Synopsis:
Charles is a young provincial coming up to Paris to study law. He shares his cousin Paul’s flat. Paul is a kind of decadent boy, a disillusioned pleasure-seeker, always dragging along with other idles, while Charles is a plodding, naive and honest man. He fell in love with Florence, one of Paul’s acquaintances. But how will Paul react to that attempt to build a real love relationship ? One of the major New Wave films. Read More »
Quote:
“L’Avarice” was Chabrol’s contribution to the 1962 French/Italian omnibus film LES SEPT PÉCHÉS CAPITAUX (which also featured contributions from de Broca, Jacques Demy, Sylvain Dhomme, Max Douy, Jean-Luc Godard, Eugène Ionesco, Edouard Molinaro, and Roger Vadim) in which a group of twenty-five engineering students put hold a lottery to pick who gets to spend a 50,000 franc evening with a beautiful prostitute. The film was photographed in Franscope by Jean Rabier (Henri Decae’s camera operator on LE BEAU SERGE and LES COUSINS.)
—DVD Beaver Read More »
This 2003 documentary by Francis Girod revisits the town of Sardent, the location for LE BEAU SERGE as well as the site of director Claude Chabrol’s introduction to cinema as a young man. It features interviews with Chabrol and actors Jean-Claude Brialy and Bernadette Lafont. Read More »
Quote:
Following the gorgeous, seemingly liberated Adriana (Divorce Italian Style’s Stefania Sandrelli) as she chases her dreams in the Rome of La dolce vita, I Knew Her Well is at once a delightful immersion in the popular music and style of Italy in the sixties and a biting critique of its sexual politics and the culture of celebrity. Over a series of intimate episodes, just about every one featuring a different man, a new hairstyle, and an outfit to match, the unsung Italian master Antonio Pietrangeli, working from a script he cowrote with Ettore Scola, composes a deft, seriocomic character study that never strays from its complicated central figure. I Knew Her Well is a thrilling rediscovery, by turns funny, tragic, and altogether jaw-dropping. Read More »
Quote:
The multi-part film is a difficult kind of cinema to get right but Duvivier’s Le Diable et les dix commandements is a rare exception where the form succeeds admirably. The film consists of seven roughly 15 minute sketches, each showing what may happen if one or more of the Ten Commandments is broken. Each sketch is self-contained (except for the last which returns to the first) and linked by a nasty slithery serpent who has a very strange sense of humour. The sketches are either mini-dramas, usually with a clever twist at the end (the best instance of this being the second sketch: “Do not commit adultery”), or comic. The sketch featuring “Do no steal” is an outrageous comic farce with Jean-Claude Brialy and Louis de Funès, made even more hilarious by Duvivier’s unsubtle attempt to ape the New Wave film directors. Read More »
Small time crook Napoleone falls into an unlikely gang made up of a gangster, called The Baron, and his two cohorts, Agonia and The Captain, where Napoleone takes them to Rome where they shack up with a shady used car dealer caled Il Cajella to help finance their new life of crime by planing to rob a statue from the Vatican. But a big-time American gangster, named Joe Ventura, hears about the heist and wants the priceless statue for himself by having his mistress, Samantha, come onto and betray the woman-hungry Cajella to give the statue away to her. Read More »
Synopsis:
Of the hallowed group of Cahiers du cinéma critics turned filmmakers who transformed French film history, Claude Chabrol was the first to direct his own feature. His absorbing landmark debut, Le beau Serge, follows a successful yet sickly young man (Jean-Claude Brialy) who returns home to the small village where he grew up. There, he finds himself at odds with his former close friend (Gerard Blain)—now unhappily married and a wretched alcoholic—and the provincial life he represents. The remarkable and stark Le beau Serge heralded the arrival of a cinematic titan who would go on to craft provocative, entertaining films for five more decades. Read More »