French film Planetarium with Lily-Rose Depp a spiritual affair

The French Film Festival has an eclectic line-up, including one ghostly offering with star appeal.

Lily-Rose Depp in Planetarium, in which she plays a 1930s spiritualist.

At this year’s Alliance Francaise French Film Festival there are more than 40 features, everything from biopics to broad comedy, personal essay to carnivalesque whimsy, not to mention two movies starring the protean Isabelle Huppert: in one she plays a philosophy lecturer; in the other, a failed Eurovision contestant.

Amid all this variety, some themes emerge: one is a surprising number of movies about the medical profession, another an emphasis on image and performance. Festival guest Rebecca Zlotowski is bringing her third feature, Planetarium, a film that seems like a compendium of movies in its own right: it’s a stylish period piece, a ghost story, a reflection on the art of cinema, a drama of obsession and the tale of a controversial period in French history.

It stars Natalie Portman and Lily-Rose Depp, daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, making her debut in a French feature. The pair play a couple of American sisters, Laura (Portman) and Kate (Depp), who are spiritualists with a stage show. Travelling through Europe in the late 1930s, they attract the attention of a powerful and visionary movie producer, Andre Korben (Emmanuel Salinger), who becomes obsessed with them.

They are a double act with divided roles: Laura is the manager, Kate the medium. Korben has plans for them both. He wants to turn Laura into a movie star, and he wants to capture on film the act of communicating with spirits.

Zlotowski was inspired by real-life examples, beginning with the three Fox sisters, late-19th-century spiritualists at one point hired by a wealthy banker who wanted to connect with his deceased wife. She transformed this banker into a very different character with far more of a role in the story. She based him on a real person, a film producer called Bernard Natan, whose story she believes deserves to be better known.

For Depp, who turns 19 in May, Planetarium is the beginning of a career. Brought up in Paris and Los Angeles, she’s bilingual and sees herself working in both French and American cinema. Yet despite her parents’ example, she says it had never occurred to her that she could be an actress. “I’d never taken classes or done plays or anything,” she says. When she was 14, she did a five-minute scene, “just for fun”, in Kevin Smith’s movie Tusk, appearing alongside Smith’s daughter, a childhood friend, and something clicked. “I realised this could be my job.”

She’s picky about scripts, she says, and wanted her first serious French film to be “something beautiful ... I want to be proud of everything I’ve done”. As Kate, the sister who seems to have some sort of connection with the uncanny, she has an ethereal, almost otherworldly quality, playing a figure she has described as someone “floating between life and death”.

Portman’s example, she says, was crucial for her. “She made me feel so comfortable, it wasn’t hard to play that sisterly bond. And just watching the way she prepares for a scene, and how much she tries to get into the character’s mind, it really inspired me.”

In Planetarium, it’s not entirely clear what powers the sisters have, or how much they know about each other’s gifts and intentions. For Zlotowski, this question is an open one. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she says, “that’s why I believe in cinema.”

Depp with co-star Natalie Portman. ‘It wasn’t hard to play that sisterly bond,’ Depp says.

One of her starting points for Planetarium, she adds, was the experience of watching a Maurice Chevalier musical from the 1930s. “It was flirtatious, very nice, very joyful. Just before the war, maybe 1935 or 1936. And everyone was dancing, like inside a champagne bubble.

“I was enjoying the experience, and at a certain moment it wasn’t pleasant. It suddenly struck me that not only all those people were dead today, but at the very moment they were shooting the film, maybe a few years after, half of them were dead.

“It had a powerful impact on me, and maybe in a way the film is the answer to that.”

There are various kinds of ghosts that haunt Planetarium. One is the figure of Natan, a producer who has disappeared from French film history. His story is complicated and much of it still contested, but there’s no doubt he was a ­pioneering force who acquired the Pathe company in 1929 and brought it into the modern era, before he was imprisoned by French authorities during the war, then sent to Auschwitz. He was Zlotowski’s inspiration for Korben, a man determined to modernise the industry, who is vulnerable to rumour and innuendo and the target of anti-Semitism in the press.

Zlotowski is a graduate of La Femis, the famous French film school. Only later did she learn that its location was the place where Natan had his studios. “He was much closer to me than I realised,” she says. “I was really pissed off that no one had told me the story of this man before.”

For Salinger, who plays Korben, Planetarium is a film about many things. It’s in part about the era of collaboration and occupation, a period in France’s history with which he says the country has still not come to terms.

It’s about the nature of film and its ability to capture what is already lost, with all the contradictions this brings.

He mentions Jean Cocteau’s maxim, “the cinema is death at work”, and talks about an actor whose example feels immediate to him. “I love James Mason — he still inspires me. He’s there.”

And you don’t necessarily have to believe in ghosts to feel there are things you can experience yet can’t explain. “When you lose people, when they die — for a while, and sometimes for a long while — they are still around you, still there. What is this thing?”

The Alliance Francaise French Film Festival opens nationally this month. affrenchfilmfestival.org

THE ONES TO WATCH

Philippa Hawker previews three notable films screening exclusively at the French Film Festival

*

Adele Hanael in The Unknown Girl.

THE UNKNOWN GIRL

This year’s French Film Festival features a surprising number of movies with medical themes, ranging from stories of country doctors to dramas about World War II medical teams, tales of transplant recipients, midwives and medical researchers uncovering malpractice.

One of the strongest is The Unknown Girl, a quietly engrossing work from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

Adele Haenel gives a wonderful performance as Jenny, a dedicated young GP who is about to take a new job and an upward step in her career. All that changes when young woman comes to Jenny’s surgery after hours.

Jenny hears the bell ring, but chooses not to answer it, because it’s late. The next day, she learns that the young woman has been found dead.

All we ever see of her is the merest glimpse on some CCTV footage. The patient Jenny did not admit — a young African woman whose body remains unclaimed and unidentified — becomes a kind of fixation for her. “She never sees her,” Jean-Pierre Dardenne says, “and neither does the audience. We said to ourselves, the more absent this unknown young woman is from the film, the more present she becomes in Jenny’s head, and in that of the spectator too.”

At first, says Dardenne, all Jenny wants to do is find out the girl’s name, to verify her existence, “so that she doesn’t die a second time”. She continues to treat her patients, in a series of observational vignettes that create a sense of the fractured community she tends.

At the same time, she cannot let her obsession go. Her detachment, her seriousness, her sense of touch, her attention to detail, all the things that make her a doctor also lead her to become a kind of detective, seeking answers as well as absolution.

*

Hanael in Ogres with Marc Barbe.

OGRES

With her second feature, Ogres, writer-director Lea Fehner creates a road movie of sorts, a work that’s an exhilarating mixture of chaos and control, energy and fragility. Fehner’s parents ran a travelling theatre troupe, and this is the world in which her movie is set.

The company is touring a cabaret-circus version of a Chekhov play, but the drama extends far beyond the confines of the show. “In these kinds of theatrical adventures, the threshold of tolerance is always being tested,” Fehner says. This happens everywhere, on stage, behind the scenes, and between the actors and the audience.

Fehner’s parents (Francois Fehner and Marion Bouvarel) have leading roles, as does her sister. She didn’t intend to cast them at first. “But during the writing I did an improvisation session with them,” Fehner says. “Something really good was happening, something strong and a bit awkward.”

Fehner has created some strong individual characters, but is also fascinated by the dynamics of the group — how people respond to each other, or react in unexpected ways.

In this mix of a community and an extended family, many questions arise. What is private space? When does a performance begin and end? A lot happens, but it’s within the context of a carefully controlled naturalism, balancing multiple storylines in the course of a scene. Fehner’s approach, she says, is to give the audience a sense of immersion, of being in the middle of it all rather than observing from outside.

Travelling theatre has one advantage, she says. You can always leave town. “Everything continues, nothing stops”; it’s the basis of the film, she says. Yet in the midst of all this movement and energy, there’s a fundamental question we are sometimes impelled to ask ourselves: In these particular circumstances, how do we continue?

*

Gerard Depardieu in Saint Amour.

SAINT AMOUR

When filmmakers Gustave Kervern and Benoit Delepine described their new project, there were those who told them it would never get made. The idea of taking Gerard Depardieu on a wine tour and teaming him up with an equally larger-than-life performer, Benoit Poelvoorde, sounded like mission impossible.

Yet the resulting movie, Saint Amour — which they say was tightly scripted, with room for a degree of flexibility — is a good-humoured story of misadventures rather than mayhem. Depardieu (with whom Delepine and Kervern have worked several times) gives a restrained, almost delicate performance as Jean, a father trying to reconnect with his hapless adult son Bruno (Poelvoorde).

The story begins at a Paris agricultural fair, where the pair go every year with their prize pigs. Bruno and a mate also have a gruesome drinking game which involves going on a “national wine tour” within the confines of the agricultural hall.

This year, Jean decides they will take a real regional wine tour. He enlists a worldly young taxi driver, Mike (Vincent Lacoste), to drive them, and they embark on a journey of discovery. In the end women rather than wine make the trip worthwhile: several generations of actresses, including Izia Higelin, Celine Sallette, Chiara Mastroianni and Andrea Ferreol, make cameo appearances.

There’s also a cameo from author and provocateur Michel Houellebecq, another of the filmmakers’ regulars, as the lugubrious proprietor of a B&B. They have no doubt they’ll work with him again: not just because they appreciate him as an actor, but also because he has traits they appreciate on set.

“He learns dialogue very quickly, at the very last minute. He’s mind-blowing,” says Kervern. And he’s low-maintenance. “He can sit on a rock for four hours without saying a word. As long as he has a packet of cigarettes, he’s perfectly happy.”

Philippa Hawker travelled to Paris as a guest of Unifrance and Alliance Francaise.