The annual fete de films, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, a collaboration between Unifrance and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, opened this week with a comedy, The Trouble with You. Director Pierre Salvadori introduced the film noting that most filmmakers in France are French New Wave influenced, but he is more inspired by Hollywood. “It’s more about my love of stories, of fiction, of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder,” he explained. “My film is funny and sad. Feel free to laugh and cry.”

And so when the Trouble with You opens with a violent police action, the movie seems a startling homage, until the realization hits: a police procedural is appropriated for farce as only the French can do. Salvadori brought with him his leading man, Pio Marmai, with whom he has worked in the past. In fact, the last time he came to New York to promote a Salvadori film, he—in a drunken state— got a tattoo, the word for fighter misspelled.

The incident may have prepared him for this bad boy part. Marmai plays an innocent man convicted to eight years in jail. Now released, he is caught in romances with two women, his prior love played by Audrey Tautou, best known on these shores as the Amelie girl, and Yvonne (Adele Haenel), the widow of the cop who put him behind bars. How does he adapt to life on the outside? In a psychopathic rage, he steals, bites people’s faces. The world owes him. Poi Marmai, who resembles Jack Nicholson in The Shining—especially around the widespread, manic eyes—is simply deliciously crazed.

Salvadori deploys an arsenal of sight gags and distractions in this film. A nerdy serial killer carries body parts into a police station, confession ready, and no one cares. A sex shop provides a wardrobe of leather looks. At lunch at the Regency the next day, we debated, is it harder to make comedy or drama? American novelist Russell Banks, a rock star in France, joined in the conversation. Dubbed an ambassador at the festival this year, Banks introduced a special screening of the classic, Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows to an audience of inner city middle and high schoolers, telling them how he resisted seeing the black & white film back in the day, and how the experience of watching this film as a young man was formative. Banks doesn’t love the idea of ambassadorship, preferring Rendez-vous’ spirit toward world citizenship.

And Pierre Salvadori, besotted with American culture, confesses, he would have fit happily in old Hollywood’s studio system.

Regina Weinreich

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