French

Come and enjoy conversation while strengthening your language skills

Come and enjoy conversation while strengthening your language skills.

TOMBOY

7:00 p.m.
Beam Classroom, Visual Arts Center

A sensitive portrait of childhood just before pubescence, Tomboy, the second film by writer-director Céline Sciamma, astutely explores the freedom of being untethered to the rule-bound world of gender codes. About 20 minutes elapse before we learn the real name and biological sex of Laure, a gangly, short-haired kid about to go into fourth grade. Her family has just moved to a suburban apartment complex a few weeks before the school year starts. The clan’s relocation provides Laure an opportunity for re-invention, introducing herself to her playmates as Michaël —an identity that gives her the liberty to go shirtless and wrestle with the other boys, attracting the attention of crushed-out Lisa. Sciamma shows a real gift for capturing kids at play, filming the August afternoons devoted to soccer and water battles as their own otherworldly time zone. But the director doesn’t present an uncomplicated view of childhood: Laure/ Michaël, beginning to reciprocate Lisa’s smitten feelings, lives in anxiety of being found out as much as she revels in being a boy. Extremely empathic, Tomboy isn’t simply an earnest plea for tolerance: Childhood itself, the film intimates, is full of ambiguities, of sorting out what you are drawn to and what repels you.

IL Y A LONGTEMPS QUE JE T’AIME

(I've Loved You So Long)

7:00 P.M.
Kresge Auditorium
Visual Arts Center

The women-in-prison film has a long, glorious and tawdry history; what’s more difficult to pull off is the story of a lady sprung from the slammer. In his helming debut, director-screenwriter Philippe Claudel, a novelist and professor of literature, crafts a solid woman’s picture that, as a wonderful star vehicle for Kristin Scott Thomas, suggests a kinship with Warner Bros. weepies from the 1940s. First seen rather conspicuously without makeup, her skin color resembling three-day-old institutional grub, Scott Thomas plays Juliette Fontaine, a former physician who’s just completed a 15-year jail sentence for murdering her young son (though the reason for her incarceration isn’t revealed until the final act). Her younger sister, literature professor Léa, takes her in, anxiously trying not to upend the snug comfort of her middle-class clan with this new addition. As she reacclimates to civilian life, Juliette slowly thaws, becoming closer with her nieces, but her calm is punctuated by believably spiky outbursts. Scott Thomas gives a remarkably deft performance, being careful not to outact Zylberstein, who particularly shines during a seminar discussion about Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Throughout, Claudel and his cast smartly reimagine melodramatic conventions, creating a film that fully earns its moments of emotional excess.

Come and enjoy conversation while strengthening your language skills.