Fantastic Fest 2008 was overwhelmingly a series of wonderful surprises for me, and La Creme is great addition to the list of the Best of Fantastic Fest. What they do with a very spare budget and a predominantly non-actor filled cast is remarkable. These Europeans have the chops...you just don't find as many Americans trying this hard anymore.
Francois Mangin (Laurent Legeay), an out-of-work salesman, wakes up Christmas morning and finds he has been gifted a jar of face cream. When he puts "la creme" on his face, whoever looks at his face thinks he's the most famous man in France. In some cases they project the qualities of the most famous person they hold in esteem on him, in others they think he is Gerard Depardieu. At face value, it may sound like an episode of The Twilight Zone translated into French, but as a movie, it holds up for me as one of the most engaging movies about fame itself that I've seen in a long while, maybe ever.
Opportunity knocks in the form of a job interview for Francois, but it turns out he's up against another guy for the job. They both need the work, and are set against each other to vie for the job.
There's no pretense as you see in the American system of stocking the movie with stars for effect or to push box office receipts. I have a soft spot for movie with few professional actors primarily because they just do the work, without the distant look of "which assistant am I going to fire today?" gleaming in their eye. The director, Reynald Bertrand, cast his cousin in the lead and if I didn't know better, I'd think he was probably a well-respected French character actor.
Bertrand is one of the best film editors working in France, and he cuts himself a lean, precise directorial debut here that's equally poignant and hilarious about the cult of celebrity. According to a post-show Q&A he was equally inspired by people randomly mistaking his father (a retired teacher) for some famous person as well as his his day job editing the French equivalents of empty-headed, lowest common denominator comedies we see in the US. In addition to the "paying the bills" flicks he's cut, Bertrand edited the lauded OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies.
The grand, sad irony of the film is that it hasn't been picked up in France expressly because there are no stars in it. Take a look at the film's official website and spread the word if you saw it at FF or elsewhere. If you're attending one of its upcoming festival appearances, make sure to see it.
I suppose the US question of what to do with it involves how to market a French film with no stars to an American audience that isn't always receptive to French films normally. If anything, these wonderful digital distribution options that exist now through collaborations of companies like Hulu and Cinetic Rights Management make some sort of a post-festival circuit future for a movie like this plausible even if no one picks it up to go out to a limited run before hitting DVD. That is not to say I don't think this movie could make it theatrically.
Of all the films that played Fantastic Fest that currently have no distributor, this one deserves to be seen the most. Get the right distributor and get the right press in front of it, and this movie will do you a decent return for what it'll cost to pick up. I know plenty of Francophiles who care less about stars in French imports than they do about the movie being good and not just serving as a French-language version of an American film they avoid purposefully. This is a director with vision and talent, and his first film deserves to be seen by as wide an audience as possible.