Anthony Byrne’s HOW ABOUT YOU is the kind of cinematic bonbon that is great to cuddle up to on a rainy day.  It features some wonderful actors (Vanessa Redgrave, Joss Acklund, Brenda Fricker, and Imelda Staunton) doing one of the things that they do best–act like total pains-in-the–well, you get idea.  Here they are spoiled senior citizens losing no opportunity to bring forth their inner grump.  Their behavior has become so problematic that they are ruining the senior citizens residence home being run by Kate Harris (Orla Brady) by driving away staff and other residents.  Into this situation comes Kate’s free-spirited, irresponsible younger sister Ellie (Hayley Atwell).  Ellie immediately connects with Alice (Joan O’Hara).  Alice is on the cusp of passing over to whatever follows our earthly life.  She is wistful about the life she has lived, but looking forward to being reunited with her husband who has preceded her in death.  There’s not a lot that happens that isn’t fairly easily predicted.  Ellie ends up running the place over the Christmas holiday when everyone else–staff and resident alike–leaves except for the “hardcore” four.  They all treat Ellie like a slave, but eventually she helps them become ”a family.”  The older actors are fantastic–as usual–and Hayley Atwell is a young actress who seems to be well on her way to stardom.  There’s an interesting scene in which Vanessa Redgrave and Hayley Atwell are both looking at themselves in the same mirror–I suspect that there may be a similar scene decades away between an elderly Miss Atwell and a yet-to-be-born hot ingenue.  The film does offer some poignant observations about aging, living, and dealing with loss.  The script by Jean Pasley from a short story by Maeve Binchy could have been tighter and perhaps a little more realistic, but this film is a sweet confection and that is exactly what it aspires to be.  This definitely meets my wife’s definition of an angst-free “Friday night movie,” but definitely look for it some Saturday and Sunday afternoon on a cable movie channel or rent it for just those occasions.

Claude Miller’s A SECRET is based on Philippe Grimbert’s autobiographical novel covering his own discovery of his family’s painful history of loss and survival as Jews during World War II.  This also addresses France’s painful and shameful role during World War II as a defeated nation and its complicity with the Nazis in the Holocaust.  As film viewers removed from the immediate sense of national disgrace, the subtle matter-of-fact handling of this story as part of a larger indictment of French culpability may be lost on many American viewers as the story’s primary focus is on an intimate, almost incestuous love triangle between Maxime (Patrick Bruel), his wife Hannah (Ludivine Sagnier), and his wife’s sister-in-law Tania (Cecile de France).  The film takes a form that is too complex and perhaps too much like the novel to translate well to a foreign language audience.  The story moves back and forth through multiple time-frames and the author, a psycho-analyst by training, wants to address the emotional fall-out from trauma and truth suppressed for while he learns his family’s secret as a teen it is not openly acknowledged for more than 20 years.   The film begins like a story from Unsolved Mysteries as a seven year-old Francois in 1955 creates an imaginary and more accomplished older brother that he senses is more favored in his parents’–especially his father’s–eyes.  He learns that such a brother existed several years later.  The effect of the time changes on film viewers can be disorientation and several festival-goers complained of being confused.  This is also a film that relies heavily on dialogue and voice-over narration to drive the story.  This means that a non-Francophone audience will be challenged by having to absorb so much from the subtitles. I think another problems for the film is that its score (by Zbigniew Preisner) may not have provided the best cues for the emotional tones of apprehension, dread, and melancholy that are so pervasive in the story.  One comes away with the sense of having seen a film with a great story, great actors, and great ambitions that is an almost-marvelous film.  To use a baseball metaphor, it is like a baseball hit long and deep to the outfield only to have it be caught up against the outfield fence as a “warning track out.”  It’s spectacular-looking, but it just doesn’t get the job done.

The final film on Day 9 is the Bollywood epic JODHAA AKBAR.  I describe it as an epic because JODHAA AKBAR, while it does have a central romance between the beautiful Princess Jodhaa Bai (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) and the handsome Mughal Emperor Jalaluddin Mohamed Akbar (Hrithik Roshan), is much more about the history of India and rivalries between the Mughals who invaded bringing the Islamic faith and various Hindu kingdoms.  The film is full of battle scenes, swordplay, and court intrigues with music and especially dance taking something of a backseat.  This is an engaging film full of rich colors and attractive actors.  Some festival-goers expressed a preference for the reduced reliance on over-the-top production numbers.  I found myself missing them.  This is a long time (213 minutes) in the theater and is probably a film that is best-appreciated when the film goer is fresh and not at the end of grueling day (even if it is only taking in two or three other films).  By the way, the lovers do get together and the film comments on the importance of religious tolerance so it does have something meaningful to say to us today.