SBS is pleased to announce a French Film Festival running two nights a week throughout the month of June.

The films featured on Sundays are crowd pleasers, featuring all the usual suspects (Gerard Depardieu, Danieul Auteil, Sophie Marceau, Audrey Tautou, Isabelle Huppert, Marion Cotillard, etc) whereas the movies featured on Thursday nights are the work of the auteur directors such as Francois Ozon and Arnaud Desplechin and films that have been popular both theatrically and on the festival circuit.

Sunday Showcase Movies:

1 June: Anthony Zimmer
8 June: Bon Voyage (rpt)
15 June: After You
22 June: A Very Long Engagement (rpt)
29 June: Me & My Sister

Thursday Night Movies

5 June: The Beat My Heart Skipped
12 June: Look At Me (Comme Une Image)
19 June: Kings and Queen
26 June: 5x2

Feature Previews

Screening 26 June: 5x2

All marriages are a mystery to outsiders, they say. This superb new film from François Ozon, the director of Swimming Pool and Under the Sand, shines a light into one such mystery while somehow keeping its essential core of unknowability intact. 5x2 shows five scenes from a modern European marriage, in which love has coagulated into a poisonous duel. But everything happens in reverse order: we see its disintegration from the final calamity to its genesis, gaining a stunning insight into an ordinary middle-class couple, Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane Freiss).

First, the divorce proceedings, then a tense dinner party, then the birth of the couple's only child, then the wedding and finally the first meeting. The resulting film is a shrewd, compassionate and quite brilliant essay in the secret theatre of relationships.

"Ozon's film shows us the pain and the exhilarating futility of hindsight, of knowing the truth about something after it is over, and even then not being completely sure that there is not more retrospective illumination to come. This is a deeply impressive film from Ozon, who, at only 37, is moving to a new level of technical and creative mastery as a director." The Guardian/ Observer


Screening 29 June: Me and My Sister

Catherine Frot, the naïve, motor-mouthed, country-bumpkin sister comes to stay with Isabelle Huppert, the cold, sophisticated Parisienne older sister.

Huppert, ashamed of her background and embarrassed by her sister, lashes out at Frot, attacks partially fuelled by Frot’s irritating ways but mostly by the fact that Huppert’s upper-class friends seemed charmed by her (which makes Huppert more insecure and furious than she already is).

Frot mostly takes it on the chin, with the fact that Frot seems oblivious, enraging Huppert further (although this might be Frot’s passive aggressive ploy).

"Leclere's film rejoices in its themes of sibling rivalry, denial of roots and snobbish one-upmanship. The roles of the two sisters were especially written for Huppert and Frot and it's worth seeing the film just for their wonderful performances. It's a real treat." -Urban Cinephile