Isabelle Huppert as you've seldom seen her -- in Bavo Defurne's luscious, near-camp melodrama, SOUVENIR

The opening credit sequence is to die for: A simply gorgeous, hand-drawn typeface, telling us the who and what, is surrounded by white bubbles that move sensuously in, out and over a golden background. It's lovely and hypnotic, until it suddenly ends -- with a delightfully witty touch. I was hooked from that sequence onwards, and I hadn't yet even seen the movie's star, Isabelle Huppert. We do soon enough, and -- oh, dear -- one of the world's great cinema actresses is... almost mousy and plain, taking us back perhaps to the time of The Lacemaker. (The actress doesn't look all that much older, either, which is a little frightening at times.)

Directed and co-written (with Jacques Boon and Yves Verbraeken) by Bavo Defurne, who gave us the lovely little North Sea Texas a few years back, SOUVENIR is a kind of almost-fantasy-rom-com-drama about a May-September relationship involving a young, would-be boxer and an ex- (and once somewhat famous) singer who has dropped completely off the celebrity map and disappeared into a oddball, 9-to-5 job (or however long daily employment now lasts in Belgium) in a factory that manufacturers very large portions of -- yes -- paté!

If this sounds just a bit like unintentional camp, and at times it plays as such, the movie is generally much better than that -- thanks to its two stars -- Ms Huppert (above, right, and below) and Kévin Azaïs (above left) -- and to director Defurne's absolute commitment to his tale and the telling of it. (Douglas Sirk and Ross Hunter, I suspect, would have applauded.)

The filmmaker gives us plenty of detail regarding his protagonists lives -- in the workplace, at home with family, and past history, too. It turns out that the Azaïs character's father (Jan Hammenecker, below, right) as a young man, was as smitten with Huppert's Liliane as his son turns out to be now (much to his wife's displeasure, then and currently).

Souvenir covers a lot of ground -- past and present -- as it tells its surprising tale, which gives Ms Huppert the chance to become a full-fledged chanteuse, which she does every bit as well as she has done everything else in her screen career. Initially, her character seems oddly out of time and sync (well, she was a near star decades ago), but Huppert draws you in, as she always does, and the movie-maker has given her a couple of swell songs to sing, which she handles with rather startling style and aplomb.

The latter of these is just about good enough to have you believing that it might become a hit (which it very well may have been in Europe). It's both catchy and quirky and by the second time you hear it, it's already bonding to your brain. And the section devoted to one of those typical and ridiculous television "talent" shows is both as believable and stupid as these shows always seem to be.

Defurne is a romantic, for sure, yet how he handles the love story, along with the age difference between the protagonists, is sure-footed and believable. Motives are neither simplified nor characterizations single note. Ego, desire, vanity and the need for success -- along with the "love stuff" -- are all part of picture here.

Finally, though, it is that love stuff that resonates most strongly. The ending, in particular, is handled with simplicity and subtlety. We don't get the chance to see Ms Huppert do this kind of thing or appear in this kind of movie very often. If you're a fan, you won't want to miss Souvenir. And if you're not, or if you don't yet know this actress' work, this is an atypical but probably rather fun place to begin (or rethink) your education.

From Strand Releasing and running just 90 minutes, the film opens this Friday, March 2, in New York City at the Quad Cinema, and on Friday, March 16, in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Monica Film Center. Souvenir is scheduled to play a few more cities around the country, too. Here in South Florida it opens at the Bill Cosford Cinema on March 23. Click here and then click on Screenings to see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters.

One of last year's best films hits Blu-ray/DVD: Mia Hansen Løve's THINGS TO COME

As if her fine performance in the very bizarre Elle wasn't enough for a single year, Isabelle Huppert appeared in yet another superb role in a much warmer movie last year. I'm only catching up with THINGS TO COME now, as it makes its DVD and Blu-ray debut this week. From writer/ director Mia Hansen Løve (shown below), the movie burnishes even brighter the career of both the actress and the filmmaker, the latter of whom has given us at least two other excellent movies: Father of My Children and Goodbye First Love. Løve's latest proves to be her best work yet: her most mature and thoughtful with nary a weak moment to be found.

In stark contrast to Elle, Huppert here plays a relatively normal woman -- a philosophy teacher who, in late middle age, finds herself suddenly confronting something she never expected. Things to Come is a family drama, but it's one that proceeds quietly and concisely in a manner that allows Huppert's character, Nathalie (below), to consider the events and people around her, just as a professor of philosophy might, and Løve lets us do the same. The movie unfurls at what seems exactly the correct pace so that we take it all in and mull it over and arrive at conclusions without ever feeling forced into anything.

If this sounds rather minor as praise, it is not. So often filmmakers stuff everything from their action to their ideas so firmly down our throats that it all seems overcooked and pre-digested. TrustMovies suspects that this sort of style is anathema to Ms Løve.

All her characters are offered up in this manner, from the special student Nathalie has coached along (Roman Kolinka, above) to her educator husband, Heinz (Andre Marcon, below, right) to her ailing mother (a lovely job from Edith Scob) and even the "helpers" who represent the current state of textbook publishing in the western world.

Løve lets you understand where all her characters are coming from; even if you don't approve of what they're doing, you can still appreciate their viewpoints. Holding all this together is Ms Huppert who, as usual, inhabits her character so fully that we can, too,

The actress takes the events that would be soap opera to so many performers, writers and directors and turns them into the most intimate and specific details of life experienced. Of course, that's what good acting is supposed to do. Watching Huppert, you realize that this is what separate good from great.

One of 2016's best films, there is not a false moment in this entire movie, so if you have not already discovered Things to Come, I would suggest you take advantage of its current home video release. (The Blu-ray transfer is especially lovely.) From Sundance Selects/IFC Films and running 102 minutes in French with English subtitles, it hits the street tomorrow, Tuesday, May 9 -- for purchase and/or rental.

See Isabelle Huppert in all her glory (and more!) in Catherine Breillat's ABUSE OF WEAKNESS

When is not Isabelle Huppert a wonder to watch perform? Nowhere that I can recall. Now, in the new film by Catherine Breillat entitled ABUSE OF WEAK-NESS, Ms Hupert is everything we've come to expect -- and even more. Here she is, as usual, moment-to-moment real and speci-fic and spellbinding. This time, there's an overlay to it all. She is playing a stroke victim who only in degrees wins back the use of her body, and even then, not completely. I'd call Huppert a revelation, except that she always is. Here, she is simply more so.

Ms Breillat, for her part, is a past master at offering up challenging, often politically incorrect movies. With her latest she seems to be pulling back a bit by giving us an easier-to-digest woman-in-trouble tale. But probably not. If the film's title seems, to this American, at least, a play on the popular phrase "abuse of power," it turns out that Abus de faiblesse (the film's French title) doubles as an article of French law (L 122-8 in the Consumer Code,  223-15-2 in the Criminal Code) in which, if one person abuses another who is weak, sick, ignorant or what have you, s/he can be prosecuted. (We could certainly have used something like this in the USA, regarding those crap sub-prime loans from Countrywide and other mortgage lenders that helped bring down our economy, while cheating folk out of their abodes.)

The players here are Maud Shainberg (Ms Huppert, above), a film director somewhat on the cold side and clearly used to having her own way (based on Breillat, perhaps?), and Vilko Piran (an actor who goes by the odd moniker of Kool Shen, below), who, when we and Maud first see him, is chatting away on a TV talk show, telling tales of his time as a con man who cheated the rich out of millions and the poor out of whatever he could get. "This guy is perfect for the lead in my new film," says Maud, and soon they are meeting, and he is charming the director out of lots and lots of Euros.

But who is taking advantage of whom? Both it would seem, though no matter how charming and sexy our Vilko might be (and he's plenty), Maud lets him nowhere near her bed. Yet he is attentive and uber-helpful to this woman, who actually needs all the help she can get. She still has trouble walking and standing and keeping her balance, so Vilko is there for her, tying her shoes and taking her out to eat -- despite what her friends and family have to say about it all. To top it all off, Maud has not yet filmed even a single scene using this guy.

The two leads could hardly be better, often keeping us as off-balance as is Maud herself. And then the film is finished, and we are left wondering if we have simply been watching a case study in how one very smart and successful women gives over completely to a con man who has "abused her weakness," as it were.

Maybe. But thanks to these very fine performances, there just might be more. Even so, this story, as Breillat films it and Huppert and Shen act it, is for me enough. Simply watching Huppert struggle to use her limbs properly or ask the speech therapist how she can come to "laugh" again is worth the price of admission.

From Strand Releasing and running 105 minutes, Abuse of Weakness, opens this Friday, August 15, in New York City at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. In Los Angeles, look for it at Laemmle's Royal, opening Aguust 22. Elsewhere? Hope so. In any case, as the distributor is Strand, we can eventually expect a DVD and perhaps streaming to various digital venues.

Huppert & Poelvoorde score in Fontaine's latest delight, MY WORST NIGHTMARE

As much as I admire much of the world of French filmmaker Anne Fontaine, I am not sure I'd have believed you had you told me her latest offering would be a kind of feel-good, screwball comedy about class barriers that, in addition, would turn Isabelle Huppert into an actress seemingly born to make us laugh. No, I wouldn't have believed you. But please believe me: It's all true.

Though a number of Ms Fontaine's films (The Girl from Monaco, Coco Before Chanel) involve excursions into class differences (the director is shown at right), one of her earliest -- Dry Cleaning -- took on the attempted melding of the bourgeoisie with lower-class "artists" that proved sensual, scary and memorable. In her latest, she does it again, this time melding an haut bourgeois couple with an even lower-class jack-of-all-trades (this would be a career-defining performance by Belgian actor Benoît Poelvoorde, below, except that just about every performance this guy gives would qualify as such) and the result is as funny and frolicsome as Dry Cleaning was dark and dirty.

MY WORST NIGHTMARE is often silly and obvious but it is almost always remarkably entertaining, thanks to the smart screenplay and dialog (by Ms Fontaine and Nicolas Mercier) that keeps the initially somewhat unbelievable situation just off-kilter enough to work. Couple this to performances that do exactly the same thing (they keep surprising us and stringing us along) and you have a not-too-slick but pleasantly fast-paced almost-farce.

Along with Poelvoorde and Ms Huppert -- (above) who does her ice queen thing to a fare-thee-well before melting ever-so-slightly but quite believably as she learns to experience a new side of life -- the cast includes the ever-game, André Dussollier (below with Huppert, and recently seen in Téchiné's Unforgivable), who appears to be having the time of his life making this movie. His surprise and enjoyment are quite contagious.

The fourth wheel on this swift and svelte little contraption is an actress new to me named Virginie Efira, shown at far left, who plays the necessarily bureaucratic but kindly social worker (with quite a thing for nature and trees) who becomes involved in this little menage. Ms Efira manages to be pert and beautiful, while also appearing to possess a good deal of intelligence and originality -- an arresting combination, I must say.

Also on board are two young near-teenagers, one belonging to Huppert & Dussollier (Donatien Suner, at left, above), the other to Poelvoorde (newcomer Corentin Devroey, above, right), and their characters and situation are handled with enough care, compassion and sense to give the movie an extra lift.

The film looks good but also looks as though it was shot on video, perhaps for speed and, well, cost, of course. In any case, the whole thing adds up nicely, and while every one of the actors is working at full capacity, it is Mr. Poelvoorde's performance that makes this a don't-miss movie.

My Worst Nightmare, from Strand Releasing and running a fleet 99 minutes, opens this Friday in New York City at the Quad Cinema and on Friday, November 9, in the Los Angeles area at Laemmle's Monica 4-Plex and Playhouse 7.

Hey, Laemmle: Why won't the site for your Monica 4-Plex ever turn up for me? I can access the remainder of your theaters just fine, but not this one, and not for some weeks now....

Back to Africa, as Denis and Huppert knock our socks off with WHITE MATERIAL

Africa has never been far away from the films of Claire Denis -- from the first and comparatively benign (everything's relative) Chocolat to the new and slowly horrifying WHITE MATERIAL. Even when Denis' setting is Paris and its environs, her characters, some of them, at least, are dealing with the African emigrant experience in France. And her most critically-acclaimed work, Beau Travail (though not my favorite) deals with the French Foreign Legion, whose "home" is the sun-splashed desert of the "dark continent." As special and full of wonder (and two peak performances) as is a film like the Paris-set, bourgeois-bound Friday Night, Denis' work set in Africa commands its own special power, yet none of her films till now have had quite the power of this new one.

White Material is also perhaps as close to mainstream a movie as the filmmaker, pictured at left, has given us. "Close" for Denis, I mean. Relatively easy to follow as it goes from the present to an extended flashback that brings us back to the beginning and slightly onward, the movie is heavy with those mainstream staples -- threat,  violence and terror -- though all of them are handled in a manner that makes us increasingly uneasy, rather than slapping us in the face with standard blood-and-guts. In fact, for a long while we see no killing, no use of violence.  Instead we see its threat -- or its aftermath. When at last, the on-screen, you-are-there killing arrives, it comes from exactly where we do not expect it and is thus even more shocking and unsettling.

It seems to TrustMovies that Denis' theme here is the fruits of Colonialism, harvested on the home ground of the colonized: How self-destructive the big C is to the colonizers themselves and how, once armed revolution takes hold, the colonized become as or more savage than their suddenly overthrown keepers.

The filmmaker's story is about a sick-unto-dying French family who has for three generations owned a coffee plantation in Africa.  The opening shots -- wild dogs running loose and our main character, Maria Vial (played by the great Isabelle Huppert, above) traveling up a road and hoping for help from passing autos that do not stop -- sets the tone for what is to come. Maria wants, no matter what, to hold on to the family plantation.

We meet Huppert's husband André (Christopher Lambert, above), who is trying to negotiate some kind of monetary settlement for the plantation from the powers-that-may-soon-be, including the town's mayor (William Nadylam, below), who has organized his own militia to fight the growing strength of the home-grown rebels jockeying for power. We also meet the household servants, including one with whom André has fathered a son.

Maria's father-in-law (Michel Subor) still controls the plantation but appears to have given up on everything, maybe including life itself. The Vial's grown son (played by Denis irregular Nicolas Duvauchelle, most recently seen in Wild Grass and The Girl on the Train) still acts like a baby half the time, due perhaps to his mom's inappropriate "mothering." When he chases after two young rebels and is made to undergo a terrible humiliation, this sets off familial crises in which the cracks become too big for everyone to bear and all hell break loose inside the family, just as the same thing is occurring outside.

 
Real control eludes nearly everyone here, and even those who seem to possess it for a time (the rebel leader Boxer, played by another magnetic actor Denis used early on: Isaach De Bankolé, shown below) know how transient it will be. In near-complete control, yet seeming loose and intuitive, the filmmaker builds her story and her tension boldly, with always just enough information to keep us up-to-snuff but on our toes, with Huppert's character always in control of herself, if of little else.

This actress just gets better and better. (Really, has she not been, from The Lacemaker onwards, close to perfect?) Huppert rarely change her appearance much (her costumes, of course) yet she has that special ability to seemingly create each character from the inside out.  Consequently we don't doubt a word she says, nor an expression that passes over her often enigmatic face.

White Material (the title refers to the "possessions" of the colonizers) is a decidedly accessible movie, unlike, say Denis' Intruder of a few years back. It tells a gallopingly good story, in addition to being about something important that the world and its people still seem to have trouble comprehending. It should increase this filmmaker's coterie considerably, even as it burnishes her art to a brighter sheen.

The movie, from IFC Films, opens here in New York City on Friday, November 19, at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema and the IFC Center. It will also be available from IFC On-Demand starting Wednesday, November 24. Click here to learn how to get it from your local TV-reception provider.