Sydney Film Festival 2010 - The Refuge

The 2010 Sydney Film Festival is underway and so far it’s been nothing short of excellent. Great reviews and a lot of pleased Sydneysiders. The 2010 selection is varied and interesting, and after its first week, tickets are selling fast.
I was fortunate enough to see three films over the weekend, which I slotted into my busy schedule. It’s a difficult time of the year for students as the festival falls right on the exam period, and assignment handing in time. One might wonder at the lack of youthful faces dotting the crowd, but amongst my creative set, the timing is just too close to the wire for us last-minute types.


The Refuge
It’s always fun to go and see a French film. It makes you feel like your life is sane and normal, even if the rest of the time it seems crazy and like you could get seven screenplays worth of juice if you just gave a little squeeze.
Never have I experienced more tangled relationships or strange vignettes of human existence than the last few French films I have seen. The Refuge is no exception.
Directed by FRANÇOIS OZON the film stars French babe Isabelle Carré as Mousse, a heroin addict whom we are introduced to at the start of the film stretched out on a sweaty bed in a French apartment. The opening scene also stars Melvil Poupaud as Louis, the spunkiest, buffest heroin addict I have ever seen (they just don’t make junkies like that here in Sydney).

I’ll admit that I could have easily walked out of the cinema after the first ten minutes. I’m not someone who is great with needles, and the scene where Louis and Mousse try and find a vein to try and shoot up was almost more than I could take. Particularly shudder inducing is when Louis injects himself in the neck for lack of another option. Cringeworthy. Think Trainspotting and Requiem for a dream, with the hotness of Heath and Abbie from Candy, plus French accents and you’ve pretty much seen the first ten minutes of Ozon’s film.

Well, as we have learned from the films above, things cannot go on being sexy and heroin-y forever. Louis overdoses, (which is a shame because I would have appreciated seeing more of Poupaud’s naked pecs glistening onscreen) and the inevitable fallout ensues.

Mousse wakes up in a hospital bed and is informed Louis is dead, and also that she is pregnant. After being told that the family would prefer it if Mousse were to have an abortion, the tragically beautiful woman walks out of the mansion and into the unknown.

In typical art-house fashion, we then seem to skip forward an unidentifiable amount of time. Paul, Louis super hot brother played by Louis-Ronan Choisy arrives in a small, gorgeous seaside town and takes a taxi to a beautiful little cottage. Mousse opens the door. She is heavily pregnant.

What follows is a story of two people getting to know each other. Mousse still grieves, but the presence of Paul helps to ease the pain. We learn a lot about Mousse and Paul, and it’s not what you would expect at all. It is as though they are both seeking a refuge of some kind, but neither of them really seems to find it. There are plenty of sequences with Mousse and Paul being transported, by car, by train, walking through the town. Both of them are always on the move from something.
I love the French way of splicing pieces of life together, so I would have to rate this a “Go-See-for-the babes-and-the-countryside-and-oh-yeah-its-got-a-pretty-good-plotline-too.”

Paris