Los Angeles Film Festival Guide 2008

CRITIC’S PICK  LA FRANCE (France) Writing from Cannes last year about this audacious, classical-yet-genre-bending World War I movie-with-music, I dubbed the film “Bresson meets the Beatles” — which isn’t far off the mark, except that it risks making Serge Bozon’s extraordinary third feature sound like a gimmick, when in fact it’s anything but. Set in the fall of 1917, La France begins far from the frontlines, where a distraught soldier’s wife (Sylvie Testud) disguises herself as a man and sets off in search of her husband. Along the way, she encounters a small company of soldiers and begs their melancholic lieutenant (the excellent Pascal Greggory) to let her join them — unaware that the men are harboring a secret of their own. Their journey into the woods is punctuated by four original songs, performed by the cast on makeshift instruments and in pitch-perfect, Brit-pop harmonies — not full-blown musical numbers per se, but merely the attempt by reluctant men of war to maintain some sense of their inner selves. Meanwhile, the war rages, heard but not seen, its dehumanizing effects powerfully felt. (Billy Wilder Theater, Sat., June 21, 5 p.m.; AMC Avco Center, Tues., June 24, 7 p.m.) (Scott Foundas)

La France

Heartbeat Detector

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More About

• AMC Avco Center
• Lee Atwater
• Lee Atwater Story
• Italian Cultural Institute
• Documentary Films

A GIRL CUT IN TWO (France) Claude Chabrol continues his cleverly dyspeptic studies in the indiscreet charmlessness of the bourgeoisie with this black comedy, inspired by the 1906 murder of Beaux Arts architect Stanford White, about two vain men in pursuit of the same firm, young flesh in contemporary provincial France. The blonde weather girl, played by Ludivine Sagnier with just the right blend of swagger and vulnerability, prefers the older writer (François Berléand) to the callow young playboy (Benoit Magimel). But truly, there’s not much to choose between these two narcissists — or any of the other co-dependent manipulators who get drawn into this predictable web of deceit. Though the movie frames itself as moral inquiry, there’s little room for us to do more than share in the supercilious detachment with which Chabrol contemplates his characters. (Majestic Crest, Fri., June 20, 9:45 p.m.; The Landmark, Tues., June 24, 9:30 p.m.) (ET)

 HAFNER’S PARADISE (Austria/Spain) Gunther Schwaiger’s documentary about former Nazis living in Spanish exile centers on 83-year-old Paul Maria Hafner, an ex Waffen-SS officer who outwardly seems like a friendly if vain old buffer. But he remains an unapologetic defender of the Reich (clue: he’s writing a book called Hitler for Eternity) and an energetic Holocaust denier, despite having been a guard at Dachau. Although Schwaiger nets interesting footage of his subject fraternizing with his rancid old Nazi and Francoist pals, reading Mein Kampf, writing David Irving a postcard, etc., Hafner’s brick wall of blanket denials and convenient memory lapses is never breached, leaving us only mildly enlightened. Hotel Terminus it ain’t. (The Landmark, Fri., June 20, 10 p.m.; Regent, Sun., June 22, 4:30 p.m.) (John Patterson)

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Largo

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You, the Living

 HALF-LIFE (USA) With the economy tanking and fewer of us able to afford even crummy apartments in the big city, movies about how dysfunctional suburban life is just don’t win my sympathy. Give me a nice house in the Valley, and I’ll take a little creepy infidelity if that’s part of the deal; it beats being broke. Still, at least writer-director Jennifer Phang manages to up the ante on the American Beauty/Little Children model by setting things in an apocalyptic future, where the world outside is falling to pieces and one young boy might just have telekinetic powers. A little pretentious but nicely moody. (Majestic Crest, Sun., June 29, 7 p.m.) (LYT)

CRITIC’S PICK  HEARTBEAT DETECTOR (France) The skeletons in the corporate closet of director Nicolas Klotz’s Heartbeat Detector are enough to make Enron look like the patron saint of the Fortune 500. Set in the Paris headquarters of a fictional German petrochemical giant called SC Farb, the film explores the actual and theoretical connections between the company’s mandate to increase productivity and rid its workforce of undesirable elements and the similar business model of an earlier, efficiency-minded multinational: the Third Reich. And if that sounds like a bit of a stretch, you haven’t heard the half of it. Before it reaches its end, Heartbeat Detector winds its epistemological way through discussions of historical amnesia, the decay of language and the soullessness of technology. It’s an unapologetic film of ideas — perhaps the headiest of its kind to arrive on these shores since Godard’s Notre Musique. But Klotz’s film more consciously echoes early Godard in the way it binds its dense philosophizing to the spine of a pulpy crime fiction. Mathieu Amalric stars as Simon Kessler, SC Farb’s in-house shrink and human-resources honcho, who’s asked to evaluate the “mental state” of the company’s CEO, Mathias Jüst (an excellent Michael Lonsdale), who has of late been locking himself away in his office for hours on end and sitting alone listening to Schubert in the back seat of his parked car. Just what is eating at the ironically named Jüst becomes the film’s central enigma — an existential crisis, like the one in Michael Haneke’s Caché, that grows only deeper and more diffuse with each passing revelation. (Billy Wilder Theater, Fri., June 20, 7 p.m. and Mon., June 23, 4 p.m.) (SF)