Bonjour, "French Cinema Now"!By Jana Hsu
The San Francisco Film Society's French Cinema Now series screened Oct. 29-Nov. 4 in San Francisco.
Axelle Ropert’s The Wolberg Family poses all the existential fly flap of post-modern family life wrought with a full spectrum of visual vignettes surrounding the topic of irreconcilable differences between the all-too-assuming, brutish father Simon (Francois Damiens) and his newly menopausal spouse, Marianne (Valerie Benguigui).
The story unfolds in a rather well-put together way, without railing off into obscurity. Charming bohemian uncle Alexandre (Serge Bozon) lives in a small redwood cabin adjacent to the main house; he shares an endearing relationship with the couple’s two children, Benjamin (Valentin Vigourt) and Delphine (Leopoldine Serre). One arresting segment depicts a winsome game between Alexandre and Benjamin in the cabin: uncle and nephew race each other in a foot trounce of hopping alternating feet over the threshold of an open door. The elder figure, who serves as a near messianic shaman for the young impressionable lad, explains to the small boy that the line right outside the door represents the “real world,” and the one right inside is the “dream world” -- causing the little boy to grow increasingly frantic at having to stop the hopping by choosing which world he’d rather land on.
Moments like this are riddled throughout the film, leaving the audience with a full understanding of each characters’ raison d'être within the family folds. I was all at once seized by the colorful rungs of the nostalgic heyday of the nuclear family unit, and the disintegrating plinth of its underlying structure relating to the society that enshrouds it. Simon has some tough harnesses to bite through, and this becomes the center of the film -- an oubliette of a diseased-ridden mind confessing past sorrows and offering solace to the once-proud, bouffant posture of Marianne, who has reached a change in her life where her russet rivulets have stopped flowing.
The viewer is invited into the warm meridian glow of that universal space between a closed bedroom door and a tight hallway that could take place anywhere in the world between husband and wife as they engage in an all too familiar tête-à-tête. The marriage is far from saved, as further complications involving a third party splinter Simon’s already antiquated existence. Splices like these unveil the truly bourgeois mindset of the family head, even as he talks down to his vagabond brother, and forces his coming-of-age daughter to flee into the warm subterfuge of an out of town boyfriend while offering audience members life lessons that involve strong implications of knobbing or intercourse and lipstick pedagogy.
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