FOCUS FRANÇAIS

French cinema threads through this year’s programme, from its postwar comic genius to its latest auteurs. On Saturday 17 October The Mowlem gives a full day to Jacques Tati. Prof Matthew Beaumont of UCL opens with a lecture on Monsieur Hulot’s walk, reading it through the anthropologist Marcel Mauss as a quiet comment on modern life. Playtime follows, the vast glass-and-steel satire that nearly ruined Tati in 1967 and now ranks among cinema’s great achievements. The evening brings Mr Hulot’s Holiday, then Rowan Atkinson in conversation with Matthew Sweet about Tati’s influence on his own career. Over the next fortnight the line runs from Pagnol to Camus. Daniel Auteuil’s The Well Digger’s Daughter revisits a story Pagnol first filmed under Vichy in 1940, while François Ozon shoots The Stra...