Beyond the Multiplex

July 20, 2006 | All that stuff I wrote last week about how stupid it was to release three films by big-name French directors on the same day, just because it happened to be Bastille Day? Well, let's just say I haven't proven my mettle as an MBA-level marketing consultant, at least not yet. (I revert to William Goldman's timeless maxim on the film business: Nobody knows anything.)

In this case, I'm delighted to be wrong. André Téchiné's "Changing Times," the charming reunion vehicle for Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve that I damned with faint praise last week, packed the house all weekend at Manhattan's Paris Theatre, grossing more than $31,000 (a very big number for a single-screen theater). Patrice Chéreau's experimental period piece "Gabrielle," starring Isabelle Huppert, got strong reviews and also did startlingly well at two New York theaters. François Ozon's bittersweet miniature "Time to Leave" also opened respectably, although below the level of the splashier competition.

But the real buzz in the biz at the moment is over yet another French picture, Laurent Cantet's "Heading South," with Charlotte Rampling as the queen bee of a Haitian resort that offers teenage boys as playmates for mature single women. The big fish in the indie-distribution pond all passed on this film, despite its director and star, presumably because they thought the subject matter (i.e., female sex tourism, plus a troubling subtext of racism and imperialism) was too outré. Shadow Distribution, a tiny company in Waterville, Maine, that mostly releases documentaries, picked it up at what must have been a bargain-basement price (such things are closely guarded secrets).

Lo and behold: After attracting surprisingly large crowds for two weeks at a couple of Manhattan theaters and earning a celebratory feature story in the New York Times' style section, the film will open this week on 16 more screens in the New York metropolitan area and five more in and around Los Angeles. The word-of-mouth ripple effect among female moviegoers of a certain age (as they say in la belle France) is almost tangible; we're talking "Thelma & Louise" for the over-40, upscale, white Burgundy demographic.

A couple of people have told me off the record that other distributors were worried that men would be scared off by the idea of watching older women (Rampling, e.g., is 60) frolic on the beach with lithe black teenagers. Well, maybe they were. But so what? Despite my spotty recent track record, here's another nugget of blindingly obvious marketing wisdom: Quit chasing the dudes, geniuses.

When it comes to indie films (and literary fiction, and a lot of other leisure-time culture commodities), it's generally the ladies who are slinging the magic MasterCard. Looking over IndieWire's box-office report, I only see two bona fide guy flicks among the year's indie hits ("A Scanner Darkly" and "Army of Shadows," and I'm not saying plenty of women don't dig those too). If we could run some kind of gender-audit trail on most of the others -- from "An Inconvenient Truth" and "A Prairie Home Companion" to "Strangers With Candy" and "Friends With Money" -- I'm guessing it's mostly women who either bought the tickets or made the choices.

OK, but where does this reductive logic leave us, partway through a long, blastingly hot summer? Well, you're going to see four pretty good French movies somewhere near your hometown at some point this year -- that's the good news. My personal good news is that I'm taking off for a family vacation next week, so I'll see you back here on Aug. 3. In the meantime, we've got at least one full-on guy movie eager to defy my latest thesis. Gela Babluani's "13 Tzameti" is a sweaty, stylized thriller that's half machismo and half arty posturing. Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's rock 'n' roll fantasy "Brothers of the Head," on the other hand, is an unexpected delight, a fable about '70s rock that avoids the customary clichés and makes its freak-show characters seem real.

Heather Lyn MacDonald's documentary "Been Rich All My Life" captures the irresistible saga of the Silver Belles, a troupe of former Harlem chorus girls, now in their 80s and 90s. Inevitably this film will be called the "Ballets Russes" of the African-American tap-dance tradition, so let me be the first (or perhaps the second or third). Finally, we have the long-awaited rerelease of the 1952 French swashbuckler "Fanfan la Tulipe," an overcaffeinated classic belonging to a school of cinema that is, perhaps mercifully, gone forever.

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