Back for its 29th edition, Film at Lincoln Center’s long-running annual series included 21 new films. Here are my reviews of a half-dozen of those entries.

 

In Thomas Cailley’s dystopian drama, some humans have started mutating into wild animals including some who have developed large wings and try to fly; is civilization unraveling, or is it a new type of evolutionary leap into the future? François (Romain Duris), worried about his afflicted wife, moves with his teenage son Émile (Paul Kircher) to be close to her, and they enter a world of hybrid humans. Calley’s conceit is certainly a high-wire act—eye-popping makeup, effects and photography vividly bring this bizarre but all too real new universe to life—yet his film often wavers, whether in the obvious metaphors for the fear of outsiders or in a wan subplot featuring Adèle Exarchopoulos, an actress incapable of a false note, but who is hamstrung by her role as a sympathetic cop. She and Duris deserve better scenes than Cailley gives them. 

 

Vanessa Springora’s soul-baring 2020 memoir created a sensation in France as she described a nonconsensual relationship with writer Gabriel Matzneff, who was 50 when he groomed her as his lover at age 13, and now Vanessa Filho—who adapted the book with Springora—has made a daring, often difficult to watch adaptation that clearly details how the self-admitted pedophile (who wrote quite openly about his scandalous sexual behavior with young boys and girls but was shielded by a literary establishment that looked askance at the real-life consequences) stealthily to her under his wing, emotionally and sexually. Jean-Paul Rouve is creepily persuasive as the destructive Matzneff, Laetitia Casta is scarily pathetic as Vanessa’s complicit mother and the great Elodie Bouchez has a magnificent cameo as the adult Vanessa. But it’s the simply spectacular Kim Higelin, as Vanessa from ages 13 to 18 (Higelin is 24 in real life), who is the beating and bleeding heart of the film, a dynamic piece of acting that is also emotionally shattering to watch.

 

Writer-director Valérie Donzelli pairs with current French cinema It Girl, Belgian actress Virginie Efira, for a twisty thriller that begins as a whirlwind romance when Blanche (Efira), still hurting from a recent breakup, falls for the charming Grégoire (Melvil Poupaud). They immediately marry, but it’s not long before she realizes he’s not the man of her dreams: yet it takes several years and two children before she finally takes action to escape his emotional and physical abuse. Efira is her usual powerhouse self, both as Blanche and her suspicious twin sister Rose, but not enough is made of the siblings’ relationship (or with that of their mother) to justify the amount of screen time it receives. Surprisingly, this routine feature was co-written with Audrey Diwan, who wrote and directed last year’s memorable abortion drama, Happening, doubling the disappointment.

 

 

Co-writer-director Anna Novion has created pulse-pounding suspense from the seemingly mundane subject of math: a grad school numbers whiz, Marguerite (a superlative and complex turn by Belgian actress Ella Rumpf), sees her academic life fall apart when it’s discovered that the theorem she has worked on for years has a fatal error. Novion’s brilliantly observed character study follows a young woman who realizes that her life can consist of much more than mere numbers and proofs on a blackboard; director and actress make Marguerite one of the most compelling characters I’ve seen onscreen in some time, and it’s easy to share in her triumphs (her first orgasm is particularly wittily shot) and cheer for her ultimate mathematical—and personal—redemption.

 

 

In a very distinguished career, French documentarian Nicolas Philibert has made insightful films about subjects ranging from French national radio to rural schooling—in his latest, he aims his sharp eye and lens on the Adamant, a barge on the Seine that serves as a mental health daycare center for adults and provides nurturing activities with a dedicated staff. Philibert, in his usual discerning way, records the interactions between the patients and the doctors and other staff members, along with perceptive and touching interviews, making for another in a long line of generously humane portraits.

 

 

Robin Campillo’s most recent film, 2017's BPM: Beats Per Minute, was a feisty, angry and absorbing chronicle of ’90s AIDS activism in France and the formation of ACT UP. His latest, equally autobiographical, feature returns him to childhood, growing up on a French military base on the island of Madagascar. The young protagonist, Thomas, feels left out of family activities and often passes his time daydreaming about a superhero comic book—whose adventures are amusingly visualized by Campillo—and then finds a fellow friend in a young Vietnamese girl, Suzanne. Campillo has made a moody if diffuse work that shows a sympathetic eye but also too often a preference for visual audacity over depth.