Two French arthouse films, available only on-demand in the U.S., risk triggering American audiences. In the well-made tradition of filmmakers like Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Cédric Klapisch’s Colours of Time deserves the popularity of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s patriotic romantic masterpiece Amélie.
The prospective sale of inherited farmland unites four distant cousins: businesswoman Céline (Julia Piaton), teacher Abdel (Zinedine Soualem), beekeeper Guy (Vincent Macaigne), and content creator Seb (Abraham Wapler). The story cuts from these descendants to Belle Époque Paris as they piece together the love lives of Adèle (Suzanne Lindon) and her mother, Odette (Sara Giraudeau). Adèle leaves home to learn the truth about her parents. Her search introduces her to sophisticated French sexual norms and joins her family history to France’s sublime art.
Among Klapisch’s plastic re-creations of Impressionist art, a tableau evokes Claude Monet’s Springtime; the view of the painter at work recalls John Singer Sargent. The staging attaches narrative sentiment to cultural heritage. Jean Renoir goes further in French Cancan: he imagines an Impressionist cinema. A rendezvous at the Musée de l’Orangerie completes three love triangles, the lovers’ outfits harmonizing with Monet’s Water Lilies. Revisiting the same locations across two eras, Klapisch celebrates multicultural Paris’s endurance. The film inadvertently records an eternal city whose self-loathing chauvinism imperils the very monuments that attest to its achievements.
If Colours of Time romanticizes France’s past and averts its gaze from the future, The Second Act faces it head-on. Arguably the greatest actress today, Léa Seydoux plays Florence. She performs in a production that claims a first: AI wrote and directed it.
Tracking shots follow actors through the French countryside. They slip in and out of character, radically subverting contemporary pieties. An argument between bisexual David (Louis Garrel) and straight Willy (Raphaël Quenard) satirizes orthodoxies about sexual preference and gender identity. Cancel culture supplies the human equivalent of AI guardrails: self-censorship. Sexually fluid but mentally rigid, David stays camera-conscious. Willy flaunts his id.
That exchange establishes the movie within the movie. The next long take pairs Florence with her on-screen father, Guillaume (Vincent Lindon), who breaks character and threatens to quit, fearing societal doom. Then his agent calls with an offer from Paul Thomas Anderson, liberal doctrinaire and darling of the media and industry. Guillaume’s enthusiasm returns so abruptly that his reverence becomes the joke. Quentin Dupieux holds the frame as Guillaume and the luminous Seydoux resume their scene. The score converts apparent reality into manufactured sentiment.
As in Yannick and Keep an Eye Out, a subplot about a nervous extra’s humiliation exposes an assault on human dignity. Dupieux’s brilliant direction of actors taps into unconscious absurdity that attests to individual worth. With Buñuel and Dalí’s surrealism and milky-smooth visuals, The Second Act fulfills the Impressionists’ impetus for the AI age.