By Seth Lukas Hynes
On March 17, the Memorial Hall in Healesville hosted the tenth annual Healesville Mini Film Festival.
Organised by the Yarra Ranges Film Society, the Healesville Mini Film Festival consists of a triple-feature of films sharing a director, theme or source culture.
The second French-themed Mini Film Festival (the first was in 2020), The Best of France 2.0 event screened three recent French films to a large, highly-engaged audience.
Full Time (2021), written and directed by Éric Gravel, could be described as a domestic thriller.
The film follows Julie (Laure Calamy, in a Venice Film Festival award-winning performance), a single mother with two children who works as the head maid at an expensive hotel.
Full Time draws extraordinary suspense from the mundane and the familiar sensation of working hard to go nowhere: Julie’s weariness weighs on her as she scrapes by amid cute but exhausting kids, a soul-crushing job, financial woes and transport strikes in the background that jeopardise her current work and any hope of progress. Julie’s struggles are well-developed and build to a heartwrenching climax, and Irène Drésel’s
harsh electronic score amplifies the tension. The audience’s averaged rating for Full Time was 4.1 out of 5, and I gave it a 5.
Driving Madeleine (2022), directed by Christian Carion, is a gentler drama about a stolid taxi driver named Charles (Dany Boon) who drives an old lady with a fascinating past named Madeleine (Line Renaud).
Driving Madeleine is endearing, well-acted and nicely-shot, but unlike the tight, relentless Full Time, Driving Madeleine just doesn’t have much tension, as Charles and Madeleine bond almost instantly in their easygoing journey.
The hardhitting flashbacks to Madeleine’s traumatic youth are a jarring tonal shift, and while they address the poor state of women’s rights in the mid-twentieth century, they still feel exploitative.
The audience’s average rating for Driving Madeleine was 4.6, but I gave it a more modest 3.
Resembling a discount Mamma Mia with no musical numbers, Two Tickets to Greece (2022) is an annoying comedy about Blandine (Olivia Côte), a socially-reserved woman who reluctantly goes on a Greek vacation with her old friend Magalie (Laure Calamy, who is unrecognisably vivacious – and obnoxious – from her austere role in Full Time).
Two Tickets to Greece features lively energy and stunning cinematography in vibrant locales, but as an autistic viewer, this film was a squirmingly uncomfortable watch in which a happy loner is constantly forced into social situations she doesn’t want.
Two Tickets to Greece drew plenty of laughs from the audience, whose average rating was a fairly high 3.9, but I don’t think I laughed once, and gave it a 2.
The films on offer gave diminishing returns in terms of quality, but the Best of France 2.0 Healesville Mini Film Festival was still a very successful event, and I look forward to next year’s Mini Film Festival.
