In France, things are quite different to the Anglosphere. Over there, a literary author can still be a meaningful part of the commentariat, work the TV circuit, and be a cultural touchstone. This foreign character is our entrée to Lie With Me, a movie that elegantly juggles the past and present while completely eliminating any element of coincidence or chance.

Stéphane Belcourt (Guillaume de Tonquédec), in the grip of a bout of writer’s block, returns to his hometown to promote cognac through a new novella and a commencement speech at the anniversary of the distillery. His wandering attention almost immediately latches onto distillery representative Lucas Andrieu (Victor Belmondo), who he quickly realises is the son of his first love. As Stéphane struggles with how much to reveal to Lucas, he considers the heartbreak of his school years, when his younger self (Jérémy Gillet) spent a season with Thomas (Julien De Saint Jean, The Lost Boys).

Adapted from Philippe Bresson’s book, the more literal title is “Stop With Your Lies” (the English title is a legacy of book translator Molly Ringwald). Stéphane is famous for autofiction, that most peculiarly European genre, and has been lax at covering his tracks to the point that multiple of his novels have had characters named Thomas, and one was directly called Thomas Andrieu. In the original book, this extends as far as the narrator character himself being named Philippe. It’s not difficult to see the parallels.

Yet Lie With Me operates at a remove as a film; writer/director Olivier Peyon is steering, rather than Besson, and the film’s split structure offers a dynamic character study of Stéphane across decades. Peyon chooses to focus mainly on de Tonquédec and Belmondo, with the past used as background to inform the present. The two leads bounce off each other in an alternately cordial and antagonistic way, and there is a genuine back and forth that keeps the movie buoyant. The cognac focus allows for unusual developments, as the lead character is near teetotal; when it comes time for the grand speech to commence it has dramatic impact for the theatrical audience but, on a pragmatic level, you have to wonder what the guests at the cognac event were making of it.

Lie With Me has a particular Frenchness that sticks to its walls, despite the universality of its lost love ricochet backdrop. Though it helps, you don’t need a degree in French literature to unpack the meta to get something out of it; aided by strong performances from de Tonquédec and Belmondo, Peyon has taken Bresson’s work and made it his own.

Lie With Me is still pending an Australian release date.

Directed by: Olivier Peyon

Starring: Guillaume de Tonquédec, Victor Belmondo, Jérémy Gillet, Julien de Saint-Jean and Guilaine Londez

Finland is a very dry country. Droll, if you will. This, at least, is the impression that writer-director Aki Kaurismäki (The Other Side of Hope) would like you to get from Fallen Leaves, the fourth film in his Proletariat trilogy. The last one was in 1990, and he claims to have retired in 2017, so you know he’s been cooking this up for a while. This is the sort of movie that you see if you enjoy two people coming together very slowly over a relatively short run time, filled with tiny delights and small victories.

Ansa (Alma Pöysti, Tove) is a supermarket worker reduced to eating expired food; Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) is an industrial site worker who drinks on the job. A couple of chance encounters between the two sparks a mutual interest between the two, but between Ansa not leaving her name and Holappa instantly losing her number, will chase ever allow them to meet again?

Fallen Leaves is a tight 81 minutes. It almost completely lacks event, and when something happens it’s so understated that you almost have to ask if it actually did. This is all part of the charm, as the dialogue is delivered in complete deadpan, declarative statements with almost no emotion backing them up. 

Near equal time is given to Ansa and Holappa, but it’s easy to think that Pöysti is the star of the movie. She is a woman without much, but she knows exactly what she wants and how much she will tolerate. Her ambitions may be small, but you want a win for her; it’s hard not to respect a woman who knows her rights and won’t allow herself to be cowed by petty tyrants.

For Vatanen’s part, he gradually makes you care about Holappa’s quiet tragedy. What is initially played for laughs eventually becomes apparent as a legitimate problem. Most importantly, when all hope seems lost for the whatever number time, you still want things to work out for him, and you want Ansa to find him again if she can.

Fallen Leaves sounds like it should be depressing by any metric, but it is actually very gently funny. Holappa’s wingman Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen, The Other Side of Hope) has an entire sideline at karaoke where he argues with Ansa’s wingwoman Liisa (Nuppu Koivu, The Other Side of Hope) about how his face lies about his age. Holappa is accused of being four minutes late for the third time in a week by his boss, and the only retort, handily ignored, is “it’s Monday”. The way that Ansa and Holappa dance around each other is so otherworldly that you have to wonder if they’re aliens, but of course it’s not that sort of movie. It is the sort of movie that features deadly earnest karaoke delivered in multiple languages, and a repertory theatre playing the most sincerely random films.

Kaurismäki litters the film with rituals and signifiers that mean everything and nothing, and highlights the drudgery of piecemeal work that his characters subsist on. It’s a world devoid of dignity, but Ansa, at least, won’t surrender her self-respect. Any despair that it makes you feel is counterbalanced by the thought that maybe some light will shine into our fated pair’s lives, and you have to have faith in Kaurismäki that it will. It’s not a vocally political movie, but it definitely is a statement piece.

It’s difficult to say if a Kaurismäki film would be thought of as odd in his native country or if that’s just what Finland is like. To an international viewer, it’s the eternal question. Fallen Leaves is a delightful oddball, an unorthodox love story between two nice people barely scraping by on the economical underbelly of their country. Its quiet, lackadaisical pace won’t appeal to everyone, but Kaurismäki has cultivated such a specific feel to this movie that is intoxicating if you get swept into it. 

Fallen Leaves opened in Australian cinemas on February 14, 2024

Directed by: Aki Kaurismäki

Starring: Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen

We’re only two Bosch novels in and already the man finds himself fighting a bull. It’s difficult not to think “we’re at this point already?” For a policeman who is supposed to be grounded in his approach to the law, Bosch finds himself caught up in multiple flights of fancy in The Black Ice. It’s hard to say whether he does more or less bad police work than in his previous outing, but he’s still a fun guy to hang around.

Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite) is an acquired taste, to say the least. Even if he’s presenting a relatively mundane story, there’s a sense of unease hanging around proceedings. Poor Things, however,is not a mundane film. It is a nightmarish and outré work delivered under the dark cover of having a name cast. Whether audiences are suspecting or not is up to them, but they really should have learned their lesson by now: Lanthimos has made a hypnotising tour de force that demands you get with its rhythms or die. 

Choose life.

The circle of life now is book to movie to musical to movie. Tina Fey’s beloved 2004 comedy Mean Girls, loosely inspired by a non-fiction book about high school hierarchy, has had a long and charmed life, with a veritable empire built from it. Now it’s back, twenty years later, and on the big screen instead of the originally planned Paramount+ launch (where, charitably, no one would have watched it).

Of course, Paramount has forgotten to promote the movie as a musical, even if there’s a note in the A. Trailers didn’t have any songs in it and tried to cut around choreography. The movie itself is missing 14 songs, approximately half of the show. And the story itself has almost all of the same problems as the original movie did. In many ways, while not a straight (ha) remake, Mean Girls is almost the original movie with a couple of songs slapped into it; whether that works depends on if you liked the movie in the first place and if you’re not so wedded to it that you can’t stand to see it in different hands. It’s a delicate balancing act.

The One Man Army has been a respected, and well trod, genre for many years. In recent times there’s been an influx of flair and personality into what can tend to be somber and bloody affairs. The Beekeeper looks like it might just be another run and gun, but there are times when it rises above itself to become heightened cinema. Adam Clay might not have personality, but The Beekeeper does.

The DC Extended Universe never had much good will, and it is well and truly past the time that it has squandered it all. Its best movie was a forbidden one that was never supposed to exist, the misunderstood subject of unconstructive memes. Most everything else has tarnished with time, and the project spawned several underwhelming or plain bad movies that underperformed at the box office. From a higher level, Warner Bros Discovery made mystifying calls, like cancelling the well-cast Batgirl while retooling and releasing the troubled and terrible The Flash to an indifferent audience.

2018’s Aquaman was amusing and satisfying, and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom retains a good deal of its creative team, so you would expect it to be good. However, this movie was doomed almost from the start, as the DCEU became micromanaged to the point that any individual would not have been able to shift the needle on it. That Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is even okayish is a minor miracle, but that’s really not good enough with the amount of money involved. At least now we know this chapter in film history is over (yet a new one struggles to be born).