A Paris Education [Mes provinciales] **** (2018, Andranic Manet, Diane Rouxel, Jenna Thiam) – Movie Review

Andranic Manet plays Etienne, a sullen, only semi-appealing French provincial boy from Lyon, who selfishly leaves his nice girlfriend Lucie (Diane Rouxel) and loving parents behind to start a new exciting life in Paris to live the life and study the cinema. Manet is pretty much ideal as Etienne, a perfect fit. His pleasant boy-next-door ordinariness is somehow both right and attractive. You can easily understand how women, and men, fall for him.

After a slow and shaky start, Etienne meets many new friends and lovers, including a gay best friend and collaborator, Jean-Noël (Gonzague Van Bervesseles). But, quietly rampant heterosexual though he appears to be, for some reason Etienne falls completely under the thrall of the mysterious Mathias (Corentin Fila), an arrogant little would-be film-maker who seems to have no time for anybody but himself. It is one real hell of a bromance.

The would-be film-makers are not really a very pleasant lot, being quite competitive and bitchy, understandably in the highly competitive and bitchy circumstances. You get the idea that hardly any of them are going to make it, in some cases because they just aren’t clever or talented enough.

Writer-director Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s A Paris Education [Mes provinciales] (2018) is a haunting, bitter-sweet homage to the old French New Wave of François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. It is tremendously self indulgent, tremendously Gallic, and tremendously enjoyable if you love cinema and quirky relationship and coming-of-age movies. We are in a world of books, poetry, philosophy, ideals, endless conversations, pseudo intellectuals – and smoking. It is the old world in every way, though the young people still despise the old folk, and of course wallow in despair at the state of the world, though they’d like to change that, either through cinema or activism.

Though it is a long haul at 137 minutes, and made in black and white too, there is no need to resist, and no need to fall asleep. All you have to do is sit there and let it just wash all over you. It is a civilised pleasure, full of the essence of Paris and French provincials in the capital. The film is playful about the movies, film education and would-be film folk, even quite revealing. Thank goodness for a really likable film in a film festival.

Andranic Manet is a French young actor (born 8 August 1996) who started in the theatre in Paris, moved to TV and became a movie actor.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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