Parky at the Pictures (DVD 18/4/2019)

When wife Dafna (Sarah Adler) faints on answering the door, Tel Aviv architect Michael Feldman (Lior Askkenazi) knows immediately that the three uniformed figures administering a sedative have brought bad news about his son, Jonathan (Yonaton Shiray), who is serving with the Israeli Defence Force. Too stunned to speak, Michael tries to take in the information about the funeral arrangements and needing to avoid dehydration. He is too shocked to take offence at one of the visitors programming his phone to beep on the hour to remind him to drink a glass of water. When left alone, however, he kicks the dog trying to console him and goes for a breath of air when older brother Avigdor (Yehuda Almagor) comes to offer his condolences. 

Wandering past a dance class at the old people's home where his mother (Karin Ugowski) lives, Michael informs her that her grandson has died. However, while she insists she understands what he has told her, she mixes him up with Avigdor and he feels very alone. On arriving home, he shoots his brother a reproachful glance when he is met at the door by his sobbing Dafna's sobbing sister (Ilia Grosz), who throws her arms around his neck. He also sees a soldier (Itamar Rotschild) waiting to go over the funeral rituals and is so angry to hear Avigdor contacting the press to dictate the death notice that he locks himself in the bathroom and burns his hand with the scalding hot water from the tap. 

Frustrated at not being able to contact his daughter, Alma (Shira Haas), whose phone is switched off, Michael allows Max the dog to nuzzle his hand as he listens to his guest's well-rehearsed, but far from tactful spiel about the burial rubric. He asks to see the body and draws the conclusion that Jonathan has been blown to smithereens when the soldier attempts to stall and change the subject to any personal touches that the family might like to include. Clumsily, he suggests that an amusing story might help ease the tension and the dog runs away when Michael snaps in irritation. 

While confiding his fears to Avigdor, Michael hears the doorbell and comes into the hallway to see Dafna's sister rushing to the bedroom to wake her. The notification party has returned and the senior officer (Danny Isserles) informs Michael that there has been a bureaucratic error and that another Jonathan Feldman has been killed. Dafna is just happy their son is alive, but Michael is furious that he has been forced to endure five hours of torment and he slaps Avigdor's hands when he tries to calm him down. He also smashes a glass when the female trooper (Yael Eisenberg) urges him to drink something and Dafna pleads with her husband not to succumb to his demons in front of strangers. 

However, Michael is overcome with a mixture of rage and relief and, as some black birds swirls in the sky above the apartment, he blacks out momentarily. Leaping to his feet, he evades the steadying clutches and calls a friend who knows a military bigwig who can snap his fingers and have Jonathan sent home as soon as possible. 

A precisely timed cut takes us to the Seam Zone somewhere in the northern sector, where Jonathan is on duty with his pal (Itay Exlroad). They raise the creaking red-and-white barrier to allow a camel to pass through before the other soldier begins to demonstrate the foxtrot and breaks into a jerky duet with his machine-gun. After a top shot roves slowly over the off-duty detail on their bunks, the night relief trudges through a flooded part of the path to take up their places at a checkpoint that is made up of a floodlight tower, a gun emplacement, a bench and a pale green van with a woman's face painted on the side. 

As Renzo Cesana's `Walk the Lonesome Night' plays on the radio, a car approaches through the darkness. The driver (Mussa Zhalka) smiles nervously as he hands over the ID cards and a check is run on his wife (Ruti Tamir), as she no longer resembles her photo. But they are given the all clear and one of the troops fires a flare into the night sky to light their way. After a while, the camel plods back from whence it came and the guard changes after another uneventful shift. 

They return to their rickety barrack and use one of the tins they have been eating out of for supper to gauge whether the building has tilted. As he sketches a pin-up with crosses over her nipples under a caption reading `One Last Bedtime Story', Jonathan tells his comrades (Dekel Adin, Shaul Amir and Gefen Barkai) about his great-grandfather entrusting his daughter with an heirloom bible before he perished in Auschwitz. She survived and informs her son that he will inherit the bible when he joins the army. However, he traded it for a pornographic magazine and Jonathan jokes that Michael had passed this on to him when he was called up to keep the family tradition going in its new twisted form. 

The next day, a driver pulls up at the barrier (Rami Buzaglo) in a van full of toys. He snarls as they take a gun-toting robot and place it on the tarmac. It makes a lot of noise and looks impressive with its shades and body armour. But, when it tries to walk, it falls over and is left helpless on its back. While one of his mates plays a video war game that night, a trooper muses on the purpose of their posting and draws the conclusion it's a waste of time. His scepticism is echoed by another who tells a buddy listening to loud music on his headphones that they are under constant surveillance. He curses him for not being a hot woman like Pamela Anderson or Jessica Rabbit and is speculating on the size Roger Rabbit's appendage when a car screeches to a halt at the barrier. 

A man (Yaakov Zada Daniel) and his wife (Irit Kaplan) in evening dress are ordered out of the vehicle. She is told to deposit the contents of her handbag on the road and she exchanges a reassuring half-smile with her husband as they are left to stand in the rain while her ID picture is verified. Some time later, another car approaches, with a couple canoodling in the backseat (Eden Daniel and Eden Gmliel). As the driver (Firas Nassar) deliberately drops his ID so that the soldier has to kneel on the ground to retrieve it, Jonathan is struck by the profile of the girl in the passenger seat (Noam Lugasy). 

She smiles quietly and turns away because she realises she has trapped her dress in the door. However, when she opens it, a beer can rolls out and a panicked soldier misidentifies it as a grenade and Jonathan fires on the car, killing everyone inside. A sombre phone call is made to their base and a digger comes out to excavate a hole into which to deposit the vehicle, as if it has never existed. Jonathan sits in appalled silence a short distance away from his brothers in arms, as the rain washes away the digger's tyre tracks and everyone is required to carry on as though nothing untoward had happened. 

At first light, a senior officer (Aryeh Cherner) helicopters in to conduct the briefest of inquiries. His shiny black boots are coated in mud by the time he gets to the barrack, which is now lurching significantly. He declares that the case was closed before it was opened and that the quartet did the right thing because they couldn't afford to take chances in a war zone. As he concludes, his phone rings and it's the friend Michael had been trying to contact to arrange Jonathan's immediate return. The officer orders him to cadge a lift with the supply truck and he asks the driver why he's been sent home. 

In the passenger seat, Jonathan opens his notebook and an animated segment commences in which Michael drives his mother to a mental breakdown by selling her father's precious bible. Rising from her hospital bed, she morphs into the pneumatic Amazonian in Jonathan's sketch and we see the cross from her breast attach itself to Michael's face when he sucks her nipple. This mark remains for the rest of his life, as he does his military service, graduates, marries a philosophy student and becomes a successful architect. In his mind's eye, he's a well-hung Adonis. But, each night, his younger self comes to pull aside the tape from the corner of his eye so that he could shed a bitter tear of regret. 

A match cut takes us from the line drawing to Michael crying quietly to himself. He is sitting in Jonathan's room and leafing through his notebook. A page has been ripped out after a drawing of the smiling girl in the car and Michael is wondering about the tear when Dafna storms in and asks him to leave. She has been decorating a cake for what would have been Jonathan's 20th birthday and she has deliberately barked her knuckles on the grater. While she tends to the cuts, Michael wanders into the lounge and sees the torn drawing of a digger holding a car in its jaws. 

Dafna asks for a cigarette, while chiding Michael for smoking again. He wonders if they might do something to mark the occasion, but she says she wants nothing to do with him. She reveals that she wishes she had terminated her pregnancy and, yet, she always preferred Jonathan to Alma and not feels his absence with a ferocity she could never have anticipated. Michael tries to empathise, but she curses his weakness and insists that both children sensed he was flawed. 

Sparking a joint, they argue over who is the bulldozer and who is the car in the drawing (as they know nothing of its real meaning) and get the giggles over the pomposity of an invitation to attend the unveiling of a plaque in honour of their son's heroic death. Alma comes home and is surprised to see them together after what has clearly been an acrimonious parting. They cut into the cake and Max snaffles a piece from his master before Alma gets a text and beats a hasty retreat. She says her parents look good together and they sit at the kitchen table with shared pride at how their daughter has turned out. 

Suddenly, Michael opens up about his own wartime experience and how he had been returning from a mission when he waved a support vehicle through. It had struck a mine and he watched in horror as the passengers died in an agony that fate had allowed him to escape. When Dafna became pregnant, he had taken the birth of a son as a sign of God's forgiveness and he confides how content he had been when Jonathan had driven them to the bus stop for what would be his last tour of duty. He jumps up and shows her how the steps of the foxtrot always bring you back to where you started and she throws her arms around him and they circle slowly on the kitchen floor in what might be a new beginning or a sad ending. 

Cutting away to the point-of-view shot with which the film started, we find ourselves in the supply truck with Jonathan and his driver. There is nothing but wilderness either side of the narrow strip of tarmac and he passes the time inking in his bulldozer sketch. When he looks up, he sees a camel standing in the middle of the road and the vehicle swerves to avoid it and overturns in plunging down a shallow incline. It's such a futile way to die and the biting irony of the commendation, `in the line of duty', clangs with a hollowness that echoes the misgivings many Israelis have about the IDF's mission. 

It's easy to see why Maoz has come in for so much criticism at home (Culture Minister Miri Regev branded the film `anti-Israeli'), but he insists that he is trying to understand his compatriots rather than condemn them. Yet, while it was put forward as Israel's submission for last year's Oscar for Best Foreign Film, it failed to beat Lebanese auteur Ziad Douieri's The Insult into the final five - a picture that has, thus far, failed to secure UK distribution. Whether this says more about the vagaries of the Academy's selection process or the politics of its members is open to debate. Either way, this potent and deeply artistic picture confirms Maoz as one of the country's finest film-makers and one can only hope we don't have to wait eight years for his next outing. 

While the performances of Lior Ashkenazi, Sarah Adler and Yonaton Shiray are outstanding and the camerawork and production design of Giora Bejach and Arad Sawat are exceptional, it's Maoz's overall concept that makes this so compelling. The tonal shifts between the three segments is audacious and inspired, with the gnawing horror of the opening scenes giving way to a playful surrealism on the front line that lulls the audience into a Catch-22-like sense of security before the shocking intrusion of everyday violence brings us joltingly back to harrowing reality. 

Yet Maoz isn't finished there, as he fearlessly slips in a passage of monochrome animation before springing the revelation that the Feldmans are grieving after all and leaving viewers to stew over how Jonathan met his demise while his parents get high and remember (for however long) that their pain unites rather than divides them. Even then, the denouement is as absurd as it is tragic and, therein, lies the truth that Maoz is striving to convey - as no death in a political context can ever be entirely futile, whether it takes place in a death camp or on winding road in the middle of a militarised nowhere.

Unsavoury stories from the set of his Palme d'or winner, Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013), look likely to dog Abdellatif Kechiche for the rest of his career. Indeed, the lingering reaction to that controversial lesbian romance has coloured the assessment of his sixth feature, Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno, as he has once again allowed his fiftysomething male gaze to dwell on the naked bodies of his young female leads. 

There's no escaping the unsettling impact of such voyeurism. But, in reworking François Bégaudeau's novel, La Blessure, la vraie, Kechiche and co-scenarist wife Ghalya Lacroix appear to have consciously invoked the spirit of Eric Rohmer to reflect upon juvenile attitudes and appetites in south-eastern France in the mid-1990s and contrast them with those of today. The result may not convince everyone of the nobility of Kechiche's intentions or the integrity his approach. But this sunkissed evocation of a not-too-distant era is anything but salacious nostalgia, as it dares to suggest that the complex interaction between the sexes can't simply be reduced to convenient PC platitudes.

Abandoning his medical studies in Paris, Amin (Shaïn Boumedine) returns to his coastal home in Sète to await a producer's verdict on his latest film script. While out cycling, he spots the delivery scooter belonging to his cousin, Tony (Salim Kechiouche), outside the house owned by the aunt of his childhood friend, Ophélie (Ophélie Bau). Peering through the window, Amin is dismayed to see the couple making passionate love, as he not only has a lingering crush on Ophélie, but she is also engaged to Clément, a soldier on active duty in the Gulf.

Deciding to break-up the tryst by knocking on the door, Amin is amused by the speed with which Tony scarpers and sips a beer while enjoying Ophélie's embarrassment at being caught with her lover. She admits that they have been seeing each other for four years, but still intends to marry when her fiancé gets home. As she tidies the bed and offers Amin some strawberries from the family farm, she reveals that her aunt is in hospital with cirrhosis and that she is looking after the house in her absence. Amin spots a Polaroid camera and reminds Ophélie of the photographs he took of her when they were younger and she teases him about the fact he doesn't have a girlfriend to pose for him. As they stroll beside the waterfront, he promises to invite her to Paris so he can show her a statue she resembles in the Place de la Nation.  

Some time later, Amin and Tony meet Nice holidaymakers Charlotte (Alexia Chardard) and Céline (Lou Luttiau) while they are sunbathing on the beach. Tony and Charlotte do most of the talking, as he boasts about the restaurants he manages in Sète and Hammamet in Tunisia. Charlotte reveals she's at business school, while Céline is training to be a dancer. Tony tells them about Amin writing movies and they are charmed by his story set in 2020 about a man falling in love with a female robot. While Charlotte and Tony smooch in the sea, Amin offers to show Céline around Paris and asks if he can take her picture to see if he can capture her dancing elegance. She smiles, but isn't quite such a pushover as her friend. 

The quartet go out for the evening and Tony introduces the girls to his Uncle Kamel (Kamel Saadi), who pays them extravagant compliments before they go to eat at the couscous restaurant run by Amin and Tony's mothers (Delinda Kechiche and Hatika Karaoui). While Tony gets a ticking off for failing to show up for his deliveries, Charlotte and Céline meet Tony's sister, Lamia (Lydia Bouchali-Zemmour), and another cousin, Joe (Hamid Rahmi), who invites them to sit with his friends, Melinda (Meleinda Elasfour) and Thomas (Thomas Fessard). However, they quickly cross the street to dance in a bar, where Amin feels put out that Joe makes a move on Céline, while Ophélie can't help but notice the attention that Tony is paying to Charlotte. 

Scolded by mother Delinda for watching Alexander Dovzhenko's Arsenal (1929) when he should be out in the sunshine, Amin listens to her criticising Tony's parents for setting him a bad moral example by their bickering. She admits her brother is a bad lad for playing away, but says Hatika is too shrewish and she hopes she has set Amin a better example. Joking that she no longer knows what women want, she dashes off to the restaurant, leaving Amin to develop some photographs of Ophélie. He meets up with her on the beach, where she grumbles about her friend quizzing her about Tony and Amin recalls how white he went when Clément threatened to emasculate anyone who laid a finger on his girl. 

Nearby, Charlotte complains to Céline about Tony cooling down towards her and she wonders whether she has made a fool of herself with him. As she walks back to the farm to do her chores with the goats and lambs, Ophélie tells Amin that Charlotte is nuisance and is pleased to report that Tony finds her frigid in bed. She has more time for Céline, who prefers having fun to stealing other people's boyfriends. But Amin keeps his opinion to himself, as he watches Ophélie bottle feed a lamb in a halo of dusk sunlight. 

That night, Charlotte and Céline come to the restaurant to find Tony. She is upset at being messed around and struggles to hold back the tears as Kamel greets her. However, he gets told off by Dalinda for making Céline sit on his knee and she whisks the girls into the pool room to find Amin. He tells Charlotte to forget Tony, as he isn't worth fretting over. But she is uncomfortable chatting with Ophélie and Melinda and is relieved to be swept away by Amin to meet his favourite aunt, Camélia (Hafsia Herzi), and her boyfriend Fernando (David Ribeiro). He asks Amin if he's met Jean-Paul Belmondo in Paris and Camélia mistakenly thinks that her nephew and Charlotte are an item. But she is trying to have a serious conversation with Tony, who has arrived with a new group of friends and who keeps flannelling her with gushing protestations that she knows are nonsense. 

Meanwhile, Céline flirts with Ophélie and dances with Kamel, who suggests that they go to a nearby disco. Dalinda tells him to act his age and leave the young girls alone, but he insists on piling into a car and the action cuts to the gang enjoying a morning-after swim in the sea. As they tuck into spaghetti on the beach, Camélia joins Dalinda and Hatika to gossip about Ophélie. When she joins them, they talk about Clément and Hatika admits that she was saddened to see him go off to war in the Gulf. They discuss weddings and fidelity and Ophélie is relieved when Amin rescues her from what she realises is a scarcely disguised browbeating. He had met a Russian girl named Anastasia at the disco and Ophélie tries to coax him into revealing details about what they got up to. 

As they walk along the beach, Amin reminds Ophélie that she owes him a favour for keeping quiet about her affair with Tony. He asks if she will pose nude for him, but she is reluctant and fobs him off with access to some lambing ewes because he needs some pictures to illustrate the screenplay he is writing. When he comes to the milking pen, Ophélie teases him because her younger sister (Charlotte Jude) has a crush on him and she is amused by how bashful he becomes whenever anybody mentions girls. She leaves him perched on a hay bale waiting for one of the sheep to go into labour and is so taken by his earnestness and gentle treatment of the animals that she promises to think about posing for him. 

Amin's patience is rewarded when a ewe gives birth to two lambs and nuzzles them as they struggle to their feet. He leaves this scene of tranquility for the disco, where Ophélie is strutting her stuff on the dance floor, while Tony is flirting with a couple of Spanish girls. There's no sign of Charlotte, but Céline is happy to bop around with Ophélie and Camélia, as they writhe around poles, thrust out their behinds and whirl their long hair in time to the music with an abandon that seems utterly oblivious to the desires they are arousing in the men enrapturedly watching them. 

As Sylvester's `You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)' blares out, the sense is unmistakable that everyone is putting on a show and sending out signals that can just as easily be ignored as misinterpreted. Although Céline tries to get him to dance with her, Amin is content to survey the scene with a passivity that stands in marked contrast to the intrusive detachment of the camera, as it upskirts Ophélie and Camélia (who isn't wearing underwear) and gets just a touch too up close and personal with the other women being ogled and fondled under the influence of half a dozen too many shots. 

The next day, Amin goes to Anastasia's hotel, but she is out and he resists the attempts of her model roommate (Karina Kolokolchykova) to kiss him. Wandering on the beach at sunset, he runs into Charlotte. She has moved out of Céline's grandmother's house and she invites him back to her apartment for supper. He accepts gladly and offers to help make the tomato sauce and, when she says it's best to let it simmer, he says he has all the time in the world. 

With Scott Mackenzie's `San Francisco' playing over the closing credits, Kechiche appears to draw a parallel between the Flower People of 1967 and the young hedonists of 1994. But he leaves it unclear whether he is suggesting that it was easier to have fun in those days or whether millennials are too hung up to let their hair down. Either way, he runs into the old movie brick wall that it's easy to show people having a good time in a bar or on a dance floor, but it's much more difficult to entice the audience into entering into the spirit. As a consequence, the lengthy club and disco sequences are by far the dullest in a film that otherwise captures the rhythms and banalities of daily life with considerable acuity. 

Although it consistently echoes Kechiche's 2007 gem, Couscous, the loudest reverberations come from such Eric Rohmer masterpieces as Claire's Knee (1970), Pauline At the Beach (1983), The Green Ray (1986) and A Summer's Tale (1996). The use of light by Kechiche and cinematographer Marco Graziaplena is certainly Rohmeresque, but so is the rambling dialogue, which reminds us of the nonsense we often talk when trying to make a good impression on someone. Amin's conversations with Ophélie are particularly well observed, although the conversational highlight is the gossipy exchange between Camélia, Hatika and Dalinda (who is played by Kechiche's sister), which becomes all the more amusing and revealing when Ophélie joins them and finds herself being discussed as if she wasn't there.

Naturally, much focus will fall on the need for César-nominated Ophélie Bau to be naked in the opening love-making sequence and for the girls in bathing suits and tight skirts and shorts to be objectified quite so pruriently on the beach and on the dance floor. But there are occasions when the camera is approximating the gaze of the male characters and Kechiche would not be accurately reflecting the way the genders operate under the influence if he merely restricted the dance moves to chaste shuffling around a handbag. It sometimes makes for discomfiting viewing. But, even though he might have opted for some more discreet camera positions, Kechiche is reflecting life as it was lived a quarter of a century ago before social media killed privacy and made everybody more hypocritically censorious. 

In praising Ophélie Bau to the skies, several critics have accused Shaïn Boumedine of making Amin seem voyeuristically creepy. This seems a little harsh on wallflowers and seems to denounce people watching as sinful. He is much less stalkerish than Xavier Lafitte's artist in José Luis Guerin's In the City of Sylvia (2007) and, besides which, he is supposed to be an aspiring film-maker and powers of observation are usually considered a professional prerequisite. For the rest, this is an ensemble miracle, with Alexia Chardard and Lou Luttiau being worthy of a picture of their own, as the tourists whose friendship dissolves in the sea air. However, much of the energy of the performances comes from the exhilarating editing of Nathanaëlle Gerbeaux and Maria Giménez Cavallo, whose contribution (along with that of Lacroix) suggests that the action has not solely been observed by or presented for the male gaze.

Two decades have passed since The New Eve (1999) allowed UK audiences to become acquainted with French director Catherine Corsini, who was making her third feature after Poker (1987) and Lovers (1994). Yet, while subsequent titles like La Répétition (2001), Leaving (2009) and Summertime (2015) were shown here, The Very Merry Widows (2003), Les Ambitieux (2006) and Three Worlds (2012) were not widely distributed. The vagaries of the British distribution system are always somewhat baffling. But, such is the potency and poignancy of Corsini's adaptation of Christine Angot's semi-autobiographical bestseller, An Impossible Love, that is would seem that a retrospective at somewhere like the Ciné Lumière is long overdue. 

As narrator Chantal (Jehnny Beth) takes up the story in the central provincial town of Châteauroux in 1958, Rachel Steiner (Virginie Efira) is a 26 year-old secretary who lives with her mother (Catherine Morlot) and younger sister, Gaby (Iliana Zabeth), and is considered past the ideal age for marriage. However, while lunching in a café with her best friend, Nicole (Coralie Russier), Rachel meets Philippe Arnold (Niels Schneider), a Parisian translator at the nearby US Army base, who sweeps her off her feet at a dance. He introduces her to literature, art cinema and sex. But, while he meets Rachel every day from work and hires cars to take her away for the weekend, Philippe has no intention of marrying the half-Jewish Rachel, even though he professes his love for her. 

On their last day before he returns to Paris, Rachel becomes pregnant in a woodland glade and has to content herself with letters until Philippe agrees to meet her for a holiday during the summer. They nearly drive off a winding coastal road when the bonnet of his rented car flies up, but he doesn't regard the close call as a sign that their destinies are entwined and Rachel gives birth to Chantal (Ambre Hasaj) alone in Châteauroux in February 1959. Indeed, she has to travel to Paris to give a letter to his father (Didier Sandre) because he has relocated to Strasbourg without leaving a forwarding address. Eventually, he agrees to spend some holiday time with her and they sleep together while he gets to know the three year-old Chantal. But he drifts away after his mother's suicide and it's only when Rachel loses her own mother soon after Chantal (Sasha Alessandri-Torrès Garcia) turns six that he pays them another visit. Unfortunately, he has come to break the news that he has married a German doctor's daughter and Rachel orders him to leave. 

Unable to afford repairs to her mother's house, she moves into an apartment on a new estate and promises Chantal that they will be happy. She shows her old photographs of a happy trip to Nice with Philippe and, even though she is disappointed that he has never recognised her as his own, she ensures that her daughter has a good opinion of her father. Seven years pass before she hears from him again, however, by which time Rachel has a new job at a psychiatric hospital and Chantal (Estelle Lescure) has become an intelligent teenager, who is thrilled by a school trip to Venice. When Philippe suggests a meeting in Strasbourg, Rachel agrees and Chantal is overwhelmed by his charm and compliments, as he shows them around his adopted city. 

On the last morning, however, Philippe comes to Chantal's room as she is packing and her expression has changed from adoration to anguish when Rachel comes to collect her. Nothing is said and Philippe recognises Chantal as his child shortly before they move to Reims for Rachel's new job. It's a wrench leaving Gaby and Nicole behind and Rachel is diagnosed with depression after she starts arguing with Chantal, who has come to see her mother as a provinciale after spending cultural weekends away with Philippe. For a while, Rachel perks up after she meets Franck (Gaël Kamilindi), an aspiring photographer from Mauritius. However, he is more interested in the 15 year-old Chantal and they become lovers. Moreover, he informs Rachel that Philippe has been abusing Chantal for years and, while her mother opts against raising the subject, she decides to sever all ties with her father around the time of her 16th birthday. 

He had written to express his disappointment at the estrangement, but respects her wishes, as Chantal (Jehnny Beth) has a daughter of her own with Cédric (Arthur Iqual). Rachel has also married Alain (Simon Bakhouche) and proves indifferent when Chantal breaks the news that Philippe is in hospital with Alzheimer's. She is more concerned for her daughter when she calls with the news that Philippe has died, as she had come to realise how important he had remained for Chantal after she and Alain had bumped into them at the Rodin Museum. 

But, shortly their bereavement, Chantal become irritated when Rachel questions her decision to leave Cédric and five years pass after she abruptly orders her mother to leave in the middle of supper. They reunite in Paris, when Chantal asks why Rachel had never suspected the incestuous abuse she had endured. Rachel regrets being blinded by her own feelings of rejection and is surprised when Chantal suggests that Philippe had treated them both so badly because he was punishing Rachel for being Jewish and lower class. However, she has finally realised that he cannot be allowed to dictate the terms of their relationship and the film fades with mother and daughter vowing to make the most of the time left to them. 

As one of France's most provocative writers and media commentators, Christine Angot is no stranger to the dark themes explored here and in Claire Denis's Let the Sunshine In, which she co-scripted. But, even British viewers unfamiliar with her oeuvre will recognise the plangent pain permeating this intense and often disconcerting saga. Yet, while it makes sense for Corsini and co-writer Laurette Polmanss to have the adult Chantal narrate events (and, thus, reinforce the Angot connection), the linking passages often feel more intrusive than instructive, especially for those unaware of the fact that Jehnny Beth (who acted under the name Camille Berthomier before becoming the singer of the post-punk band, Savages) is consciously mimicking Angot's look, character traits and delivery style.

Moreover, it seems odd to give the often-estranged Chantal such detailed knowledge of her mother's past, as well as such a keen insight into her psyche. Nevertheless, the increasingly impressive Virginie Efira gives a poised performance as the small-town girl whose readiness to accept the defects in both her lover and her child occasionally blinds her to the truth about their personalities and their relationship. Niels Schneider is equally assured as the self-serving intellectual cad, even though he sometimes seems a touch too impassively internalised, while newcomer Estelle Lescure capably switches from being gushingly accepting to spikily capricious, as Chantal learns to deal with her hideous secret. 

Directing efficiently, but more impersonally than usual, Corsini keeps the story moiling across the decades. She is ably assisted by Toma Bacqueni's production design, Virginie Montel's costumes and Jeanne Lapoirie's camerawork, as well as by Grégoire Hetzel's restrained score and Fréderic Baillhaiche's steady editing. Yet, for all her shrewd insights into the changing nature of French attitudes towards gender, class, race and sexuality, Corsini self-deprecatingly allows Angot's voice to ring out loudly and clearly.

Since graduating from the Lodz Film School with one of the most admired shorts in its long history, Malgorzata Szumowska has been steadily positioning herself as Poland's most significant woman director after the peerless Agnieszka Holland. Following her debut feature, Happy Man (2000), with Stranger (2004), in which a woman develops a relationship with her unborn child, Szumowska has contrasted the corporeal and spiritual well-being of her compatriots with the state of a nation that has failed to exploit the benefits of capitalism and democracy after five decades of Communism. She hasn't always succeeded in satirising with subtlety in pictures like 33 Scenes From Life (2008), Elles (2011), In the Name Of (2013) and Body (2015). But Szumowska has consistently proved herself to be a fearless critic of her homeland and she once again exposes its hypocrisy, venality and myopia in her latest offering, Mug. 

In a small town near the Polish border with Germany, a department store attracts extra custom by having a pre-Christmas `underwear stampede' that requires the shoppers to compete for their bargains in a state of undress. Jacek Kalisztan (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz) and manages to get hold of a widescreen television and takes it by ferry to the island farm where he lives with his paternal grandfather (Tadeusz Mikiewicz), widowed mother (Anna Tomaszewska), older brother (Dariusz Chojnacki) and sister Iwona (Agnieszka Podsiadlik), and their respective spouses (Martyna Krzysztofik and Robert Talarczyk). They tease Jacek about leaving to make a fresh start in London, but he is in no hurry to go anywhere, as he has a decent job working on the construction of a gigantic statue of Jesus Christ and is dating Dagmara (Malgorzata Gorol), who likes his long hair and beard, his denim and tattoos, and the deadpan sense of being a rebel outsider that he plays to the hilt as he zooms along empty roads blasting Metallica's `Hardwired' from his car stereo. 

They dance, gallop on horseback and hurl insults on their neighbours from the sanctuary of the woods. But Jacek and Dagmara are trapped in a lakeside dead end and his sister urges him during the Christmas festivities to escape while he can and make a fresh start for himself. Instead, he toils with a bunch of migrants who don't speak Polish on the statue that the parish priest (Roman Gancarczyk) boasts will be bigger than Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro. Over a few drinks, he laughs at the mildly racist jokes cracked by his luggish brother-in-law and enjoys playing fetch with his dog, Gypsy. Moreover, he is overjoyed when he proposes to Dagmara on the bridge spanning the lake and she accepts. 

Shortly afterwards, however, while on some scaffolding inside the base of statue, Jacek falls backwards and is fortunate to survive. He is visited in hospital by his family and the priest, who tells him that God has spared him for an important purpose. But Jacek has undergone Poland's first total facial transplant and nothing is ever going to be the same again. When he first catches sight of his new self in the window of his high-rise room, he dims the light to negate the reflection. However, he puts on a show of bravura at a press conference, even though he can barely speak, and experiments with new hairstyles when looking at himself in the bathroom mirror after arriving home. 

His family can't quite bring themselves to look him in the eye, however, and Dagmara becomes increasingly conspicuous by her absence. The local drunks take him as they find him when trying to cadge money, while the congregation crowds around him for photographs after mass. As the state refuses to pay for the pioneering treatment, the priest organises a special collection and Jacek feels embarrassed as his neighbours look over at him as they make their donations. But Dagmara's mother (Iwona Bielska) orders him to stop pestering her and he is crushed to see her kissing someone through the car window when she returns home late at night. 

Denied compensation because he is deemed capable of working part-time (even though he is almost blind in one eye and can't risk catching an infection), Jacek agrees to promote a skin care cream and Iwona goes to see Dagmara to ask if she still loves her fiancé now that he's a model. But her husband is frustrated by the fact his wife is devoting her time to her brother and the priest is sympathetic during confession when he admits to watching porn. He even excuses him calling Jacek `Mug' and Iwona herself struggles to put on a brave face when she is interviewed for a television news report about Jacek's progress. 

The confessional becomes increasingly busy, as Jacek's mother comes to ask if the priest can perform an exorcism, as she believes her son has been possessed by an evil spirit who looks at her in a menacing and indecent way. Dagmara also shows up to inquire whether it's a sin to stop loving someone and she is curious to know what the priest wants to know details about what she gets up to with her new boyfriend. As for Jacek, he is distressed to see a picture of him beaming with Dagmara in the window of the photography studio and is hurt when he tries to cover her up when she starts dancing topless in the local bar and some of his former friends jostle him to prevent him from interfering. 

The parishioners stop donating towards Jacek's medication. So, when a cleric and a nun come to perform the exorcism, he toys with them by pretending to be under the influence of a raging demon. Yet, while he mocks them when they try to film the ritual (as he had earlier bared his bottom to the compensation panel), he attends the first communion picnic and imagines Dagmara abandoning her new beau to return to him because (in her eyes) he looks the same as before. However, the truth is very different and Jacek gets so drunk that he has to be helped home by his brother and Iwona's husband. 

Meanwhile, the archbishop has come to inspect the statue and is furious that it is facing the wrong way. He informs the priest that he will turn a blind eye to his bungling and his use of Muslim labour if he puts things right. But he is in no mood to listen when his underling tries to explain that the Roma aren't followers of Islam. While a solution is being found, Jacek's beloved grandfather dies. As Gypsy curiously disappears from the story, he alone has accepted Jacek for who he is and he is so disgusted by the graveside fight that breaks out between his sibling and his brother-in-law over the ownership of the old man's field that he takes the bus one morning and leaves. As he looks out of the window, he sees the statue with the crowned head turned to look over its right shoulder, as though he can no longer bear to look at those who have driven the sadder and wiser Jacek away. 

A closing caption reveals that Christ the King monument at Swiebodzin took five years to build at a cost of $1.5 million, which was raised by the 21,000 residents of the town. Standing at 108ft, it's the biggest structure of its kind in the world and Szumowska wittily uses it to bring about the anti-miracle at the heart of her adult fairytale. However, she pushes her luck slightly by having Jacek nicknamed `Jesus' by the local winos because of his long hair and beard. Moreover, the sequence in which the priest presses Dagmara to give him some juicy details about her sex life feels like a cheap dig after having already laid into the Roman Catholic Church in In the Name Of. 

Indeed, much of the social satire feels a little forced, as the country folk betray their insular prejudices and backward hypocrisy. One joke even manages to be racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic. But Szumowska and co-scenarist Michal Englert (who also doubles as cinematographer) keep an undercurrent of bleak humour bubbling throughout proceedings that often move as slowly as the ferry crossing the placid lake. They also achieve a mischievous sense of storybook otherworldliness by shooting with a shallow field of focus and blurring the frame periphery in a manner that recalls Feng Xiaogang's use of an oval mask in I Am Not Madame Bovary (2016). 

Of course, Szumowska is similarly seeking to expose the narrow horizons and blinkered perspectives of the townsfolk, who appear no more sophisticated than the villagers in a Frankenstein movie. But she somewhat stymies herself by reducing them to mere ciphers rather. Even Jacek's family members are sketchily drawn, with only Iwona being afforded a name. She is played with a dour sense dutiful pity by Agnieszka Podsiadlik, which contrasts with Malgorzata Gorol's display of selfish hedonism as the stupified Dagmara. Robert Talarczyk and Roman Gancarczyk are drolly effective as the blunt brother-in-law and the jobsworthy priest. But the standout performance comes from the director's husband, Mateusz Kosciukiewicz, who is touchingly vulnerable beneath Waldemar Pokromski's outstanding make-up, which almost makes it seem as though another actor has been cast as the post-accident Jacek.