In the French corner

Depardieu. Godard. Isabelle Huppert. Isabelle Huppert's daughter. The IFI French Film Festival showcases the undisputed champions of European cinema, writes Donald Clarke

EVERY NOW and then somebody decides there's a bit of a crisis in French cinema. Such talk was about the place before - and, to an extent, during - this year's Cannes Film Festival.

It's all got a bit middle-class. Has it not? Can we endure another one of Daniel Auteuil's romantic dilemmas? Is it time for Huppert to go crazy again? And yet a glance at the films playing in the main strands should have reassured any cynic that no other European country can boast such variety in its cinematic output. A number of those films have turned up at the 11th Irish Film Institute French Film Festival, and that argument still seems secure. The Germans, the British and the Italians are, of course, still delivering good work. But, somehow or other, the French industry manages to look that bit more like, well, an industry.

Consider those films from Cannes alone. Winner of the Grand Prix (essentially the runner-up gong), Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men finds contemporary echoes as it follows the interactions between a group of French monks and Islamic extremists in Algeria during the mid-1990s. Leisurely, thoughtful, unapologetically studied, the picture is almost Russian in its devotion to the interior life. That's the art-house constituency covered, then.

Rachid Bouchareb's Outside the Law also has its roots in Algeria, but it could not be more different in tone, flavour and scope. A semi-official follow-up to the same director's Days of Glory, the picture is concerned with the domestic armed campaign against the French occupation of that north African country. It sounds like grim stuff, but, following three brothers as they move to Paris, the film has as much in common with The Godfather as it does with The Battle of Algiers. Demonstrating their talent for over-reaction, the French police erected a ring of steel before the film's Cannes screening, but the right-wing protests turned out to be modest to the point of quaint. Hard-line Gaullists will miss a film that cunningly blends long-gestated rage with an irresistible mainstream sensibility.

A bit too angry for you? Well, Bertrand Tavernier, that reliable old master, is on hand with a (the only word) sumptuous epic entitled The Princess of Montpensier. Starring Melanie Thierry and Gaspard Ulliel in a tale of religious conflict from the 16th century, the picture was a little bit sluggish for this writer's taste, but - what with all those nice frocks, big castles and rearing horses - it will close the festival with a mighty period flourish.

Elsewhere, the eager punter can enjoy a few more populist pleasures.

Director Jean Becker, son of the great Jacques Becker, reunites with Gérard Depardieu for a sentimental drama entitled My Afternoons With Margueritte. Depardieu plays a simple-minded fellow, barely literate, who is opened up to the world of books by an elderly lady. Depardieu and Becker previously worked together on the charming Conversations with My Gardener.

Most of these pictures will, of course, make their way to Irish cinemas in the fullness of time. Marie-Pierre Richard, the festival director, is aware of the responsibility to ensure that the festival feels like a special occasion. Accordingly, the director will be inviting a happy slew of special guests and presenting new material that reveals fresh directions in French cinema.

Lolita Chammah, star of Copacabana and Memory Lane, is probably already tired of being described as "Isabelle Huppert's daughter", but we do so anyway, before announcing that she will be on hand to introduce those two films. In Copacabana, Lolita plays opposite her mother in a comedy that, the programme admits, borrows some dynamics from Absolutely Fabulous: conservative daughter squirms before her conspicuously trendy parent. Memory Lane follows a group of seven childhood friends as they regroup in the Paris suburbs for a spell of bickering, flirting and reconsideration.

Jacques Cousteau is, for obvious reasons, rarely grouped in with other auteurs of his vintage. Yet it is worth remembering that the oceanographer and aquatic technician - inventor of the aqualung, no less - won three Oscars and one Palme d'Or. It could be argued that all modern notions of underwater photography can be traced back to his 1956 film The Silent World. Conceived with Louis Malle, that picture is being presented in a shiny new digital print and its treasures should alert a younger generation to a figure, once massively famous, who is now discussed too rarely.

Éamon de Buitléar, the distinguished Irish natural history film-maker, will introduce The Silent World and Cousteau's World Without Sun (1964), another Oscar winner. Folk who remember Cousteau's work on television in the 1970s will savour the opportunity to see the footage on the big screen.

The festival will also be paying tribute to some late masters. Claude Chabrol, who died just a few months ago, will be honoured with a screening of his 1970 masterwork The Butcher. Detailing the disastrous romance between a butcher and a schoolteacher, the picture - mildly Hitchcockian - now looks a little like the quintessential Chabrol piece.

Also screening is Marcel L'Herbrier's 1928 version of Émile Zola's Money. Peter Walsh, the Irish Film Institute's indomitable programmer, will introduce both these films.

What else? Well, a French film festival without Jean-Luc Godard would be like an Ulster fry without potato bread. Though dizzyingly eccentric and close to unreadable for the past four decades, the great man remains the dark god of world cinema. At the Cannes screening of Film Socialimse, possibly his last ever film, directors such as Michael Haneke and Agnès Varda turned up to pay tribute to one of our few walking messiahs.

The film itself is one those very few bad films that you absolutely must see. Featuring significant stretches filmed on camera-phone, utilising English-language subtitles that merely hint at the dialogue's meaning, the picture flits between confusing adventures on a cruise ship, confusing adventures in the French countryside and snatches of world affairs filtered through the familiar Marxist lens.

The end result is infuriating, but, in its sheer wilfulness, strangely invigorating. It could only come from Godard. It could only come from France.

yyy The IFI French Film Festival runs from November 18-28