The Seattle International Film Festival at Seattle Center (a stone's throw from the Space Needle) recently screened a series of French language shorts, L'Origine de la Tendresse and Other Stories. The screening packs six continental shorts into 97 minutes to mixed results.
The opening film is a winner by Guillame Martinez. At a svelt eight minutes, Penpusher is a clever use of cinematography that benefits from its short run time. The film finds two young strangers on Le Metro communicating via underlined words in the novels they carry with them for the long train ride home. It's a sweet, romantic gimmick that would have gotten old if it passed the ten minute mark. The conceit is also nice for the symbolist in us all. The two characters manage to meaningfully connect using a medium typically intended to shut other people out. It's quite an uplifting way to open the series.
What follows is an unfortunate slog through three non-fiction films. The best among them is the first, Filipe Canales's My Mother, A Story of Immigration. That said, My Mother is little more than a slideshow with compelling narration. It's a quick jaunt through the major themes of Farida Hamak's novel of the same title, using photographs Hamak took of her life and family beginning in her teens. The story of Hamak's Algerian immigrant experience through the lens of her mother's gradual transformation is a genuine family chronicle; So much so that it deserves a little more than a series of stills.
The screening's obligatory animated feature is One Voice, One Vote by Jeanne Paturle and Cecile Rousset. Squiggled, simple cartoons give the eyes something to do while recordings of two French voters play in fragments. One is a genial but otherwise apathetic man, the other is a slogan-spouting female activist. Neither the animation nor the commentary supporting it are really interesting enough to keep more than half the theater from falling asleep.
The last of the non-fiction pieces is The Last Day. In it, Olivier Bourbeillon captures the final day of operation for a naval yard smithy. Three iron workers basically walk us through the creation of a machine-ready hunk of metal, a process that is only as captivating and romantic as it seems because it's the first time most (or all) of the audience has seen it. The workers are humble, likable and competent, but we don't really get to know them. All in all, it feels like they were short changed. The Last Day plays like a dull educational film from middle school minus any informative narration.
The screening's titular film The Origin of Tenderness is a subtly artful, if typical European independent short by Alain-Paul Mallard. It follows a casually frumpy woman named Elise as she lives a dreadfully uneventful life, all while extending a casual brand of kindness to everyone she meets. She's not oblivious or bubbly, so she doesn't come off as a cheap plot device. Her weirdness and quiet desperation recall the early scenes of Punch-Drunk Love, only not as quirky. In the end, it's a dreary slice-of-life that makes its point without really raising the mercury.
By far the most interesting film of the series is the closing piece, Alice Winocour's Kitchen. It begins like an endearing goofball piece but soon crosses into some gut-busting domestic macabre. A woman finds herself at the mercy of the main course when her husband requests a special lobster dish for dinner. The recipe calls for a rather unsettling series of knife flourishes applied to a live specimen. When she brings the unfortunate crustaceans home, our nameless protagonist finds that she can't bring herself to do the deed. What ensues is a hilarious string of mishaps, including a lobster taking up residence in a dust pan and the other disappearing completely for a time. The whole exercise would be too fluffy if it weren't for the film's grotesque turn in its final minutes. One moment in particular involving a bathtub has the fearless staging of a true comic auteur.
As it stands, SIFF's screening of L'Origine and Other Stories is half a good shorts collection. Its entertaining moments don't balance well with its preachy conscience, but I dare say that it's worth sitting through the interminable middle to get to the fantastic end.