Alain Cavalier

“Since a long time I have been linked to the painter Georges de La Tour. His paintings helped me in making my films. Even more, in a precise way they crossed my personal life. The film I shot about La Tour is about that : an intimate emotion followed by the love for the works of La Tour. […] Georges de La Tour’s paintings (it remains 30) are fixed images gifted of a rare radiation and density in the history of human labour. It happens that me, a film-maker, with my movement of twenty four images per second, I am a little jealous of this completion.” (Alain Cavalier) Read More »

PLOT SUMMARY:
Formal to the point of mystification, Alain Cavalier’s La Rencontre is a bittersweet love story shot from the most oblique of angles. Two voices – one a man’s, one a woman’s – discuss a series of objects, views, pictures and body parts, swapping observations back and forth. In between listing and analyzing this parade of possessions, the film’s “characters” read each other poems, tell each other anecdotes, describe their dreams, name their hopes and fears.
Eventually, we realize they love each other; equally eventually, they realize they may no longer do so.Read More »

Synopsis :
1961. Luxemburger Thomas Vlassenroot deserted the French Foreign Legion during the Algiers Putsch. His lieutenant, Fraser, initiated the desertion for the two of them, Fraser believing he could do more for the French working for an underground organization. However, Thomas readily admits that he no longer has any political motivations or affiliations, and thus is hiding out from the authorities in Algiers. Fraser offers him a proposition: help him kidnap Lyonais lawyer, Dominique Servet, who is in Algiers to defend two Algerian nationalists…Read More »

Quote:
When a young auto salesman is forced to give up a vacation with his wife in order to drive a big American car to its new owner who lives on the Riviera, he makes the best of things. First, he gets and old friend to ride along with him. Then, the two of them are joined by another pair of men who want to ride south.Read More »

The life of little St. Therese of Lisieux, depicted in minimalist vignettes. Therese and her sisters are all nuns in a Carmelite convent. Her devotion to Jesus and her concept of “the little way” to God are shown clearly, using plain modern language. A sense of angelic simplicity comes across without fancy lights, choirs, or showy miracles.Read More »

Quote:
Emmanuèle Bernheim and Alain Cavalier are linked by thirty years of friendship. They are preparing a film based on the autobiographical book of the novelist: Everything went well. She tells how her father asked her “to finish” after a cardiovascular accident. Cavalier proposes to him to hold his own role and that he, be his father. One winter morning, Emmanuèle calls Alain; it will be necessary to delay the shooting until the spring, it is operated urgently.Read More »

summary from filmsdefrance.com :
“For a year, they have let themselves be seen and filmed – a filmmaker and an actor, the president and his first minister: Alain Cavalier and Vincent Lindon. Now you can see them, both in real life and in the fiction which they have created together… “
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AMG :
“French director Alain Cavalier ventures into pseudo-documentary territory with his 2002 film René. Purportedly concocted as a means for Cavalier to help actor Joël Lefrançois lose weight while not making a straight documentary about Lefrançois’ ordeal, René instead focuses on fictional children’s theater actor René (Lefrançois) from provincial France who is undergoing a bit of a personal crisis. Having just been abandoned by his girlfriend, René decides dieting is the only way to win back her love.Read More »

An American sculptor settles in Paris, convinced that this city will be good for his work. However, to survive, he has to sell the New York Herald Tribune at night.

The assistant director on this film was Maurice Pialat.Read More »