Berlin Dispatch. 9.

The best things about a film festival are the surprises, and I have been surprised by two films from France in the Panorama section at this year's Berlinale. One of my favorites this week is Camping Sauvage, a melodrama about a teenage girl's thunderous summer love affair with an older man that turns fatal. If this twist on the coup de foudre is not French, I don't know what is, and I'm pleased to announce that Catherine Breillat has not exhausted this subject.

The setting is a colony of campers, the kind they call caravans in Europe, which families in August drive to campgrounds for a month, with the same families usually going to the same ones every year. In one of these trailers, at close quarters, are parents Antoine and Edwige, plus a dotty grandfather who's almost deaf, and a angry, libidinous and voluptuous daughter, Camille (Isild Le Besco), who spits out obscenities at her parents most of the time, especially when guests are in earshot. This is trailer trash, albeit summer trailer trash, à la française. She quickly takes up with the bartender, Fred, who already has another girl in mind. (Yes, there's a catfight.) All these ingredients add up to melodrama, and that is exactly what this is.

Enter Blaise (Denis Lavant), a brooding loner and step-brother to the camping boss, Eddie, whose John Waters moustache and humorless mien remind you that this melodrama is not to be taken seriously. The luscious teenager is enough to get Blaise to cheat on his wife, not that it takes much, (this is a French movie) and, once the angry wife gets him back, to abandon her and his small child when Camille comes calling. The errant Blaise is fired from his job as a sailing instructor, and Camille is chafing at her parents' apron strings, so the two get an idea that seems right for any amour fou melodrama - they take off for the seashore, with Camille recording everything on videotape just to make absolutely sure that her parents are insane with fury. Next comes a suicide pact, and at least one of them ends up dead, shot with a Nazi Luger, stolen from Antoine, who had shown it off with pride on Blaise's first visit. How's that for a detail?

If the story of Camping Sauvage sounds extreme, the acting is even more over the top, with Le Bresco snorting out abuse at her parents and Lavant fuming like dynamite that's about to explode. The rest of the ensemble adds the right unnerving gestures at the right moments. The actors play broadly, but deadpan is the rule, and the tactile camera goes for a sweat and skin grossness that makes a lot of us dread the summer holidays. The gorgeous Le Bresco is shot to make her look like a grimacing sex monster, which is exactly what her character is. This is not your warm-spirited Jacques Tati vacation. This is a comic book, only more exaggerated. Christophe Ali and Nicolas Bonilauri made it even better, answering questions after the premiere screening, when they explained that they modeled the death pact story on real events at a camping site, in part, because they could lodge their actors, crew and technical team in trailers on the site - one-stop filmmaking. Team members got to know each other quite well in the communal showers, the filmmakers said. So that's what it takes. Now the secret's out.

The two confessed in French to the German audience, through an excellent translator, that they had made one near-feature, a fifty-minute film called The Rat, which they said seemed to get the mania for making experimental cinema out of their system. I think they've hit their stride here.

This is a story that David Cronenberg would love. I have a suggestion for a sequel - or for an American or Canadian remake, if Cronenberg is free. The aggrieved couple adopts a troubled teenager, and takes her to a camping site in the US to start life afresh. The camping manager: Ex-Vice President Dick Cheney. Lock and load.

The other French film that I enjoyed against all my expectations was Quatre Etoiles (Four Stars), a grifter farce by Christian Vincent that takes its title from its setting, the Carlton Hotel in Cannes. My friends sneered at me when I even mentioned the film. It's not the first time they've been wrong, and it won't be the last.

Franssou (Isabel Carré) is a schoolteacher who's just come into a small inheritance and wants to enjoy it. Stephane (José Garcia) is a short con man who knows every employee at the hotel by name and also knows how to avoid paying his bills. After a rough back-and-forth to determine who each other really is, Stephane launches a con job against a race car driver, who takes a shine for Franssou, as the con man tries to sell him an overpriced residence. Once the lady and the driver seem ready to spend a wild weekend at his house, Stephane throws a wrench into the works, and we get the confusion that's usually the crescendo of a farce.

This isn't much of a story - caper films rarely are. But the acting in Quatre Etoiles is what makes you stay with the film. Isabel Carre plays her role with more awkwardness than guile, yet still a step ahead of the hapless Garcia, who, like most struggling con men, tries and fails to seem a lot smarter than he turns out to be. As Rene the race car driver, François Cluzet is the boiler-plate comic figure, fitting the formula that most of this film manages to rise above.

Another obstacle that the film transcends is industrial-strength product placement. It's not just the Carlton that's shown shamelessly. Carre drives everywhere in a Volkswagen. There's even a scene in a dealership where she buys the convertible. VW just happens to be a sponsor of the Berlinale and a provider of VIP cars for anyone important. Pure coincidence.

This is the kind of comedy that could make American producers rethink their allergy to buying the remake rights for French comedies, a strategy pushed very profitably by the late Daniel Toscan du Plantier of Unifrance that seemed reasonable once but never worked. But think of the exposure. Plenty of hotels in the US would prostrate themselves for free. Yet it's the acting that makes Quatre Etoiles something more than a French farce made with a cookie-cutter. And it's the acting that's almost impossible to replicate.

Another find was The Collector the new dark comedy by Feliks Falk of Poland. Falk's protagonist is a well-groomed but ruthless repo-man in Warsaw, which has become a feeding ground for the greedy, more than a decade after the fall of communism. So much for solidarity in this vision of defenseless people at the mercy of predatory bankers and their hatchet-men.

No one whom I've talked to disputes the film's grim accuracy. As the oddly-pure collector who can't be bribed, Andrzej Chyra looks like a Polish Daniel Craig, but he manages to develop a conscience after stripping families, octogenarians, and even a hospital of anything sellable. Everyone else seems to be for sale. The bodies end up stinking here, a blunt but true enough metaphor for contemporary Poland that's being repeated in other Polish films, like the must-see The Wedding by Wojciech Smarzowski (2004), which takes its orgy of greed and deceit in a rural setting to the limit and then some.

Posted by dwhudson at February 16, 2006 11:15 AM