# C04 A few French Films
Sorry for that but I went to the cinema to see French movies.… very French this time !
## Toni en famille / Toni
It's a Drama comedy about a woman (Toni played by Camille Cottin) in her forties who looks back on her past life and looks her family life. She was a star in a talent show in her twenties but lives from little show in bars now. She has 5 children and the older ones are going to leave to study or work. She decides to become a teacher but nothing is simple for a women of her age… The film is a slice of life, a generational movie. It's not only for women but for people who sacrified a lot to their family (it's often women!!), who lived not for them but followed the career their parents chose for them. It's not original but well filmed, with a good cast for children and Camille Cottin who carries the movie with her talent. I'm not sure that the movie could have been done without her, or could have been interesting.
## Bernadette
This film is about former first lady Bernadette Chirac, the wife of Jacques Chirac. But it's not a biopic, it's a comedy with fictional elements. Catherine Deneuve is Bernadette and the movie celebrates that women, a woman from the old French aristocracy who takes a back seat to her husband. But when her husband becomes President of France, she can no longer stand to be mocked by everyone, as an old-fashioned woman. She's of course not a feminist but French politics is so masculine. De Villepin, Juppé, Sarkozy and other French politics are mocked and with real elements and anecdotes. For French people, it's very funny but I don't know how it can be felt by a foreign viewer who don't know French politics. Perhaps as the revenge of a woman against a boorish and liar husband ? The little scenes making a link with the Christian religion and another famous Bernadette are laugh-out-loud funny....especially if you are fan of french pop music !
## Wahou ! / Wow !
It's an anthology film about real property and estate agency. We see different real estate advisors trying to conclude a sale with buyers. The first one is a a disillusioned salesman (Bruno Podalydes) and the second one is a depressive widow (Karin Viard). They are trying to sell a large old-fashioned middle-class house and a recently completed flat. The owners of the house are an old couple (Sabine Azéma and Eddy Mitchell) very attached to their memories, less to the details and the upkeep. One sketch follows another and it's like anecdotes of an estate agency. It's often very funny and the cast helps for that with many actors and actresses of the Comédie Française. But as many anthology films, it's uneven and heterogeneous despite the small number of sketches. A very French comedy and a good surprise, because the good moments are often in the trailer in this type of films.
## Le Consentement / Consent
It's an adaptation of the french autobiography of the same title from Vanessa Springora. She was a teenager (played by Kim Higelin) and she met French «novel» writer Gabriel Matzneff (played by Jean-Paul Rouve). I have read the book when it came out and it was a shock. Matzneff was a well-known paedophile and paedo-criminal and wrote about it for years, receiving prizes for that, protected by the powerful and the publishing world. With the #MeToo movement, time has finally come to denounce. Woody Allen or Kevin Spacey are just amateurs compared to Matzneff. It's also different from Harvey Weinstein but not far from him...with children (and also sex tourism in the Philippines) !!! If the book was hard to bear, I wondered if I would have the same feelings with the movie version. I can understand people who don't want to see such a story. It's a useful testimony for all the children (and their parents) who can fall into the clutches of predators like him. The movie is very hard to watch and close to the book.
In that kind of story, it's always difficult not to be voyeuristic or gloomy. The balance here is quite good to show the monster and the manipulation of this guy with children, parents, friends… The position of the mother (Laetitia Casta) is complex to understand, more than many affairs of this kind. It's really the type of film where the story is more important than the direction or the acting.
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