On Saturday afternoon, French actor, director and screenwriter Michel Blanc - the featured guest of the 11th annual Providence French Film Festival - entertained an audience with his lighthearted charisma in a nearly full Cable Car Cinema. The panel discussion followed screenings of two films starring Blanc, Isabelle Mergault's "You Are So Beautiful" and Andre Techine's "The Witnesses."
The theater was packed for the screening of "Witnesses," which tells the story of a group of free-thinking friends whose unconventional yet blissful lives are affected by the AIDS outbreak in 1984 Paris. Married couple Sarah and Medhi - played by Emmanuelle Beart and Sami Bouajila, respectively - are in an open relationship that is perhaps even spiced up by their extramarital affairs. As Medhi experiments with his sexuality, Sarah tries, often unsuccessfully, to love her newborn baby.
Meanwhile, their friend Adrien - an older gay doctor played by Blanc - takes handsome, young newcomer Manu, played by Johan Libereau, under his wing and falls in love with him. Adrien attempts to channel his passionate and sometimes self-destructive devotion to Manu, who is in love with another man, toward raising AIDS awareness in the Parisian community.
Divided into three parts, the film explores the before, during and after of the characters' battle with the virus as it suddenly infiltrates their circle and forces them to confront their tensions and mortality.
Because the question-and-answer session directly followed the screening of "Witnesses," the audience's mood was somber, but Blanc broke the tension with his answer to the first question. Now that he had acted, directed and written scripts, an audience member asked, "What next?"
"Dead," Blanc joked. "And I'm not the only one."
Blanc told the story of his rise to fame - he started out in a "cafe theater" comedy group called Le Splendide, which he explained is "something like standup." He then struggled to change his popular comic image and break into more serious roles, a 30-year process that he jokingly described as "very easy."
Blanc then answered a series of questions about "Witnesses." Techine had been telling him for about 10 years that he wanted to work with him, Blanc said, and finally, about two-and-a half-years ago, he approached Blanc with the script for "Witnesses," which Blanc described as "very touching, very clever, very deep."
"It's a film about war," Blanc said, referring to both the fight against the virus and the struggle to learn how to actually live life.
"All the characters, except the young boy (Manu) are trying to avoid living. Emmanuelle (Sarah) has a baby but doesn't want to be a mother. Adrien's in love, but the love is in his head; he doesn't want to live it," he said. "Death wakes everybody up."
An audience member praised the film's portrayal of humanity and relationships for avoiding sentimentality and stereotypes and expressed his appreciation for Blanc's role, which he said he found particularly relatable.
Blanc made the audience laugh with his clever responses. When an audience member asked him what else he wants to accomplish before he dies, he asked, "Are you free until tomorrow?" As one of his reasons for preferring film to theater, he said that in film, "You're not onstage when they boo you."
The panel took a turn toward the end and became more of a heated discussion as the audience began comparing French and American cinema and addressing why there isn't more distribution of French film in the United States. An audience member criticized Americans for being unable to understand "the French soul" and for disliking films with subtitles.
Another audience member argued that the problem wasn't foreign film, but rather Americans' general taste in film. "I don't think Americans want to watch serious American films," the person said.
Blanc took a conciliatory approach by saying that it is understandable that not all Americans would want to watch French film.
"We make very different films," he said, to which an audience member responded, "Thank you for doing that."
Still, Blanc added, the real distinction is between independent and commercial cinema and not between foreign and American film. While commercial cinema is an industry that asks, "What would you like to see?" he said, independent cinema does the opposite and often shows audiences what they don't want to see.
