France

  • Jacques Audiard – Regarde les hommes tomber AKA See How They Fall (1994)

    1991-2000DramaFranceJacques Audiard

    Quote:
    Jacques Audiard made his directorial debut in a spectacular fashion with Regarde les hommes tomber, one of the most visually striking and disturbing French thrillers of the 1990s. The son of the acclaimed French screenwriter Michel Audiard, he had scripted several films (going back to the mid-1970s) before he gravitated to the role of director and pretty well redefined the French film noir with this and his subsequent thriller offerings – Sur mes lèvres (2001), De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (2005) and, of course, the stunning Un prophète (2009). Those aspects which most characterise Audiard’s distinctive brand of cinema – the nihilistic bleakness, the fragmented narrative, the assortment of fragile outcasts living on the abyss – are present in his first film, an idiosyncratic study in solitude and friendship.Read More »

  • Marguerite Duras – Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976)

    1971-1980ArthouseExperimentalFranceMarguerite Duras

    When the film Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert was initially shown in 1976, many viewers found it hauntingly beautiful but deeply perplexing. Some, seeing it as a sign of Duras’ inability to separate herself from the making of India Song, even ascribed the film to a kind of postpartum depression. Since that time, the film has been placed in perspective as an inseparable component of the India cycle as a whole, although little has been written, with certain notable exceptions, on its specific relation to the other works. Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert is a purely metanarrative epilogue that culminates the progressive decomposition of spectacle as well as the dismantling of the neocolonial subject conceived as specular identity that was initiated by previous works in the India cycle.Read More »

  • Jean Epstein – La chute de la maison Usher AKA The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

    1921-1930ArthouseFranceJean EpsteinSilent

    Quote:
    A leading member of the French cinema’s avant-garde movement and the director of the Impressionist classic Coeur fidèle (1923), Jean Epstein broke with his more modernist colleagues in the late 1920s to make documentaries and fiction films grounded in the realities of everyday life. Before that evolution, however, Epstein filmed this adaptation of two Edgar Allan Poe stories: “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Oval Portrait” (1850). The film’s significance lies not so much in its fidelity to Poe’s stories as in its atmospheric evocation of the author’s gothic sensibility. Read More »

  • François Ozon – Frantz (2016)

    2011-2020DramaFranceFrançois OzonWar

    Quote:
    Screwball comedy master Ernst Lubitsch took a rare stab at straight drama with 1932’s “Broken Lullaby,” the tense story of a soldier who attempts to make amends with the family of a man he killed in World War I. Preeminent French director François Ozon also wanders into unconventional territory with “Frantz,” his astonishingly beautiful and inquisitive remake of Lubitsch’s film, using it as a springboard for a profound look at alienation and grief.Read More »

  • Bertrand Tavernier – La passion Béatrice AKA The Passion of Beatrice (1987)

    1981-1990Bertrand TavernierDramaFrance

    Quote:
    Somewhere in France during the Middle Ages. Béatrice is impatient to see her father return from English captivity. She doesn’t expect however that the father whom she loves from distance will be the most hateful person who will submit her and her family to abuse and humiliation.Read More »

  • Steno – I tartassati AKA Fripouillard et Cie AKA The Overtaxed (1959)

    1951-1960ClassicsComedyFranceSteno

    Since the IRS has ordered new taxes, all traders in the village are tormented. Only Torquato Pezzella, a wealthy merchant of rain does not give in to despair general. To escape the contributions it has offered a tax advisor, the very respectable Curto Hector, who is in reality an ignorant on the subject. Still, Pezzella that has so far managed to avoid the taxes through the valuable advice of his new partner. Until one day an inspector of the brigade versatile, the formidable Topponi Fabio decides to check himself the accounting of this individual who is enriched by eye and does not report to the state. The note is difficult to digest; home Pezzella owes more than fifteen million in contributions. However, an unexpected event will upset all the data …Read More »

  • Anne Fontaine – Nettoyage à sec AKA Dry Cleaning (1997)

    1991-2000Anne FontaineComedyDramaFrance

    From Stephen Holden review: “La Nuit des Temps, a mildly racy nightclub in the center of the sleepy French town of Belfort, is the equivalent of Pandora’s box in Anne Fontaine’s haunting erotic fable “Dry Cleaning.” Here is where Jean-Marie Kunstler (Charles Berling) and his wife, Nicole (Miou-Miou), a proper, buttoned-up French couple who have been married for 15 years, find themselves one evening watching a slithery gold-lamé-clad brother-sister drag act called the Queens of the Night lip-synch to Sylvie Vartan records.Read More »

  • Claire Denis – US Go Home (1994)

    1991-2000Claire DenisDramaFranceTV

    In the sixties, in a suburb near Paris, Martine wants to lose her virginity.Read More »

  • Robert Kramer – Notre nazi AKA Our Nazi (1984)

    Documentary1981-1990FrancePoliticsRobert Kramer

    Quote:
    In 1984, the West German film director Thomas Harlan (maker of Torre Bela [1976] and author of the novel Rosa [2000]), directed Wundkanal: Execution for Four Voices, a joint French-German production about Dr S, a soldier impeached after the war for taking part in the massacre of Jews in Lithuania, and his slide towards suicide. To express his resistance to the forgetting of Nazism as war criminals aged, Harlan cast Alfred Filbert – an actual member of the SS during the War who spoke only German – as Dr S for this experimental fiction film shot in a French studio. (7) Filbert was not aware of what was to happen on set, in front of the camera, mor that the script was merely a pretext or ruse for a psychodramatic ‘happening’: Harlan, in fact, intended to interrogate and expose, ‘live’, his complicity with Nazi atrocities.Read More »

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