The 2025 Alliance Française French Film Festival is well underway in Australia and, as the French would say, C‘est énorme! (It’s huge!)
The largest French film festival outside of France has become noticeably larger in its 36th year, expanding to 19 locations with the addition of Ballarat, Ballina, Darwin, Warriewood in Sydney and Warrawong in Wollongong. As a result, the 2025 French Film Festival should easily beat last year’s attendance record of 188,000 filmgoers. All up there will be 42 films screening over the course of March and April.
Here are our favourites so far at the 2025 French Film Festival.
Riviera Revenge/N’avoue Jamais
This is the funniest film I’ve seen in quite a while, and I could tell from the constant laughter around me in the cinema that others were enjoying it enormously too. Retired French general François (André Dussollier) is tidying out the attic when he stumbles across a batch of old love letters penned to his wife Annie (Sabine Azéma), complete with references to her ‘erupting Venus triangle’. François has a little eruption of his own and makes a mad dash down to the French Riviera to “beat up her Boris”. Annie comes along ostensibly to try to prevent him from doing something crazy, but more likely she’s craving excitement. Perhaps the sight of Boris (played with relish by Thierry Lhermitte) will make her Venus triangle volcanic again.
There’s a lot more to N’avoue jamais (Never confess) than the trailer reveals. François and Annie’s rarely visited three children all live on the Riviera, and each has secrets of their own or issues to resolve. Days of reckoning are nigh! The films blends comedy and pathos with equal panache, spectacularly so in a puppet theatre scene that will bring tears even to a hardened retired general’s eyes.
N’avoue jamais was also the title of song performed by Guy Mardel representing France at the 1965 Eurovision contest in Naples, where he came third. Listen out for a remastered version of it in the film.
The siblings in suits rather than bathing suits at the seaside. Classy!
My Brother’s Band/En Fanfare
The last time I saw Benjamin Lavernhe in a movie he was the scruffy teacher being amorously chased by Laure Calamy’s character and her donkey in Antoinette dans les Cévennes. So in the opening scenes of En Fanfare (which would translate into English as with fanfare, or with a bang) it was disconcerting to see him as a sartorial famous orchestra conductor at home in the high-brow world. But then come life-threatening situations which lead him to his brother (played by Pierre Lottin), a trombonist in a mediocre marching band in northern France.
To say more would give the game away, but this was the saddest yet most positively uplifting film of the festival for me. It’s easy to see why it was a huge box office hit in France. The music – supplied by L’Orchestre National d’Île-de-France and Harmonie des Mineurs de Lallaing – is fantastic.
Raphaël Personnaz as Ravel in Bolero.
Boléro
This biopic could test your patience: it goes through all the agonies that composer Maurice Ravel went through when he was commissioned by flamboyant Russian dancer Ida Rubenstein (Jeanne Balibar) to compose a sensual finale for her next ballet. Raphaël Personnaz plays the famous musician going through the frustrating musical equivalent of writer’s block. But hang in there – the final dance scenes in the ballet are magnificent, and Boléro (played by the London Symphony Orchestra) sounds glorious in surround sound in the cinema.
Another very satisfying moment in the film is when a politely sneering music critic who’s been tormenting the composer throughout finally gets his comeuppance. Ravel’s composition progresses agonisingly , but his wit’s quick.
Pierre Niney as the enigmatic Count of Monte Cristo.
The Count of Monte Cristo
When French novelist Alexandre Dumas died in 1870 little could he have imagined or even fantasised that 150-odd years later he’d be playing a huge part in the revival of the French nation’s love of French cinema. First came big-budget versions of The Three Musketeers, and followed by the equally spectacular Le Comte De Monte Cristo, which was nominated in 14 categories at the 2025 César Awards.
Pierre Niney adds the title role to his list of many acting achievements. The film is long at 178 minutes, but there is so much to absorb I’d quite happily see it twice. As The New York Times put it, “this swashbuckler leaves previous versions of Dumas’s famous revenge saga in the dust”.
If you can’t see it at the French Film Festival, The Count of Monte Christo will be in Palace cinemas from April 10 in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra (with advance screenings over April 4-6). The screenings start from April 17 in Adelaide, Perth, Gold Coast, and Hobart. M5R
Photographs courtesy of the Alliance Française French Film Festival.
