The French, 4/22.

So the French are voting as I type. Turn out, evidently, is high. If you haven't been following the campaign but you've got 5½ minutes, the audio slide show that accompanies Ariane Bernard's piece in today's New York Times is a fine overview of the candidates and the stakes. If you've got a bit more time this Sunday, see Jane Kramer's piece in the New Yorker; and if you've got all day, there is, of course, the Guardian's coverage.

Cahiers du cinéma, which recently polled the candidates regarding their politique pour le cinéma, lays out its "12 Objectives for Cinema in France." After all, "everything is not very well. As the surveys in Cahiers point out month after month, the problems lie predominantly with aberrations in the support measures that make up our rightly famous "French film system" - aberrations that have ended up reversing the effects they originally intended."

Also:

• Antoine Thirion explains where the title of Jacques Rivette's Don't Touch the Axe comes from, draws several parallels to Out: 1 and a few more to Histoire de Marie et Julien before settling to dwell on what Rivette dwells on: obsession and "the certainty of death."

• Hervé Aubron reviews Belles toujours, in which "Manoel de Oliveira imagines in it the reunion, forty years later, of two Belle de jour survivors - the blonde Séverine, now a widow (Bulle Ogier, Catherine Deneuve having withdrawn), and the libertine Husson (Michel Piccoli).... Belle de jour displayed a double life, a back and forth between two spaces, compartmentalized yet symmetrical... In Belle toujours, the boxes remain, vestiges of the past compartmentalization, but the double life no longer is. Life has unified itself onto a single plane, in a Paris which resembles a cemetery for brothels."

• "'I am an artiste!!!' Olivier Dahan's Edith Piaf does not miss a single opportunity to shout this out, like an insult or a calling card," writes Emmanuel Burdeau. "However La Vie en Rose reveals rien, non, rien de rien, of this art, why people love it, why it plucks at the heartstrings of the French."

"Paris is the city of lights but also of love, and in Paris je t'aime, 18 renowned directors contribute star-studded vignettes about amour, each set in a different metropolitan neighborhood," begins Nick Schager at Slant. "Typical of such compilations, results tend to vary wildly, though despite roughly an even number of slight successes and minor misfires, the bad nonetheless tends to outweigh the good courtesy of a few preachy and/or ugly episodes that spoil the otherwise light, affectionate mood."

Via Movie City News, Philippa Hawker reflects in the Age on the century-plus-old love affair between Paris and the cinema.

In the NYT, Leslie Camhi previews Emmanuel Bourdieu's Poison Friends. Thibault Vinçon plays André, "the brilliant ringleader of a band of Parisian graduate students... Perhaps only in France could people's literary impulses appear so widespread and insistent that, according to André, they must be controlled, like a physical itch or a psychological compulsion."

Philip French calls this week's DVD club in the Observer to order: Last Year in Marienbad.

Earlier: James van Maanen's coverage of this year's Rendez-Vous With French Cinema: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12.

Posted by dwhudson at April 22, 2007 6:50 AM