Oct 21
International Film Forum: MES PROVINÇIALES
Mes provinciales [A Paris Education] (Jean-Paul Civeyrac, 2018, France, 147 min.)
With this story of a young man from the provinces moving to Paris to find his fortune, Jean-Paul Civeyrac provides a fresh spin on a narrative tradition reaching back at least as far as Balzac and Flaubert. In this case, the young man is Étienne Tinan, a passionate aspiring filmmaker who enrolls at university to study film, immersing himself in the artistic quarrels and enthusiasms of the day. He falls in and out of love, meets showboating aesthetes and diehard political activists, tries and fails to make films that live up to his ideals, then tries again. As a film professor himself, Civeyrac strikes a winning balance between an authentic, highly contemporary depiction of the lives and interests of film students today and the time-honored themes of solitude, devotion, hope and hopelessness that have molded our view of young people lost in the urban rush since the age of the Romantics. He is well served by a stellar cast of photogenic unknowns, filmed in sublime black and white that brings to life the memory of all the classic films that drive his characters toward the realization of their own dreams.