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Les Amandiers
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I had not previously seen any of the seven (!) films since 2003 – 6 theatrical features and a telemovie – directed by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi – before watching Les Amandiers; she took up that mantle after the initial 1990s mediatic ‘moment’ of the jeune cinéma français (JCF) or ‘young French cinema’, in which she rose to prominence as an actor, had more or less passed. I have since glimpsed a little (dubbed on Spanish TV) of Les Estivants (2018), a typically bittersweet ‘extended family at the summer house’ confection of the kind that overpopulates French cinema. (At least this one hits off with a surreal ‘film project assessment’ prologue featuring silent cameos from Frederick Wiseman and philosopher-actor Mehdi Belhaj Kacem!) What was the JCF? (I confess that, as a phenomenon of the time, it largely passed me by, even as I was watching this or that film associated with it in Australia during the 1990s.) Like many journalistic tags (such as the 1980s cinéma du look), the reality of this grouping was always rather flimsy, open to any assortment of films, filmmakers and symptomatic cultural signs of the 1990s that commentators wished to corral and extol (or decry). Even Douglas Morrey, a scholar I respect, has some problems with defining this and other groups in his otherwise valuable book, The Legacy of the New Wave in French Cinema (2019). I wouldn’t, for instance, include Christophe Honoré (formerly a Cahiers du cinéma writer, like Olivier Assayas) in the JCF, just as I wouldn’t include Leos Carax in the Look gang (a common error, addressed well by Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd in their 2003 book on the director). However, one can locate a certain coherence among a loose collocation of film school-trained directors (whether graduates from IDHEC, INSAS in Belgium, or the later FÉMIS) who emerged with their first features in that late 1980s-through-1990s period: Arnaud Desplechin, Éric Rochant (these two were firm pals), Pascale Ferran, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, Cédric Kahn, Lætitia Masson, Xavier Beauvois, Sandrine Veysset, Érick Zonca … and not forgetting Noémie Lvovsky, whose 1999 La vie ne me fait pas peur (Life Doesn’t Scare Me), shot first for television (as Petites) and then expanded into a feature film with extra material a few years later, marked an undoubted highpoint in the JCF. And maybe also its veritable swan song, punctuating the decade that had started with Rochant’s Un monde sans pitié (World Without Pity, 1989) co-written with Desplechin. Some of those nominated JCF directors have slid into relative obscurity since the ‘90s, while others have hung in and evolved with the changing times. Today, the JCF trace is especially evident in the generation of actors (some of whom also became directors) launched in those films: Mathieu Amalric, Jeanne Balibar, Emmanuelle Devos, Denis Podalydés, Sandrine Kiberlain, Bruni Tedeschi … Other key personnel can be associated with the JCF moment: DOP Eric Gautier, writer Florence Seyvos (regular collaborator of Lvovksy and partner of Desplechin), editor François Gédigier … Finally, all touted movements inevitably merge into a larger sea of crosscurrents: whatever identified the JCF in the mid ‘90s could be found, in the 2000s, disseminated in many places: the films of Honoré, Philippe Garrel, Jean-Claude Biette, Pierre Léon, Assayas, and even those ‘old timers’ Alain Resnais and Jacques Rivette (to name only a few of the ever-spreading connections). Back to Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. In their remarkable polemical 1998 essay “Petit arrangements avec le jeune cinéma français” (which appeared in the short-lived magazine Balthazar), Stéphane Delorme & Mathieu Lavin peg her as the “exemplary type” of actor required by JCF ideology: “a conception of acting in perfect accord with the type of theatre inherited from the Method … Every bodily manifestation must be readable”. Their key reference is Laurence Ferreira Barbosa’s Normal People are Nothing Exceptional (1993), dealing with a psychiatric ‘case study’ – but Lvovsky’s striking debut feature Oublie-moi (Forget Me, 1994) would serve their argument just as well. Almost 30 years on from her role in Normal People, Bruni Tedeschi revisits, in Les Amandiers, memories of her mid ‘80s youth at Patrice Chéreau’s hothouse École des Amandiers for actors – complete with subsidised trips for the students to no less than the Actors Studio in New York, home of the Method. (Oddly, that Studio is here reduced to seemingly a single room and a sole teacher, played by Sandra Nkake – maybe a budgetary constraint consideration.) It’s an odd movie, happy to play along with (rather than contradict or expand) most of the clichés associated with the various Method schools around the world. For these kids (principals are played by Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Sofiane Bennacer) and their teachers, nothing is artificially enacted, everything is truly lived: passions, rages, tears, doubts, egomania. It’s all one big, messy, ‘80s party, with the teachers (Louis Garrel as Chéreau and agreeable JCF stalwart Micha Lescot, more recently featured in Assayas’ Suspended Time [2024]) happy to get hooked on the same drugs as the kids, and share their beds into the bargain. Until, of course, the spectre of AIDS looms … The way in which the film begins – right in the midst of a sex-and-strangulation melodrama, before the ‘reveal’ that it is an on-stage audition for entry into Chéreau’s school – is a lazy switch-up that brought on, for me, the unpleasant memory of an awful arthouse release, Élie Chouraqui’s The Liars (1996), starring none other than … Valeria Bruni Tedeschi! On a more positive note, Les Amandiers sometimes hits a jangly, wayward, episodic energy and rhythm that is reminiscent of Life Doesn’t Scare Me – and, indeed, Lvovsky is the co-writer here alongside Bruni Tedeschi and Caroline Deruas (aka Deruas Peano and Deruas Garrel), who has recently directed Stereo Girls (aka Les Immortelles, 2025) featuring her daughter, Lena Garrel. © Adrian Martin 3 August & 28 November 2025 |
