First cousins Carole and Jerôme go behind the Iron Curtain with a group of French tourists to Odessa on the Black Sea. However, they plan to do some unorthodox sight-seeing.
Heading for residential areas of the city, the couple meet Victor, a Jewish physicist whose visa request for Israel was turned-down. He tells how he was punished for this by being sent to a labour camp.
The film lifts the lid to offer various points of view about the Soviet Refusnik situation in the post-1967 war period, and the involvement of Jews and Jewish organisations in trying to help them escape.
A lightly comic caricature of an overly friendly Soviet tourist-cum-propaganda guide welcoming his group is quite a tease compared to the story matter of Les Interdits - Friends from France.
Directors Anne Weill and Philippe Kotlarski, who also co-wrote the screenplay, tackle serious matters of freedom, community bonds and duties.
A certain dose of well-distilled humour helps the medicine of such weighty themes go down.
The four languages in the film, French, Russian, Hebrew and English, are like a sort of Tower of Babel, says Philippe Kotlarski.
They mirror the contrasts and contradictions that underscore this four-country co-production (Canada, France, Germany and Russia).
Kotlarski says: "The whole film is based on contradictions, because this is the way we see life and it certainly comes from a certain complexity. Cinema should not be seen as simple either. Maybe because it’s a first film we have tried to make it a bit more complex to reflect our point of view. Contradiction and contrast is certainly at the heart of what we are doing."
Les interdits - Friends from France, indeed ends in a contradictory bittersweet way, as it satisfactorily ties together the different threads of each person’s story.
In contrast, for the film-makers the ending is straightforward. They managed to make their film, which is doing the rounds of festivals at home in France and abroad, and on general release in Paris.
No comments:
Post a Comment