French Film Fest 2026 Review - The Party’s Over!
Images courtesy of the Alliance Française French Film Festival.
A mainstay of the Melbourne cinema calendar, the Alliance Francaise French Film Festival, returns this week with another charcuterie-platter selection of francophone film. Following the 2025 edition – the most admissions the festival has ever seen – this year’s theme is “travel”: both literal, with films featuring an assortment of globetrotting settings; but also more figurative, as the storytelling of the selections invites you to travel to a different time, or a different perspective. There is also a focus on the réalisatrices, female directors, this year – including Alpha, the new film by Palme d’Or winner Julia Ducournau. The Opening Night film, Cédric Klapisch’s Colours of Time, was highly acclaimed in France, and also of note is a new adaptation of Albert Camus’ 1942 novella The Stranger, in black and white and directed by renowned filmmaker François Ozon.
One excerpt from the upcoming program, Classe Moyenne or The Party’s Over!, was recently screened for press on the evening of the festival’s program launch. The film was a selection in the prestigious Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and will screen throughout the festival’s many venues from opening day on March 4th through to closing day on April 8th. A class satire with a debt to splashy modern festival darlings like Parasite (2019) or Triangle of Sadness (2022), the film follows two families, the Trousselards and the Azizis – the latter employed by the former. Philippe and Laurence Trousselard, a successful lawyer and a faded star actress, employ Tony and Nadine Azizi as caretakers of their glamorous Mediterranean holiday home. The Trousselards’ daughter, Garance, was close to the Azizi’s daughter Marylou when both were kids, but now as young adults their obvious differences in socio-economic status have led to an awkward distancing. Their rift mirrors that of their parents’, as each couple has slowly been brewing with a hate for the other in recent years – the Trousselards see the Azizis as bludging freeloaders, who in turn think of the Trousselards as sneering, out-of-touch landlord types.
The film attempts to focus its commentary through the lens of Mehdi, Garance’s working-class law-student boyfriend who typifies upward socioeconomic mobility, and ends up caught between both ‘worlds’ in a Class War that the narrative starts to assume. The trouble is, however, that despite constantly showing us disparities in virtue – the Trousselards are repeatedly portrayed as shallow, materialistic, bitter people – we’re nonetheless asked to feel like Mehdi has a difficult choice as to with whom he should cast his lot. It’s such a strikingly false equivalence, a nakedly over-diplomatic case of both-sides-ism, that the entire story crashes under its weight. It’s a relief that the film is frequently very funny, as to its credit, in those moments it makes you forget the bizarre ideological disparity that it demands you treat as ambiguous. In this way, it’s a classic French studio comedy: glossy and taking full advantage of its setting, toothless while simultaneously somehow well-observed, and would certainly go down easy on a night out with a glass of wine.
The Party’s Over! is screening as part of the 2026 Alliance Française French Film Festival, which runs in Melbourne from the 4th of March to the 8th of April. For tickets and more info, click here.