BEFORE: As we get closer to Father's Day, the linking has provided me with several films about fathers - "Annette" was one, so was "White Noise", and now this one. Why have just one Father-themed film when I can knock off a whole bunch of them? Really, there are so many films with fathers in them, there may be five or even ten between now and June 18 - I guess maybe I'll mark them along the way and then total them up when we get to the holiday. Oh, yeah, last week there was "Eighth Grade" and "The Land of Steady Habits", those had fathers in them too. And if you count "News of the World", where Tom Hanks sort of acted as an adoptive father, I had five films in a row about fathers and I didn't even plan that. Really, I'm a much better programmer than I realized. But I have three very specific father-themed films picked out for that week in June, don't worry, we're gonna get there.
Matt Damon carries over from "The Last Duel" to play another father character today. I was a day behind, but I'm going to catch up today by watching a film in the afternoon, and another film at night. Really, the only way for me to catch up when I'm behind is to watch 3 movies in a 24-hour period - good thing today's my day off and I can do that.
THE PLOT: A father travels from Oklahoma to France to help his estranged daughter, who is in prison for a murder she claims she didn't commit.
AFTER: This is another film from 2021 that played at the AMC 7-screen theater during the three months I worked there. I must have stood in the back and watched a couple of scenes, but they didn't make much sense until today, when I was able to finally watch the whole film. My friend Victoria came to the theater to see "Stillwater", visiting me during my time in exile. I kind of miss that job, but then I remember how exhausting it was to sweep up those theaters again and again, cleaning up all the empty popcorn buckets and nacho trays, sometimes cleaning all 7 theaters three times during a shift, and then humping all the garbage bags into barrels and wheeling them down to the curb. There were probably a bunch of rats on that Manhattan city block who developed a taste for popcorn, I hope they enjoyed their high-fiber diet. No, I guess I really DON'T miss that job after all - I sympathize with the porters at the theater where I work now, it's a tough job and right after you clean up another crowd just comes in and messes the place up again. It's tough work, but at least it's steady work.
Oh, yeah, the movie. There didn't seem to be much to the movie for at least the first hour, it's just a father from Oklahoma who flies to France to visit his daughter, who's been in prison for 5 years for murder, and she's still got four years to go. But this time Bill decides to hang around in Marseille and try to track down the guy that his daughter says murdered her girlfriend. And this is the "lover" form of the word "girlfriend", not the "casual friend" form. (Why we use the same word for both is beyond me, it can be very confusing. We got personal pronouns changed, why can't we have a different word for "girlfriend" when the girls aren't sleeping together?)
This is loosely based on the Amanda Knox story, although I don't think Knox was the lover of the roommate she was accused of murdering, and also this film is set in France, not Italy, and also Amanda Knox didn't have a father who played amateur detective to try to prove her innocence - so really, this story doesn't play out like the Knox case at all, and if it did, then the filmmakers probably would have faced a lawsuit. So the names and everything else was changed, but still in the end it's probably "inspired" by that case - and Knox was eventually acquitted of murder and released, but it took four years.
After five years, Bill Baker's daughter Allison hasn't given up on proving her innocence, but her French attorney has. Bill delivers a message from his daughter to her lawyer, but the letter is in French, so later he has the French woman staying next door at his hotel translate it for him. The letter says that Allison believes a man named Akim killed her roommate, so next step, Bill meets with the police, gets nowhere, then tries a detective who wants to charge him 12,000 euros to track down Akim, if he even exists. Well, Bill doesn't HAVE 12,000 euros, so he gets a job with a French construction crew and keeps enlisting the help of that woman from the hotel, Virginie.
As time goes by, Bill and Virginie get closer, he rents a room in her apartment and becomes sort of a surrogate father to Virginie's daughter, Maya. They work on finding photos from social media to try and identify Akim, and when Bill brings the photos with him when he visits his daughter in prison, she's able to point him out. Bill stakes out the neighborhood where they think he lives, but his inquiries draw the attention of a street gang and he gets beaten up - BUT he spots Akim being driven away by the gang, so he succeeds but also fails.
More time passes, and Allison becomes eligible for parole, but by this time she also wants nothing to do with her father, because he messed up and couldn't catch Akim, or even get any of his hair or something to prove that he's a DNA match for evidence found at the murder scene. Bill spends Allison's day of parole (1 day per year?) with her, but after she returns to prison, she tries to hang herself. Months later, while taking Maya to a soccer game, Bill spots Akim in the crowd, and that's where I stop relating the story, because this is also where things start to finally happen, and the story gets pretty good, for a while. The big question then becomes, how far will a father go to prove his daughter's innocence? And really, it's a variation on the questions from recently watched films like "No Escape", "The Pale Blue Eye" and "News of the World". What will a father do to protect his daughter or adopted daughter, would he fight or even kill for her?
Sure, it's an interesting question, I just wish here that it didn't take the better part of two hours to freakin' get to the point where that question comes up. There's at LEAST an hour of down time that could have been cut right out of the middle of this film - should it have been 2 hours and 20 minutes long? Hell, no, the amount of plot points here probably could have been squeezed down to an hour and 45 minutes, or even less. Sure, some really intriguing stuff happens near the end, but did it have to take so long to GET there? No, it did not.
This is also the second film this week to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival - remember, this year's edition is going on RIGHT NOW, so it's another bit of coincidence. "Stillwater" and "Annette" both had their first screenings at Cannes in 2021, while "The Last Duel" and "White Noise" both premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, in 2021 and 2022. This really isn't that shocking, because I know both festival require international premieres - I happen to know quite a bit about film festival regulations, it's kind of my thing. I'm starting to enter my boss's new animated feature into festivals, and we missed the deadlines for Cannes and Venice, so the film's going to premiere at the Annecy Animation Festival in France in June, that's the best we could hope for, given that the film is going to be (mostly) completed at the end of May. Then the next festival to enter was Toronto International Film Festival (which requires a North American premiere) and Telluride (same). If it doesn't get into either of those, the smart move would be to wait for Sundance in January, but we'll miss too many fall festivals if we do that, so it looks like Sundance won't be possible - it's impossible to get a film into Sundance now, anyway, unless you already have a deal with a distributor that can get it a slot. So I don't know WHERE the U.S. premiere will be if we don't get accepted into either of the "Big T" festivals, but we'll see.
Also starring Abigail Breslin (last seen in "Zombieland: Double Tap"), Camille Cottin (last seen in "House of Gucci"), Lilou Siauvaud, Deanna Dunagan, Idir Azougli, Anne Le Ny, Moussa Maaskri (last seen in "The Family"), Isabelle Tanakil, Naidra Ayadi, Pierre Piacentino, Jean-March Michelangeli, William Nadylam (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Nassiriat Mohamed, Mahia Zrouki, Bastien d'Asnieres, Grégory Di Meglio, Michel Bompoil.
RATING: 6 out of 10 painted fingernails
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