Why Darma and Dames Don’t Mix

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, the festival offers encore screenings of two grim but deeply affecting titles reviewed here last week, A Birch Tree Meadow and Eager Bodies, along with the local premieres of two brighter-than-average comedies. The directorial debut of actor Michel Boujenah, Father and Sons takes that old movie-of-the-week chestnut — a dying patriarch who gathers his family around him for one last reunion — and gleefully cracks it open, with a disarming Philippe Noiret cast as a father who, following the lead of Royal Tenenbaum, pretends he’s dying so as to force his self-absorbed offspring into taking him on a coveted Canadian fishing trip. In the closing-night selection, After You, the peerless Daniel Auteuil (in one of his rare comic roles) falls to pieces hilariously as a waiter whose own life goes haywire after he saves that of another man (José Garcia). Best of all, there’s a revival screening of Jacques Demy’s splendid Donkey Skin, based on Charles Perrault’s Freudian fairy tale about a beautiful princess (Catherine Deneuve), a widower king (Jean Marais), a temperamental fairy godmother (Delphine Seyrig) and a magical ass — in two senses of the word — with a most unusual knack for turning straw into gold. Digitally restored so that Demy’s candyland visuals and Michel Legrand’s lilting songs (touching on everything from unrequited love to baking instructions) look and sound better than ever, Donkey Skin may well prompt you to ponder, right alongside one of the film’s own characters, “Whatever will we do with so much joy?”

—S.F.