[TrueFaith77]

44.A Night in the Fields (Guillaume Grélardon); grade: B+
45.Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryusuke Hamaguchi); grade: B
46.My Donkey, My Lover, & I (Caroline Vignal); grade: A

Three recent art-house movies aim to reconnect audiences to a cultural heritage that vivified human relations in opposition to contemporary alienation (essential dependence vs. authoritarian isolation).

1) The platonic friendship at the center of A Night in the Fields provides the opportunity for Grélardon to catalogue various forms of intimacy and physical love during a fateful night of working-class recreation. His visuals connect the gay-youth films of fellow French filmmakers Andre Techine, Gael Morel, and Francois Ozon with the American youth-cult films of Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Hill. The resonances culminate in an iconic image of male affection—sharing a seat on a bike ride—familiar from those French auteurs in Wild Reeds, Full Speed, and Summer of 85 The image originated as mother-son love in Pasolini’s Mama Roma, a process Grélardon tracks narratively from family tenderness to friendly compassion.

2) The overrated Hamaguchi practices rare narrative efficiency in the three thematically-linked shorts in Wheel of Fortune. Although the rhetorical progression reminds of Eric Rohmer’s anthologies, Hamaguchi highlights each story’s existential moment of grace with zoom shots—countering the zoom prisons of Kubrickian misanthropy. (The second story’s perverse feminist triumph is worthy of Mary Gaitskill.)

3) Last, and best, Vignal awakens her self-involved heroine (and audience) to the Other In My Lover, My Donkey, and I. After receiving a benediction from the impossible protagonist in Rohmer’s masterpiece La Rayon Verte (Marie Rivière), Laure Calamy unfurls her self-destructive romantic history onto a saintly donkey named Patrick. Through this dynamic, Patrick chases out the snakes of sociopathology that threaten to doom Calamy. Cineaste Vignal leverages the spiritual-narrative trope of human-and-animal/alien bonding (from National Velvet to E.T.) to revivify Rohmerian existential Faith. Hence, the film’s range of feeling—from enervation to hilarity to endearment to catharsis—achieves the spiritual version of restoring dead flesh (as in a fling with a biker). The adulterous “lover” played by Benjamin Lavernhe (hilarious on stage as Scapin the Schemer) further anchors the film, beyond cinema tradition, to Moliere romantic ritual. I imagine Clarence Brown, Rohmer, Spielberg, and Moliere moved to tears by Patrick’s final bequeathing of hope.