Director Jean Becker’sConversations With My Gardeneris a wry and knowing French comedy of cultural misunderstanding between thecosmopolitan artist and the provincial gardener. The artist knows nothing aboutpractical matters and the gardener is nonplused by the artist’snonrepresentational painting and the nude mistress sunning herself on the lawn.Conversations With MyGardener will open this year’s Festivalof Films in French, screening 8 p.m. Feb. 5 and 9 p.m. Feb. 6 at theUW-Milwaukee Union Theatre. The Festival of Films in French runs through Feb.14 at the Union Theatre.
Sexy and worldly, tolerant and profound, Conversations is the sort of carefullypolished gem one associates with French cinema. Although the gardener with hisroutine, ordinary existence is the object of the film’s ironic humor, the arcof the plot leaves us wondering which man has enjoyed the richer life.
It’s not the only thought-provoking and entertainingfilm at the festival. Un Secret (A Secret) concerns a scrawny, sickly lad in 1950s France,Francois, a disappointment to his athletic father. Occasionally, dad tries toturn his son into his ideal of a man, as mom looks on with worried disapproval,but he soon surrenders to disappointment. What really gets dad angry, however,is Francois going on about his imaginary brother, the strong avatar who doeswhat he can only dream. Francois doesn’t realize that the amplitude of thatanger is because there really had been a strong brother, the son dad reallywanted.
Un Secretis the story of a family’s buried history, a willful forgetfulness caused notso much by the shock of French defeat in World War II as the trauma that camewhen the Holocaust began. Barely aware of his Jewish heritage when he wasyoung, Francois’ suspicion that something is missing leads him to a fullaccount of what happened. Dad’s first wife and their son, his lost halfbrother, were among the victims shipped by eager French collaborators to thedeath camps of Nazi Germany. And on some unspoken emotional level, dad may havebeen to blame.
Working from the spare but revealing novel byPhilippe Grimbert, director Claude Miller composed the story as a series oflong flashbacks from the perspective of the 1980s, when Francois had become apsychoanalyst whose withdrawn child patients remind him of his own episodes offamily discovery. The cast includes many faces familiar to lovers of Frenchfilm, including Mathieu Amalric and Julie Depardieu.
Un Secret willscreen at 5 p.m. Feb. 6 and 7 p.m. Feb. 7 at the UWM Union Theatre.
