French cinema mostly lives in a bubble — a Champagne bubble, of course, with attractive stars, gorgeous scenery, adult ideas and sophisticated dialogue. It’s why French cinema is the gold standard of cinematic refinement. 

Occasionally, a French-language movie will burst out of that bubble and reach the kind of audiences routinely enjoyed by Hollywood movies, as happened with Amelie (2001), Welcome to the Sticks (2008), Untouchables (2011) and Cedric Klapisch’s lovely Spanish Apartment trilogy (2002 to 2013).

Beginning with the tale of a group of students from across Western Europe who share an apartment in Barcelona, Klapisch revisited the charming characters played by Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, Cecile de France and Kelly Reilly in Chinese Puzzle and Russian Dolls to paint a picture of a generation for whom friendship was the equal family.

The relatable, reliable hit-maker Klapisch returns to the Alliance Francaise French Film Festival with another multi-character hit comedy Colours of Time, a typically breezy story of a group of distant relatives who come together to sort out an inheritance, an abandoned farmhouse in Normandy owned by forebear named Adele who owned a few interesting art works.

During an inspection of the house one of the cousins falls asleep is sent tumbling back in time to 1895 when Adele left her Normandy home and travelled to Paris in search of her mother, a thrilling odyssey in which she meets some of its most important names of the age such as Sarah Bernhardt, Victor Hugo, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and, most significantly, the pioneer photographer Felix Nadar, who is anxious to take her picture.

The film then flits between past and present, with Klapisch and his regular screenwriter Santiago Amigorena again making the kind of fun, fizzy populist entertainment that has its roots in the writer-director’s passion for American cinema. 

“American directors were very important to me, so at the age of 23 I went there to study film even though we had great film schools in France,” Klapisch tells me over zoom ahead of the French Film Festival, which kicks off this week and runs for the next month. 

“I loved the movies of Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman and others from the 1970s. I wanted to be immersed in their world . I didn’t find film directors in France driving me like the American auteurs,” explains Klapisch.

While Klapisch loved the energy and the eagerness to entertain of American movies  he was less comfortable with the American system, which is brutally commercial in comparison to the highly subsidised French system in which a healthy portion of every movie ticket sold is pumped back into the screen industry.

“I would have been a total misfit if I had stayed,” laughs Klapisch, who took his passion for the multi-character naturalism of Altman back to France and started to tell tales of character and community, finally achieving an international hit with the delightful When The Cat’s Away (1996).

While we see Klapisch’s films as the work of an auteur, a filmmaker with a personal vision that they imprint on film after film, in France he is not regarded as as that kind of singular cinema artist, but more of an American type orchestrator of hits, a man in the shadows who prefers the characters to live apart from him.

“I’m really in between,” explains Klapisch. “People know that when I am telling a story it’s not completely conventional, like an American movie, but it has a classical structure. I’m not quite an auteur, with an individual style, but there are enough points of difference to make it interesting.”

In Colours of Time, the point of difference is that the distant relatives who come together to deal with the inheritance of a forebear who lived in Paris when photography started to challenge the dominance of painting is flitting between two time periods.

“My scriptwriter and I started with the idea of the arrival of photography in the late 19th century impacting painting. Photography could capture reality with greater accuracy than painting, which is the reason for the rise of Impressionism. 

“This evolved into a story about the impact of technological change — not just in art but in many aspects of our world. So we began to see the film as an echo chamber, with the story of photography impacting painting matched by the internet and other technology changing the way we live,” he explains.

When it came to style Klapisch had two models — James Cameron’s Titanic and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

“Surprisingly, it is not a widely used device,” says Klapisch. “At the beginning we thought it might just be a framing device, like in Titanic, but by the end it is 50/50, which I think is a much more interesting way of doing it. Even in Midnight in Paris there is not as much as our film.”

What ties Colour of Time to the Spanish Apartment trilogy is that all four are ensemble works. Indeed, they are all about establishing alternative families to the traditional group of mother, father and children.

“Then conventional family does not exist,” argues Klapisch. “It is a fantasy that everyone has a father and a mother and life is smooth. People get sick, they die, they get divorced. In France the divorce rate is 50%, so only showing traditional families is not reality.”

Capturing reality is the cornerstone of his work, says Klapisch. “In all of my films I work hard to describe the world as it is. When you’re dealing with reality you’re not dealing with someone who’s going to explode the planet or create a war or even murdering someone. You’re dealing with someone who is going to the grocery store or taking their children to school.

“It is more challenging and interesting to make a film dealing with very small things, with minimalism. There are no heroes sweeping to save the world, as in a Marvel movie. It is about the tiny complications that impact all of our lives.”

As usual the French Film Festival has a dizzyingly diverse program, a result of a subsidy system that allows quietly spoken art movies to exist beside raucous comedies and sleek thrillers. 

One of the most anticipated films is One Upon a Time Michael Legrand, David Hertzog Dessites’ loving but surprisingly frank documentary on the great jazz pianist and composer.

Instead of showing the aging maestro in all his eccentric warmth, as it is usual for this kind of documentary, Dessites begins with the maestro preparing for a concert in Poland just before his death in 2019 behaving like a real arsehole — complaining about the organisation, attacking assistants for not bringing him the right music, trashing the musicians. 

It’s uncomfortable, but the Polish incident is the perfect way into an examination of the perfectionism and drive of Legrand, who by his mid 20s was working with some of the giants of 20th century jazz, such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans (he was also mostly a lovely guy!).

While Legrand is best known for his movie soundtracks, from the early Nouvelle classics such as A Woman Is a Woman and Vivre Sa Vie, his Jacques Demy collaborations (Bay of Angels, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) to his numerous Hollywood Oscar winners (The Thomas Crown Affair, Summer of 42), I didn’t realise what an astonishing pianist he was, even into his later years. 

He is breathtaking to watch as his hands dance over the keyboard. If anything is going to take your mind of current hostilities it is this celebration of one of the giants of the 20th century, a life and creative force.

Other highlights included School Reunion,  a sweet and funny ensemble comedy about a group of school bullies who set out to make up for their sins by throwing their own school reunion, and the dystopian crime thriller Dog 51, in which Adèle Exarchopoulos and Gilles Lelouch play a pair of cops are on the trail of the revolutionary leader who wants to break the barriers between the classes in a world controlled by a super-intelligence (it’s combination of policing and artificial intelligence make this one scarily relevant). 

The Alliance Francaise French Film Festival is on at the Luna Leederville, Windsor Cinema, Luna SX and Palace Raine Square from March 12 to April. Details: affrenchfilmfestival