Some French Cinema

Lately my local cinema has been running this years French Film Festival (they do a bunch of foreign film festivals from different countries each year). Last year I saw a recent production of The Three Musketeers. This year I saw two films.

 The first was The Stranger based on the novella of the same name by Albert Camus. Filmed in black and white, the story was a looking at what led a man to shoot another and the consequences of that action. The main character is a very unemotional type, and I saw a lot of myself in how he reacts to certain things, and I feel that if the novella had been written today he would be considered to be on the autism spectrum. The way this part of who he is and how he reacts differently to others is used against him when it comes to the trial, and I feel that this is why not only is found guilty but is sentenced to death for what most of the characters were expecting to be a light sentence at worst due to the inherent racism of the society at the time (the main character is a Frenchmen who killed a native Algerian). Due to fatigue from night shifts I did start to zone out at the end where the main character was going through a final revelation, and while listening with your eyes shut means you can usually keep up with what's going on, that isn't the case when you're relying on subtitles, so I did miss a bit of the ending and the main characters final catharsis.

The second was The Money Maker, based on the real life story of a Polish Immigrant who came to France during WWII who became a counterfeiter. Jan Bojarksi started out faking papers to help people escape the Nazis, and after the war got roped into counterfeiting by a criminal he'd worked with during the war. The criminals get caught due to sloppy security but Bojarksi escapes with some equipment and goes into operations for himself. The story then follows the next few years as Bojarski deals with family problems, the police continuing to hunt him, and the challenge of the French government introducing new notes forcing him to start from scratch each time. Bojarski feels similar to Walter White from Breaking Bad in that while he initially gets started because he wants to provide for his family, his main motivation soon becomes pride in his craft (counterfeiting vs cooking meth) and the fact that he's good at the crime, and the lack of recognition galls him. This last part drives certain poor decisions like when Bojarski after nearly getting caught sees the main detective at a bar and has a chat with him. I did like during the ending where they mentioned that decades later a Bojarski counterfeit sold for quite a bit at auction.

Of the two I preferred The Money Maker, although The Stranger has made me consider reading the book (if only to get the ending properly).