Parky At the Pictures (30/5/2025)

(Reviews of Along Came Love; and Bogancloch)

ALONG CAME LOVE.

Born into a Breton family living in Ivory Coast, Katell Quillévéré earned a César nomination for her first short, À bras le corps (2005). She has since impressed with her first three features, Love Like Poison (2010), Suzanne (2013), and Heal the Living (2016). Her fourth outing, Along Came Love, has also secured a UK release. Yet despite being based on a discovery the director made about her own grandmother, this Sirkian saga has not been as warmly received as its predecessors.

Following newsreel footage of French women greeting American GIs at the Liberation, we see collaborators having their heads shaved for consorting with Nazi soldiers. Still in monochrome, Madeleine Villedieu (Anaïs Demoustier) runs and hides in a barn after her humiliation and scrubs at her pregnant belly to remove the swastika that has been daubed on it.

We cut to colour, as five year-old Daniel (Hélios Karyo) runs towards the sea at a resort in Brittany. Madeleine chases after him and is embarrassed when the boy is plucked from the tideline by a stranger. He turns out to be François Delambre (Vincent Lacoste), who was invalided out of the war with polio and is now studying archaeology at the Sorbonne. When she spots him at the restaurant where she works, Madeleine insists on serving François and meets him after her shift to watch the moonlight on the water.

Dutiful, but brusque towards her son, Madeleine pays him little attention as he paddles in a pool. She perks up when François arrives. But he's peevish because his family have arrived to compete in a yacht race (as they own a thriving factory) and he wants to avoid them. When he fails to show at dinner or on the beach next day, Madeleine lights a candle in the church and snaps at Daniel for revealing his `wish' that she would one day come to love him. Indeed, she is almost resentful at the woman who returns him from the sea, as she almost hopes that an accident befalls the boy.

After a few days, François returns and Madeleine is cautiously pleased to see him. He says he has been back to Paris to end a love affair and she tells him the truth about her German soldier. They walk all night and kiss as the sun comes up, marrying shortly afterwards. Daniel runs away from the civic ceremony and Madeleine chides him for trying to spoil her happiness. However, her wedding night is ruined when François rushes out of the bedroom to throw up and she feels nonplused.

They move into a new apartment, but Daniel still kisses the photo of his father that Madeleine keeps in her handbag. As Madeleine has always wanted to work in a dance hall, François finds them jobs near an American base in Châteauroux. Before they can leave, however, he is tracked down by Nicolas (Eugène Marcuse), who makes a scene outside the house in the middle of the night. Daniel wets himself and Madeleine realises she has rushed into matrimony François's insistence that Nicolas is a jealous student who flipped after his thesis was rejected rings hollow.

Feeling she has no right to happiness, Madeleine is crushed by the news that her father has died. She visits his grave and is grateful when François not only tells Daniel that his father's body was never found, but also cleans the car when it is covered in manure while they are in the graveyard. They return home to discover that Nicolas has torched the apartment. Madeleine overhears François telling the police about his relationship with Nicolas. But she refuses to think the worst and calls the dance hall to secure when both work and a fresh start. He clutches her hands and they kiss and toast the future in red wine.

Young Daniel gazes from the car window at all the GIs and the neon signs of the bars. Five years later, he (Josse Capet) is used to the rowdy behaviour and leaving for school just as Madeleine and François crash into bed. She meets Black soldier, Jimmy Wade (Morgan Bailey), when he helps her carry a case of absinthe and he makes a good impression on François by showing him how to mix a whisky cocktail. They realise he is racially abused by his comrades in arms and take a shine to him, even though Daniel reserves his judgement while standing over them dozing on the bank after swimming in the river. Instead, he steals the picture of his father from Madeleine's bag, cuts it out and places it in a black coffin he hides under his bed. When she finds it, his mother accuses him of being warped.

Although he recognises the mutual attraction between Madeleine and Jimmy, François doesn't feel threatened by it. Indeed, they make love for the first time fantasising about him and, when he is forced to hide in the room above the bar when the military police conduct a search, Jimmy makes out with Madeleine on the bed. She urges François to join them and he kisses Jimmy, as he has sex with his wife. But the American jumps up in indignation when François tries to enter him and he is left sobbing on the floor, while Madeleine finally cottons on to her spouse's secret.

After Daniel is suspended from school for fighting another boy, Madeleine asks François about the men he's slept with. She worries he can never love her like them, but he insists he can't live without her and they make love with genuine passion. The result is a daughter, Jeanne (Margot Ringard Oldra), and she dotes on the now 18 year-old Daniel (Paul Beaurepaire), who creates footprints on the carpet at Christmas so she keeps believing in Santa. He confides his first crush in François, who can now afford a luxurious apartment now he is teaching at the Sorbonne. Not needing to work bores Madeleine, however, and she needles her husband about the students he is sleeping with before going to sleep on the sofa.

In fact, he does have regular assignations in a Seine washroom with a student who reports him to his father when he breaks things off. Madeleine is angry with police when they search François's study and use art books as evidence of perversion. She tells him she loves him, as he is cuffed and led away and he begs her to say nothing to the children. Realising he is ruined and that his family will suffer, François throws himself under a truck after watching Madeleine take Daniel and Jeanne to school. She hears a scream and knows instinctively what has happened.

She reads a Stefan Zweig poem at the graveside and takes the kids to the resort where she had met François. Daniel is furious at old memories being re-awoken and throttles his mother on the beach until she reveals his father's name. As soon as she speaks it, he strides away across the beach. Back in Paris, Jeanne vows to read every book in her father's study.

Time passes and Madeleine gets her own bar and Black chanteuse sings the same song that Jimmy had crooned all those years ago. She has also lost her hair again, as she is undergoing chemotherapy. Daniel comes home on army leave before her operation and asks for a letter of confirmation so he can register his paternity with the West German authorities. As the film ends, he leans out of the train window to wave to his mother, with no guarantees with his profession and her condition that they will ever meet again.

Watchable without being particularly innovative or profound, this often feels like the kind of `woman's picture' that was made in 1950s Hollywood, as well as Tradition of Quality-era France. Quillévéré has spoken of her admiration for Douglas Sirk and Maurice Pialat and she has clearly sought to mix gloss and grit in a melodrama that takes us from the immediate postwar era to the cusp of the Swinging Sixties. But the interaction of the characters matters more than the socio-cultural context, as Madeleine and François find a way to muddle through in a country that has nothing but contempt for their kind.

As one might expect, Anaïs Demoustier

superbly turns a stock character into an individual worthy of the audience's compassion and concern. But indifferent writing means that Vincent Lacoste is no more convincing as a gay man than he was in Christophe Honoré's Sorry Angel (2018). Whether wearing a cumbersome waitress's uniform or a chic red cocktail dress, Demoustier conveys the hard work needed to make a living and build a life. Yet, while her hairstyles change and cigarettes and alcohol come to symbolise the hard veneer that she has had to develop, Madeleine seems disconnected from the society evolving around her. She's rarely seen outside her home or her workplace, at a time when the horizons of other Frenchwomen were widening. Moreover, Quillévéré and co-scenarist Gilles Taurand seem to sideline her relationship with Daniel, which rather calcifies after her marriage to François.

His battle with his sexuality also gets parked after the humiliation with Jimmy and only re-emerges when the narrative needs a crisis to kickstart the last act. Given how meticulously Quillévéré has scripted her earlier work, this feels as surprising as the cocooning of the family from the vicissitudes of the Fourth Republic. Indeed, the sense of place and time is flimsily established, in spite of the excellence of Florian Sanson's interiors and Rachèle Raoult's costumes, with Tom Harari's visuals having a generic polish that never quite captures the lustre of the Technicolor that made Sirk's Ross Hunter melodramas so immediate, intimate, and involving by embracing the superficiality and artificiality of the scenario rather than hoping that no one else has noticed it. Sirk also spared us any grossly misjudged ménage-à-trois sequences. Thank heavens for the Production Code. Now, who would ever have expected anyone to write that!

BOGANCLOCH.

Artist Ben Rivers has made 40 films. The majority have been shorts, although he has produced such documentary features as A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013), The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015), and Krabi, 2562 (2019), the first and last of which were respectively co-directed by Ben Russell and Anocha Suwichakornpong. His best-known work, however, has been created in collaboration with Jake Williams, an ex-sailor who now lives off the grid in Clashindarroch Forest, which lies in the shadow of the Cairngorms in Aberdeenshire. Having introduced the Scottish recluse in the 2006 short This Is My Land, Rivers offered a longer profile in the acclaimed Two Years At Sea (2011). Now, he completes the triptych with Bogancloch, which has been named after the forest abode that Williams shares with a tabby-looking cat.

Having spent the night in his decorated caravan, Jake Williams returns to his secluded farm, pausing en route to retrieve a pheasant for a road kill supper. A cat guzzles greedily from the bucket filled with discarded innards, as Williams stands over a steaming pan on an outdoor stove, with the sound of the breeze rustling the trees.

Next day, he fires up the generator and digs out a collection of cassettes. As they have a world music vibe, it's likely that he picked these up on his travels. But there's no recognition in his eyes, as he listens impassively, treating himself to a short bent-kneed sway to some Latin rhythms. Removing his beanie, to reveal a receding line to his mane of white hair and lengthy beard, Williams dozes to a slower number, as the static camera observes discreetly.

Striding out in the morning mist, Williams picks his way through the woodland, accompanied by the sounds of birds tweeting and twigs cracking under foot. Pausing for a cuppa and a snack, he sings Irving Berlin's `Blue Skies' while resting against a large tree trunk. As rushing water echoes through the quietude, a gaggle of walkers passes close to the slumbering Williams, who resembles the effigy of Edward III atop his tomb in Westminster Abbey.

Williams uses a pub parasol to construct a Solar System model to give a lesson to the children at the local school. A Sun and a Moon dangle on string, as he turns the dome to show their relative positions at different times of day, according to the seasons. Straining to look up without being particularly inspired, the kids listen politely, but bolt the moment the lesson bell rings. Feeling nonplussed, Williams sighs to himself and packs up his car to head home.

Smoke billows out of a side door, as Williams opens it. No source is given, but he is also compelled to open the skylight in the snaggled roof to let wispy billows slither out. As he does odd jobs, Seamus Heaney's `The Underground' emanates from the record player and sunlight insinuates itself through the foliage, while bees murmur busily. It's a grand spot and a nice life, but the aura of compositional premeditation is becoming too insistent to ignore, despite the intrigue that is established by the crinkled colour photos from Williams's itinerant past that follow each sectional fade to black.

Jazz plays, as Williams repairs his outdoor bathtub and stacks wood for the winter. A local choir comes to sing `The Flyting o' Life and Death', a ballad about Life and Death claiming sovereignty over the world and Williams joins in the final stanza, as the bonfire lights up faces in the pitch darkness. The image seems to flare out and, when we return, colour momentarily predominates. But monochrome order is soon restored, as Williams replaces panes in his greenhouse.

Snow falls and Williams zips between the trees on skis. He clears the door covering the bath and strips off to luxuriate in the hot water, as he croons `Singin' in the Bathtub' from John G. Adolphi's Warner talkie revue, Show of Shows (1929), which lampooned `Singin' in the Rain', which had been the hit of Charles Reisner's MGM offering, The Hollywood Revue of 1929. It's a nice moment, as Williams peels off several layers to sit in the winter chill without a single shiver.

He vigorously washes the hair that we have just seen in an old picture was once reddish brown. Stream hovers above the water, as Williams reclines and a drone takes the camera up into the distance, with just the sound of the drips and a miaowing cat connecting us to the scene that is already a distant memory. A twinkle of stars presages the credits, leaving us to hope that the planned colour confluence of Rivers and Williams will take place at some point in the future.

With Williams resembling Rick Jones in a particularly intense excursion through Play School's arch window, there can be no doubting the artistry involved in the framing and filming of the hand-cranked 16mm images, with the recurring flare-outs bring to mind Mark Jenkin's Bait (2019). Similarly, natural sound is innovatively used to reinforce the idyllic nature of the setting. But, even though Rivers records Williams going about his everyday chores over five visits during the course of a single year, several scenes feel pre-discussed, as the activity is a little too quirky and the camera placement is just a tad too perfect.

This is fine. After all, Rivers is making a piece of art rather than Direct Cinema. But the deliberation draws attention to such unmentioned factors as the newness of Williams's car and the fact that it requires petrol to run. He may forage to fill his self-sufficient larder, but he is also a consumer (albeit in a limited way) and it would be instructive to learn about his source(s) of income. Similarly, it would be interesting to know the extent to which he interacts with the locals, as no school is simply going to invite the hermit from the woods to talk to the kids without him being (in some way) part of the community.

Such reflections are clearly prompted by the creative decisions that Rivers takes and this makes Bogancloch a cannily interactive enterprise. It's also knowingly amusing, with Williams (who is entirely content in his solitude) being very much in on the joke. But this is his life and it's to Rivers's credit that he never patronises or oversteps the mark. Williams is wholly at home amidst his photogenic bric-a-brac and Rivers always remembers he's a guest. However, he might have coaxed his host into whistling a snatch of `Busy Doing Nothing' from Tay Garnett's 1949 adaptation of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.