FILM Ballina’s Beautiful and Beastly ode to French film

From Monday, August 17, to Thursday, August 20, Ballina Arts Centre will host La Belle et la Bête: The Beautiful and the Beastly in French Cinema – a four-day programme of French film, as a curtain-raiser to the inaugural French-Ballina Festival.  

The programme concentrates on two distinctive aesthetic and thematic concerns of French film: the beautiful and the beastly. Over the four days, two films will be screened each night – one ‘beautiful’, at 6pm; and one ‘beastly’ at 9pm.

The programme starts fittingly on Monday with with Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946), a haunting retelling of the story of ‘Beauty and the Beast’. The film is full of Cocteau’s trademark visual flourishes and oozes a classical fairy tale aesthetic. Combining the cruel humour of Grimm’s fairy stories, with the spirit of Terry Gilliam and that peculiarly French knack of putting magic into film, this feverish tale of star-crossed lovers and small town cannibalism has endured.

On Tuesday, the 6pm screening will be the highest-grossing French film of all time, ‘Intouchables’. Directed by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, it tells the heartwarming story of the unlikely friendship that develops between a millionaire paraplegic and his carer. The 9pm screening will be the powerful ‘La Haine’. Mathieu Kassovitz’s critically-acclaimed film, which won the 1995 Best Director prize at Cannes, is a tale based on the real life ghetto riots in urban France, centres on three troubled ghetto teens. The black and white visuals are stark yet striking, and the acting is second to none.

Wednesday will see a screening of the perennial favourite ‘Jean de Florette’. Released to universal acclaim in 1986, Jean-Jacques Beineix’s film is a visual love letter to the countryside of Provence, telling the story of two local farmers who scheme to trick a newcomer out of his newly inherited property. The later screening will be the classic noir ‘Les Diabolique’. This thriller from Henri Georges Clouzot focuses on two women – the fragile wife and the wilful mistress of the sadistic headmaster of a boys’ boarding school – who hatch a daring revenge plot. With its unprecedented narrative twists and terrifying images, Les Diabolique is a heart-grabbing benchmark in horror filmmaking.

The final night of the programme, Thursday, August 20, has two films which are the quintessential beauty and the beast of the programme: ‘Amour’ and ‘Martyrs’.  

The 6pm beauty screening, Michael Haneke’s ‘Amour’, tackles one of the great taboos of cinema: old age. It is a sober, rigorous piece, and a magnificent collaboration with two veteran actors, Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant. They play a couple whose  long-standing love is unshakeable through immobility, dementia, incontinence and more. A film of delicacy, intelligence and immense force.

The festival’s final film, the shocking ‘Martyrs’, is a shocking journey into the heart of darkness of the human soul, set against the backdrop of child kidnapping, torture and revenge.

All screenings will take place at Ballina Arts Centre, and the programme is presented in association with Access Cinema. Admission to all films, €5; special nightly double-bill ticket, €8. For full details check out www.ballinaartscentre.com or call 096 73593.