When I got out of Bertrand Tavernier's My Journey Through French Cinema--and forget whatever IMDb might call it, that's what it was called at the New York Film Festival--I joked on twitter: "Come for Tavernier's stories about Jean Gabin and Jean-Pierre Melville, leave for everything else." But perhaps I wasn't entirely joking. This sprawling 190-minute documentary isn't so much an exhaustive recount of Tavernier's love for French cinema as it is a rambling, amorphous mass of remembrances, anecdotes, and the occasional love letter to this director or that. What's most astonishing was that the credits suggested that this might only be the first part of a series that could easily be extended another 190 minutes as it examines more directors like Jacques Tati. Spare me. This film was enough of a chore to sit through. It made me pine for Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson's A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), a 225-minute beast of a documentary about...exactly what it describes in the title. Despite its greater length, it was endlessly absorbing and captivating for two main reasons. First, Scorsese's film was rigidly, meticulously structured whereas Tavernier's film staggers along with seemingly no direction whatsoever. Second, Scorsese is an actual documentarian. This might be Tavernier's second documentary, but if it's proof of anything, it's that he still hasn't fully grasped the medium and how to utilize it.
5/10
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