Actualités

Sneak Peek "Copacabana", the upcoming French comedy feature directed by Marc Fitoussi, starring Isabelle Huppert as 'Babou'.

Cast also includes Aure Atika as 'Lydie', Lolita Chammah as 'Esméralda', Jurgen Delnaet as 'Bart', Chantal Banlier as 'Irène', Magali Woch as 'Sophie', Nelly Antignac as 'Amandine', Guillaume Gouix as 'Kurt', Joachim Lombard as 'Justin' and Noémie Lvovsky as 'Suzanne'.

"...'Babou' (Huppert) is boldly unconventional and cheerful. Never having cared about social conventions before, she is suddenly faced with the realization that her own daughter is ashamed of her and therefore refuses to invite her to her wedding. Hurt in her pride, Babou tries to regain her daughter's respect by starting anew. She accepts the challenge of selling time-sharing-flats at the Belgian seaside during the off-season, in a desperate attempt to prove her real worth and her motherly love to her daughter..."

The film was released in France July 2010 with a North American release Tba.

Copacabana

Stars: Isabelle Huppert, Aure Atika, Lolita Chammah, Jurgen Delnaet | Written and Directed by Marc Fitoussi

This would be the second Isabelle Huppert film I have seen at the London Film Festival thus far and Copacabana is a far superior film to the disappointing Special Treatment . Babou (Huppert) is an initially very annoying Frenchwoman who has flitted from place to place in her life, enjoyed her travels and perceived rebellion against bourgeois society, yet failed to put down roots and now finds herself unemployed. She has a daughter, Esme (played by Huppert’s real life daughter Lolita Chammah), who is much more strait-laced than her mother and is marrying a boring executive. The final straw comes when Esme tells her mother not to attend her wedding, partly to save her from paying for any of it but mostly because Esme is embarrassed by her. Distraught, Babou finds work as selling...

'I'm not going to sleep with you - not in a million years," Matty tells Johnny in the romantic comedy "Moscow, Belgium." But time flies, and within the hour the two are getting it on in the cab of Johnny's yellow truck.

Matty (Barbara Sarafian) is a 41-year-old postal clerk in the working-class Belgian suburb of Moscow.

She lives with her three children (the oldest is 16-year-old Vera) in a high-rise apartment after her art-teacher husband runs off with one of his female students.

Johnny (Jurgen Delnaet) is a 29-year-old long-haul trucker ("My truck is my life") prone to drunken violence,...

Below from PosterGeek comes the poster for Moscow Belgium.  This Belgian import features a romantic triangle between Matty, a world-weary mother of three, her charming but philandering husband, and the hot-tempered, far younger truck driver Matty literally crashes into. Matty (Barbara Sarafian) is a no-nonsense, working class forty-one-year-old mother of three with a thousand yard stare whose life seems to come apart after a minor collision with a Belgian truck transporting Italian lollipops. The 29-year-old redhead driver Johnny (Jurgen Delnaet) has not only bruised her car but also ...

By Neil Pedley

There's a noticeably European flavor this week, combined with some good old-fashioned work-a-day miserablism just in time for the holidays. Laurent Cantet's Palme d'Or-winning doc shows a French school in minor crisis, Mickey Rourke battles his demons and Jim Carrey flails about -- all in good festive fun!

"The Class"

Considering that the ongoing debate over the education system approaches a national pastime in France, it's not difficult to see why Laurent Cantet's pseudo-documentary chronicling a year in a Paris classroom took home the Palme d'Or on its home turf in Cannes. Based on a semi-autobiographical account from former lit teacher François Bégaudeau, playing a similar role here for the cameras, Cantet delivers a studied microcosm of French society via a multiethnic school with an administration run by committee. During the course of a turbulent school year, every aspect of the human social dynamic is played out with points made,...

Cannes Film Festival Critics' Week

When care-worn Matty backs her battered family car into Johnny's truck in Christophe Van Rompaey's highly enjoyable romantic comedy "Moscow, Belgium", triggering a torrential exchange of inventive abuse, you just know they were made for each other. The story of how they bridge their differences is one that should appeal to audiences of broadly varying tastes in Europe and to arthouse moviegoers around the world.

The scale of these differences is formidable. For one thing, Matty (Barbara Sarafian) is 43, with fading looks, while Johnny (Jurgen Delnaet), a rugged 29, would be a catch for women half Matty's age. For another, she's just been dumped by Werner (Johan Heldenbergh), her art-teacher husband, and is hoping against hope that he'll return. Last but not least, there's the issue of class (not for nothing is the action set in a suburb of Ghent called Moscow): Matty and Werner are middle-class, albeit at the lower end of the scale, while Johnny is irredeemably proletarian in outlook.

Van Rompaey paints a warm and often witty picture of workaday life in modern (Flemish-speaking) Belgium.He has a keen eye for social detail, from Matty's edgy sparring with the street-wise Vera (Anemone Valcke), aged 16 and the eldest of her three children, to the grotesquely kitschy, out-of-key karaoke number with which Johnny serenades Matty in an attempts to patch up their latest spat. His portrayal of working-class life as it is lived in Belgium, and by implication much of northwestern Europe, is unsentimental and uncondescending and largely rings true.

When Werner, having had a row with his student paramour, decides finally to return to Matty, she is faced with a choice. But Van Rompaey generally applies a light touch and keeps the outcome (more or less) uncertain to the end. Sarafian's sympathetic portrayal of a woman facing a mid-life crisis and unable quite to believe that she has been given a second chance sustains this engaging movie, as do Ruben Impens' cinematography -- much of it shot at night -- and the rich accordion score.

Cast: Barbara Safarian, Jurgen Delnaet, Johan Heldenbergh, Anemone Valcke, Sofia Ferri, Julian Borsani. Director: Christophe Van Rompaey. Screenwriters: Jean-Claude van Rijckeghem, Pat Van Biers. No rating, 102 minutes.