The Bottom Line: A poignant real-life tale of one couple's entente cordiale Opens: Wednesday, Mar. 25th (in France) Director: Richard Copans
Producer-director Richard Copans tells the story of his Franco-American origins
Between Jerry Lewis, Maurice Chevalier, Bill O’Reilly and freedom fries, the United States and France have carried on a love-hate relationship that’s lasted for over two centuries now. One particularly inspiring case of the former is examined with beaucoup affection in A Love Story (Un Amour), producer-director Richard Copans’ documentary account of how his American father and French mother came together at a time when the world was coming apart, holding on through thick and thin as war engulfed Europe and they found themselves separated by an ocean.
Composed of archive photos, letters, sound recordings and present-day interviews, with dueling voiceovers providing each character’s point of view, this non-fictional narrative offers up a moving and historically apt follow-up to Copans’ 2003 film, Racines, which examined the filmmaker’s roots in rural France and Eastern Europe. But its veritable tale of Franco-American passion makes it a stand-alone work that could find takers in fests and select art houses following a late March release in Gaul.
Copans is more known at home as a producer than as a director, heading up the Paris-based company Les Films d’ici, whose doc-heavy catalogue includes works by Robert Kramer, Nicholas Philibert, Claire Simon and Luc Moullet. He first got behind the camera for the feature-length Racines, and is picking up the plot a decade later with a script – co-written with novelist-actress Marie Nimier – that jumps between the 1930s-40s and the present to faithfully recreate his parents’ story.
His father, Simon “Sim” Copans, first came to Paris as an exchange student from Brown, studying at the Sorbonne and living nearby on the rue Soufflot, where he witnessed the funeral of the assassinated president Paul Doumer in 1931. Eight years later, Simon was back in France on a group visit to Chartres Cathedral when he crossed paths with Lucienne, a young woman from the eastern city of Soissons.
The two soon hit it off with their shared love of literature and left-wing politics, both of them ardent Republican supporters during the Spanish Civil War. Simon, who was a member of the Youth Communist League along with activists like Harry Foner – shown in the film singing his witty ballad “Love in the YCL” – wanted to enlist, but instead he and Lucienne became godparents to children orphaned by the conflict.
When Germany invaded Poland, Simon convinced his girlfriend to marry on the fly, allowing her to flee with him to the U.S. But there was one hitch: not only was he Jewish and she Catholic, but Lucienne was fervently opposed to the idea of marriage, which she saw as an archaic institution belonging to the generation of her parents.
Simon nonetheless pleaded until Lucienne gave in, and after a shotgun wedding in Paris they moved to Manhattan, where the groom’s family set up a more traditional ceremony. These sequences allow for some amusing anecdotes about what it was like for a French country girl to find herself among a bunch of Yiddish-speaking New Yawkers, with Rabbi Marcia Rappaport commenting on how traditional Jewish customs have evolved over the last century, granting more autonomy to women.
The lovebirds spent nearly two years apart when Simon was drafted into an army propaganda squad, driving around Normandy to give news about Allied victories and playing American jazz records for the recently liberated population. The letters he wrote to Lucienne at that time form the backbone of A Love Story’s narrative, while his wife’s earnest replies are read aloud by Gallic actress Dominique Blanc. Other texts are recited by contemporary characters whom Copans encounters as he retraces his parents’ long journey, the future and the present blending into a single whole.
Even if the film is more of a personal exercise than an anthropological one, the director manages to frame his origin story within the greater context of world history, revealing how individual trajectories are shaped by events beyond anyone’s control. At best one can try to cope with the bad times, which is what Copans’ parents did until they were reunited and eventually settled in Paris. There, Simon would continue broadcasting jazz on French public radio, and his American-accented voice would spark other memories – including that of writer Georges Perec, who immortalized the shows of “Sim” Copans in his famous text, Je me souviens. The affair continues.
Production company: Les Films d’ici Director: Richard Copans Screenwriters: Marie Nimier, Richard Copans Producers: Serge Lalou, Richard Copans Executive producer: Anne Cohen-Solal Director of photography: Richard Copans Editor: Sylvain Copans Composers: Michel Portal, Vincent Pelrani International sales: Les Films d’ici
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A conceptually sophisticated, emotionally manipulative drama about America's teen bullying epidemic.
The causes and consequences of teen bullying get a potent if not entirely persuasive airing in “A Girl Like Her,” a mix of found-footage thriller, mock-doc realism and public service announcement that rings true almost as often as it rings false. There is much to admire in writer-director Amy S. Weber’s well-acted, well-meaning cautionary tale about a high-school student who attempts suicide after being relentlessly targeted by a verbally abusive classmate. Yet the film’s agenda-driven approach, while sure to strike topical chords and generate exposure in American high schools far and wide, has the inevitable effect of compromising the drama, which seems less and less convincing the more blatantly it strives for authenticity.
Weber’s film has a tough opening scene: Jessica Burns (Lexi Ainsworth), a sophomore at South Brookdale High School, opens her parents’ medicine cabinet, downs a bottle of pills and falls unconscious. All this is shot from Jessica’s p.o.v.: She’s wearing a pin concealing a tiny camera, which we later learn was given to her six months earlier by her friend Brian (Jimmy Bennett), for reasons that will be revealed shortly. As the girl lingers in a coma, watched over by her heartbroken parents (Stephanie Cotton, Mark Boyd), a documentary filmmaker, Amy (Weber herself), starts filming in and around the corridors of South Brookdale High, determined to capture a definitive snapshot of the average public-school experience. It’s not long before Amy has begun tracking the story of Jessica’s suicide attempt, the motive for which she soon traces to Avery Keller (Hunter King), one of the most popular girls in school — and, as we later observe in Jessica’s secretly recorded footage, the sort of mean girl who would give even Regina George pause.
In short, every moment of “A Girl Like Her” is meant to be perceived as “real,” captured by cameras that are explicitly accounted for in the story — whether it’s Jessica’s pin, Avery’s own video diaries or the more heavy-duty equipment wielded by Amy’s crew. It’s a shrewd enough conceit, nicely reflecting the obsession with self-depiction and technology that afflicts the average modern teenager (and quite a few adults as well), while also heightening the verisimilitude of what we’re watching. Working with d.p. Samuel Brownfield and editor Todd Zelin, Weber capably simulates the look and texture of a documentary, observing with fly-on-the-wall detachment as students hang out in the hallways, capturing the heated discussions at an emergency PTA meeting, and using school administrators and teachers as calm, rational talking heads.
At a certain point, however, Weber pushes her conceptual strategy well past the point of plausibility. If what we’re seeing here is supposed to pass for an actual documentary, the result feels clumsy enough at times as to suggest a textbook demonstration of how not to make one — starting with the crew’s habit of eavesdropping on students in their most private moments (the sound recording in these scenes is improbably first-rate). Elsewhere, there are instructive reminders that throwing a verite frame around a scene doesn’t automatically render it believable, just as the act of filming a parent’s grief doesn’t become less exploitative simply because the camera is shaking along with them.
What makes “A Girl Like Her” intriguing in spite of these flaws is the fact that Weber’s interest clearly resides more with the villain than with the victim in this scenario, which may account for why Jessica, though well played by Ainsworth, never becomes more than an object of sympathy. Avery, by contrast, emerges as the true protagonist of a story that fully intends not only to expose her, but also to redeem her — to hold her up as a living, breathing embodiment of the old saying that “Hurt people hurt people.” Heading up a strong cast, the 21-year-old King (an Emmy winner for her work on “The Young and the Restless”) etches a fully rounded characterization here, doing full justice to Avery’s viciousness, but also to the defensiveness and vulnerability lurking beneath her stereotypical blonde-queen-bee surface.
Humanizing a monster — and allowing her to tell her story in her own words — is an eminently worthy aim in a movie that is nothing if not eminently worthy. But at a certain point, Weber’s meddlesome alter ego doesn’t seem to be documenting the events in question so much as auditioning for the job of guidance counselor, all but enfolding her characters in a group hug. The teary-eyed, over-scored montage that closes “A Girl Like Her” would feel manipulative in the extreme even if it didn’t build to a final shot of altogether remarkable dishonesty: For a movie that’s trying to teach the teenagers of America that their actions can have tragic repercussions, there’s something borderline irresponsible about the idea that a simple show of remorse is all it takes to make everything OK.
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