FILMS/
LADY JANE
World Cinema
France, 2007, 104 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Fri, Apr 25 / 9:15 / Kabuki / LADY25K
Sun, Apr 27 / 9:45 / Kabuki / LADY27K
Tue, Apr 29 / 4:30 / Kabuki / LADY29K
CREDITS
- prod
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Robert Guédiguian
- scr
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Robert Guédiguian, Jean-Louis Milesi
- cam
-
Pierre Milon
- editor
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Bernard Sasia
- cast
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Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Gérard Meylan, Pascale Roberts, Jacques Boudet, Christine Brücher, Fréderique Bonnal
- source
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Films Distribution, 20, rue Saint Augustin, 75002 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1-5310-3398. EMAIL: caraux@filmsdistribution.com
Lady Jane is a character-rich film noir suffused with the knife-sharp light of wintry Marseille. A teenage boy’s kidnapping leads his desperate mother, Muriel (Ariane Ascaride), a boutique owner in Aix, to seek help from two old criminal pals. Dour François (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) owns a boat repair shop and supports a wife and two kids. René (Gérard Meylan) works in a topless club and has settled into a life of drinking beer, pimping and selling slot-machine concessions. At first the trio’s reunion is about drumming up the ransom money, but one thing quickly and violently leads to another in the twisting plot. In this first foray into genre, however, Marseille-based writer/director Robert Guédiguian (whose films have screened at multiple Festivals past, the most recent being The Last Mitterrand, SFIFF 2005) has more than noir in mind. Existentialism deepens the darkness, along with the irretrievable loss that surfaces when we revisit the past. (François, for example, still desires Muriel as he did years ago, and wants to recapture the time when the three friends were “gods” in their neighborhood.) The soundtrack weaves together driving blues, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and pop lyrics as sharp cutting furthers the film’s edgy, frenetic feel and careful framing uses narrow streets, windows and walls to keep Guédiguian’s trio hemmed in until the surprising ending. Only then, in the film’s few tight close-ups, do we see how devastating the long reach of vengeance can be.
—Sid Hollister
North American Premiere. Sponsored by TV5Monde, French Cultural Services and the French-American Cultural Society.
