Drôles d'oiseaux (2017)
Directed by Élise Girard

Film Review

Director Elise Girard's follow-up to her well-received autobiographical debut piece Belleville Tokyo (2010) is somewhat lighter in tone, an engaging and thoughtful exploration of a platonic relationship between a young woman and a man old enough to be her grandfather.  With an admirable delicacy and lightness of touch, Drôles d'oiseaux probes facets of romantic involvement that cinema has a had a tendency to steer clear of in recent years and convinces us that there is far more to love than the mere satiation of a primitive physical yearning.  The film has some shortcomings on both the writing and directing fronts and at times it leaves you with the feeling that it doesn't develop its central themes as fully as it might.  But for all that it is an engaging work that reaffirms Girard's talents and makes contact with the work of the Nouvelle Vague generation without making this too blisteringly obvious.

The film's most inspired touch is the casting of Jean Sorel and Lolita Chammah in the lead roles, two actors that outwardly seem so different and yet somehow carry with them the same tenebrous mystique hinting at profound inner complexities that we can only guess at.  Despite his impressive list of credits, Sorel remains a surprisingly unknown quantity.  If he is remembered today, it is most likely for his portrayal of Catherine Deneuve's frigid aristocratic husband in Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour (1967).  Now in his ninth decade, the actor retains his singular aloof charm and astonishing good looks, and is just as unfathomable as he was in his younger years.  It is up to the winsome but equally enigmatic Chammah to prise open the clam of Sorel's sealed persona in this gently understated 'getting to know you' romantic drama, and who better than the captivating daughter of one of France's most revered actresses, Isabelle Huppert, to attempt this feat?  Looking more like her mother with every film she makes, Chammah would seem to be following Huppert's warped trajectory into off-kilter roles encroaching on the more perverse and surprising aspects of human nature.

The electric rapport between the film's two leads more than compensates for the occasional lapses on Girard's part, and what might well have ended up as a fairly mundane variation on a May to December romance acquires a somewhat deeper meaning when it contrasts the attitudes of the protagonists to political causes.  Part of the fascination that Chammah's character has for Sorel's is an obvious need to account for her lack of political interest and understand how it was possible that an earlier generation could be so intensely involved in the momentous events of its day.  It's a shame that Girard doesn't make more of this because it is evidently the most interesting and honestly presented aspect of the film.  The question remains largely unanswered, but it's good to see it being raised, particularly as we now seem to be moving into an era when the under 30s are becoming ever more engaged with politics - and with good reason.

The influence of Girard's Nouvelle Vague forebears is apparent not just in the film's canny fusion of romance and politics, but more visibly in its use of its Paris setting to express the inner fragility of the protagonists.  Like Truffaut in Les 400 coups and Rivette in Paris nous appartient, the capital, filmed with an exquisite melancholic beauty by Renato Berta, says more than any quantity of dialogue as to how the equally rudderless Mavie and Georges feel in their unsettled, unfulfilled and disconnected lives.  Drôles d'oiseaux lacks the refined auteur sense and sustained confidence to impress as a truly significant film but it is, through the arresting contributions of its leading performers, an involving and emotionally satisfying work.  What it offers is an authentic exploration of a relationship between two mismatched individuals who are drawn to one another not by the readily understandable force of desire, but by something far more subtle and profound.

Film Synopsis

Mavie, 27, is an attractive young woman from the provinces who has just arrived in Paris, tentatively groping for a sense of direction in her hitherto aimless life.  Whilst trying to find an apartment of her own, she moves in temporarily with a friend.  One day, she comes across a bookshop that no one seems to know about and falls under the spell of its aged owner, Georges.  Even though Georges is fifty years her senior and strikes her as the archetypal cantankerous old man, always moaning and miserable, Mavie finds him a fascinating creature and can hardly fail to be impressed by his erudition.  It is the start of a singular friendship between two people who appear to have nothing whatsoever in common.  Then Mavie meets Roman, a man of her own age, and is soon caught up in a whirlwind romance...