Best of French at IFC

The programme for the Carte Noire 9th Dublin French Film Festival, which opens on November 3rd and continues for 10 days, is commendably varied and rich in promise; programme director Marie-Pierre Ordonneau has succeeded admirably in acquiring the cream of new and recent French-language cinema for Dublin audiences.

The festival opens with Marquise, directed by Vera Belmont, who will be in Dublin to introduce the screening. This lush biopic of the infamous 17th-century courtesan and actress, the Marquise du Parque, stars Sophie Marceau, with Bernard Giraudeau, Thierry Lhermitte and Lambert Wilson.

The closing film on November 13th, Manuel Poirier's Western, a prize-winner at Cannes this year, is an offbeat road movie which follows the experiences of its dislocated protagonists, a Spanish shoe salesman and a diminutive Russian immigrant, as they travel through Brittany in search of love. The two men are played by Sergei Lopez, a regular in Poirier's films, and the nonprofessional actor, Sacha Bourdo.

In the just-published 1988 Variety International Film Guide, the leading French critic Michel Ciment notes that 1997 has been Poirier's year, with Marion showing in Berlin and Western competing at Cannes. Made before Western, Marion, which also features in the Dublin programme, deals with a 10-year-old girl who is coveted by a wealthy, childless couple.

The Dublin programme also features Bruno Dumont's La Vie De Jesus, singled out by Ciment as one of the year's "outstanding revelations" in French cinema, which reveals Dumont, a former philosophy lecturer, as "a totally accomplished film-maker" whose film "emerges as a cross between Bresson and Pialat". Working with a non-professional cast, Dumont tackles AIDS, rape, racism and unemployment in this picture of idle young villagers in a provincial town.

Ciment praises Brigitte Rouan's Post Coitum Animal Triste as "an energetic portrayal of a married woman in love with a younger man", and he cites "its sheer dynamism, mixing pathos with comedy and some surrealistic touches". And he describes Raoul Ruiz's Genealogies Of A Crime as "a new combination of psychoanalysis and surrealism by Bunuel's legitimate heir". It features Catherine Deneuve in the dual role of a psychiatrist in love with her nephew and a lawyer defending the same man on a murder charge.

The splendid Deneuve turns up again, co-starring with Daniel Auteuil in the latest Andre Techine film, Les Voleurs, set among a criminal family. Elodie Bouchez, who starred in Techine's excellent Les Roseaux Sauvages, co-stars with Beatrice Dalle in Yolande Zauberman's Clubbed To Death, in which Bouchez plays a young woman who falls asleep on the last bus home and finds herself in a suburban demimonde of immigrants, drug dealers and louche techno dance clubs.

Elodie Bouchez also features with Romane Bohringer and Jean-Philippe Ecoffey (both from the current gem, L'Appartement) in Graham Guit's Le Ciel Est A Nous, which Bohringer describes as "a French Pulp Fiction". The Guardian critic Jonathan Romney notes that Guit "directs with a true pop culturist's eye for retina-searing colour and Seventies retro ephemera".

Look out, too, for a well regarded variation on the Jules Et Jim theme in Marion Vernoux's Love Etc., based on a Julian Barnes novel and starring Charlotte Gainsbourg. And for one of the box-office hits of the year in France, Philippe Harel's Les Randonneurs (Hikers), a comedy of three young men and two young women facing logistical and personal complications as they brave the Corsican countryside on a hiking trip.

Director Claire Simon, who has worked extensively in short films and documentary, will travel to Dublin for the screening of her first feature film, Sinon, Oui (A Foreign Body), a factually-based drama set on the outskirts of Nice in which a woman (Catherine Mendez) pretends to be pregnant to keep her husband from leaving her.

The festival retrospective will pay tribute to the great Jean-Pierre Melville, who died in 1973, and will screen 11 of his films, including such classics as Leon Morin, Priest, Le Cercle Rouge, Le Samurai and Le Deuxieme Souffle. A tribute to the 50th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival will feature such notable French productions as L'Argent, Jules Et Jim, Petits Arrangements Avec les Morts and Van Gogh.

A video programme of films and documentaries will include Jean-Luc Godard's four-part Histoires Du Cinema and Andre S. Labarthe's Jean-Pierre Melville: Portrait En 9 Poses. Worth noting, too, are the three programmes of new short films from France. Having served on the shorts jury at last year's festival, I was struck by their high standard, and I look forward to the festival screening of the new 52-minute feature, Regarde la Mer, directed by Francois Ozon, whose exuberant Un Robe d'Ete won our jury prize last year.

This year's festival will be held at the two IFC cinemas, with the opening presentation of Marquise showing in the Savoy 1 auditorium. The festival booking office opens at the IFC next Tuesday, when full screening details and the festival brochure will be available.