Old is new

If it’s not the adultery, it’s the lemmings.

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And if it’s not the lemmings crawling through the drainpipes in the placid Southern suburb of Bel Air, then it’s the lousy marriages, or the aggravating siblings.

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Despair and disorientation come in many forms in the French cinema.

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If you were going to take the measure of French society from the four films in French Film Yesterday & Today at the High Museum April 13-April 21, you might find that very little has changed from the days of Jean Renoir’s controversial 1939 classic, The Rules of the Game.

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The upper echelons of French society apparently are still plagued by marital troubles and a mask of false appearances that can hide some very dirty doings indeed. In Dominik Moll’s fascinatingly surreal Hitchcock-by-way-of-Michael-Haneke thriller Lemming (2005), the bourgeoisie is attacked from within, and overtaken by dark, psychological forces. Alain (Laurent Lucas) and Bénédicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) Getty are happy young marrieds who have recently relocated to the town of Bel Air for Alain’s job as a robotics engineer.

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But there are mysterious forces afoot that threaten to tear his new home apart in the form of a very spooky woman, Alice Pollock (Charlotte Rampling). After a disastrous dinner party with Alan’s boss, Richard Pollock (André Dussollier), and his disturbed wife, Alice, the Gettys find their own happy marriage literally overtaken by the ruinous, black force of the Pollocks’ doomed union. There are early signs of trouble ahead. One morning Bénédicte finds a tiny Scandinavian lemming in her sink drain. And so, with the horrifying logic of a nightmare, the Gettys have their own lives and minds invaded by similarly inexplicable, burrowing, suicidal forces.

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Whether dismantled by lemmings, infidelity or ambition, marriages are fragile things in French Film Yesterday & Today. One of French cinema’s most visible and nuanced performers, Isabelle Huppert, stars in Claude Chabrol’s Comedy of Power as Jeanne Charmant-Killman, a workaholic magistrate whose own sense of power clashes with the cultural firmament of some very rich, very powerful French businessmen. With great zeal, Jeanne approaches the task of prosecuting the executives (based on the Elf Aquitaine oil company corruption scandal of the 1990s) who have been filling their personal bank accounts via shady business deals. As Jeanne’s investigation escalates, her husband becomes troubled by her single-minded, ball-busting zeal that perhaps leaves her husband feeling more than a little emasculated.

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Alternating between playfulness and pain, 2004’s Me and My Sister is a vastly entertaining family drama starring Huppert as another brittle, well-off Parisian. Martine has a beautiful apartment and a well-orchestrated life filled with gallery openings, lunch dates and luxury. But her well-oiled equilibrium is thrown off balance with the arrival of her chirpy, animated younger sister Louise (Catherine Frot) from the country. A beautician who Martine has clearly written off as a provincial, unsophisticated frump, as the film progresses, Louise increasingly defies Martine’s expectations.

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An incisive look into the reminders our family members can often be of our unhappier, unformed selves, Me and My Sister is ultimately a transcendentally sweet portrait of how Martine’s sister prompts her to come to terms with the disappointments in her own life.

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In cinema, as in life, there is much to be learned from going backward.

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The April 21 closing film of French Film Yesterday & Today acknowledges one of the masters of the psychologically rich portraits of French upper-middle-class life. Renoir’s The Rules of the Game is the terra firma on which so much of the French cinema’s domestic drama rests. Renoir’s lyrical drama follows the upstairs/downstairs sexual hijinks of wealthy philanderers and their comparably bawdy staff at a country chateau on the eve of World War II.

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When it premiered, The Rules of the Game was a controversial enough portrait of social corruption to inspire one man to try to burn down the theater. It undoubtedly was an influence on Robert Altman’s Gosford Park.

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The film remains shockingly modern. Like more contemporary French cinema, Renoir dealt with how easily marital bonds and social decorum are discarded when it suits individual whims.

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And so, some things never change.