercials lacked the lyricism that makes this come alive. For one brief moment, this movie actually made it cool to be cool. But while this movie moved away from moral considerations, it was nevertheless a refreshing leap forward in terms of showing the multicultural world that France was becoming. Godard’s characters may have carried around Mao’s little red book, but it rarely occurred to them to actually get to know any persons of color.

Read More at Cockeyed Caravan.

The Triplets of Belleville(France 2003, 78 min, dir: Sylvain Chomet, cast voices only)

Why is it that anything done in animation gets a free ride on story? Words like charming, delight, and inventive are always attached. No one seems to care if it makes sense.

Okay, The Triplets of Belleville is a wonder to look at, and there’s a lot of social commentary in the drawings. The city of Belleville is probably Montreal, and the French bicycle race puffing up the mountains is probably the Tour de France’s annual push up Mount Ventoux in Province. If this is so clear, why is the story so convoluted?

Animators are visual people, but rarely writers. The great success of classic Walt Disney animated films was their stories. The same is true for the best of Pixar. These companies hire top writers. Auteur is not in their language. Sylvain Chomet is an auteur. The credits of his films usually show he did everything but wash the floors.

Which brings up another one of his films, The Illusionist. The story of this one is more straight forward, but equally flawed. A fading music hall magician is befriended by the maid who scrubs the floors of the hotel/pub in a small Scottish village where he performs. She follows him to Edinburgh, where his fortunes sink and she blossoms into a beautiful young woman. The story of their moments between his descent and her ascent are wonderfully emotional. But the ending leaves us wondering if we couldn’t know a little more about them and get a clue of what it all meant.

Both films are lovely to look at but unsatisfying. Where are Disney songs like “Someday My Prince Will Come” or moments of horror like Dumbo’s mother burning in a train car or Bambi’s father telling him “your mother isn’t coming back anymore.” Chomet tries to toe the line between sentiment and art like a tightrope walker. He can’t balance. Sappy sentiment wins every time. Denying it only muddies his story. An old saying in Hollywood is: “if you come to the circus, don’t complain that it smells of elephant shit.”

Beautiful pictures are enough of a reason to see Triplets (and catch The Illusionist). But this is no reason for critics and filmies to moon over Chomet like he is a genius wrapped in gossamer. He’s an artist: meaning he draws really well. But telling tales well is not what you learn in art school. If he wants to strut the path that Disney blazed he ought to find a writer partner.