FAU Presents a French Film Festival

FAU presents the Tournees French Film Festival from Wednesday, Feb. 3 through Monday, Feb. 29. All movies will be shown in the Performing Arts Building, Room 101, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton campus, unless otherwise noted.

Films are in French with English subtitles and will be introduced, with discussion to follow by FAU faculty.  The shows include "Mood Indigo," "Girlhood," "The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq," "Hiroshima Mon Amour," "P'tit Quinquin," and "La French."

• "Mood Indigo," Wednesday, Feb. 3, 6:30 p.m. (this film only will be shown in the Arts and Letters Building, room 189). The central narrative of the film concerns the ultimately tragic love story of Colin (Romain Duris), an exceptionally wealthy man who inhabits a spectacular rooftop apartment/playhouse, and Chloé (Audrey Tautou), a physically frail woman he meets a party. Yet theirs is no ordinary courtship: Colin and Chloé travel across Paris in a cloud-shaped vessel, sip beverages from a cocktail-mixing piano, and dine on elaborate concoctions prepared by Nicolas (Omar Sy), Colin's in-house chef and lawyer.
• "Girlhood," Monday, Feb. 8, 6:30 p.m. Set in the impoverished banlieues that ring Paris and are home to many of its French-African denizens, "Girlhood" focuses on Marieme (Karidja Touré), a 16 year old who assumes responsibility for her two younger sisters while their mother works the night shift; the teenager must also frequently absorb the wrath of her tyrannical slightly older brother.
• "The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq," Wednesday, Feb. 10, 6:30 p.m. Michel Houellebecq, perhaps France's most popular, and controversial, contemporary author, plays a version of himself in Guillaume Nicloux's absorbing comic docu-fiction. The film was inspired by a real-life incident: After Houellebecq failed to show up for several scheduled appearances on a 2011 book tour, some media outlets began to wonder whether he'd been abducted, perhaps even by Al Qaeda. This hysterical speculation was soon put to rest, however, when the writer eventually resurfaced.
• "Hiroshima Mon Amour," Monday, Feb. 15, 6:30 p.m. One of the most influential movies ever made, Alain Resnais's masterwork from 1959 would not only shape the Nouvelle Vague benchmarks made in its wake but also liberate filmmakers from linear storytelling. Hiroshima Mon Amour, which was scripted by Marguerite Duras, consists of multiple flashbacks, a device that destabilizes chronology.
• "P'tit Quinquin," Tuesday, Feb. 23, 6:30 p.m. Bruno Dumont, an auteur often considered a spiritual heir to Robert Bresson, reveals his considerable talents for dark, slapstick comedy in this film, which originally aired as a four-part TV miniseries in France. Set in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, the film centers around a series of grisly murders: The body parts of the victims are found stuffed inside cows and other farm animals. As two bumbling cops, Captain Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost) and Lieutenant Carpentier (Philippe Jore), try to stop the killer before he - or she - strikes again, a few local kids, with little to occupy them now that school's out for the summer, do some investigating on their own.
• "La French," Monday, Feb. 29, 6:30 p.m. Cédric Jimenez's high-energy true-crime tale tracks the six-year crusade of a law officer to bring down a seemingly untouchable drug kingpin. Police magistrate Pierre Michel (Jean Dujardin) has recently been transferred to Marseille, a city all but controlled by the ruthless gangster Gaëtan Zampa (Gilles Lelouche), who oversees an enormous heroin syndicate. Pierre is determined to destroy the drug lord's operations and put him behind bars for good, a task that proves even more insurmountable once the policeman realizes how many of his colleagues are on Zampa's payroll.

The Tournees Festival is presented by FAU's Department of Languages, Linguistics and Comparative Literature in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. For more information, contact Roderick Cooke at 561-297-0307 or cooker@fau.edu.