Director Jean Becker’s Conversations With My Gardener is a wry and knowing French comedy of cultural misunderstanding between the cosmopolitan artist and the provincial gardener. The artist knows nothing about practical matters and the gardener is nonplused by the artist’s nonrepresentational painting and the nude mistress sunning herself on the lawn. Conversations With MyGardener will open this year’s Festival of Films in French, screening 8 p.m. Feb. 5 and 9 p.m. Feb. 6 at the UW-Milwaukee Union Theatre. The Festival of Films in French runs through Feb. 14 at the Union Theatre.
Sexy and worldly, tolerant and profound, Conversations is the sort of carefully polished gem one associates with French cinema. Although the gardener with his routine, ordinary existence is the object of the film’s ironic humor, the arc of the plot leaves us wondering which man has enjoyed the richer life.
It’s not the only thought-provoking and entertaining film at the festival. Un Secret (A Secret) concerns a scrawny, sickly lad in 1950s France, Francois, a disappointment to his athletic father. Occasionally, dad tries to turn his son into his ideal of a man, as mom looks on with worried disapproval, but he soon surrenders to disappointment. What really gets dad angry, however, is Francois going on about his imaginary brother, the strong avatar who does what he can only dream. Francois doesn’t realize that the amplitude of that anger is because there really had been a strong brother, the son dad really wanted.
Un Secret is the story of a family’s buried history, a willful forgetfulness caused not so much by the shock of French defeat in World War II as the trauma that came when the Holocaust began. Barely aware of his Jewish heritage when he was young, Francois’ suspicion that something is missing leads him to a full account of what happened. Dad’s first wife and their son, his lost half brother, were among the victims shipped by eager French collaborators to the death camps of Nazi Germany. And on some unspoken emotional level, dad may have been to blame.
Working from the spare but revealing novel by Philippe Grimbert, director Claude Miller composed the story as a series of long flashbacks from the perspective of the 1980s, when Francois had become a psychoanalyst whose withdrawn child patients remind him of his own episodes of family discovery. The cast includes many faces familiar to lovers of French film, including Mathieu Amalric and Julie Depardieu.
Un Secret will screen at 5 p.m. Feb. 6 and 7 p.m. Feb. 7 at the UWM Union Theatre.
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