Olivier Assayas

  • Olivier Assayas – Paris s’éveille (1991)

    1991-2000DramaFranceOlivier Assayas

    An ARTE chanell broadcast. Film quality is very good though. This is one of the first films by Assayas, featuring the great Jean Pierre Leaud. Enjoy.

    The story: Nineteen-year-old Adrien comes back to his father’s flat to live; the two haven’t seen each other in three years. Clement has a teenage girl living with him who is using heroin. Louise, the girl, at first rejects Adrien, then later falls in love with him. An unstable situation becomes worse as we learn that Adrien is sought by the police for theft.Read More »

  • Olivier Assayas – Boarding Gate (2007)

    2001-2010FranceOlivier AssayasThriller

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    Quote:
    Assayas has a fondness for casting striking leading ladies, such as Maggie Cheung (IRMA VEP, CLEAN) and Connie Nielsen (DEMONLOVER), and Argento’s role in BOARDING GATE fits neatly alongside these in the director’s oeuvre. The early, dialogue-heavy scenes give Argento and Madsen plenty of time to establish their tawdry relationship, but when Assayas transports the action to Hong Kong, the movie takes a different turn as the director sets up some nerve-jarring chase sequences. The director infuses the movie with all his usual visual flair–the shaky, hand-held camera work and dimly lit sets perfectly reflect the seedy nature of Assayas’s subject matter–but BOARDING GATE will mostly be remembered for Argento’ s supremely confident performance.Read More »

  • Olivier Assayas – L’Eau Froide AKA Cold Water (1994)

    1991-2000CultDramaFranceOlivier Assayas

    Quote:
    Gilles and Christine a boy and a girl live in the outskirts of Paris, their families are ineffective and distant and they lead a purposeless life. They steal some records in a supermarket but she is caught and sent to a nursing home by force by her parents. She escapes and follows Gilles to a house where some other youths live. They then decide to go south: Christine has been told there is a commune there, where artists live. So they head south sleeping rough…Read More »

  • Olivier Assayas – HHH: Un portrait de Hou Hsiao-Hsien (1997)

    1991-2000DocumentaryFranceOlivier Assayas

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    Synopsis

    A documentary on the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien that explores the complexities of political and social life in Asia and how it affects his films. Hou returns to the setting of his youth to talk to childhood friends and discuss his films. He visits old neighborhoods, film locations, and favorite haunts. Clips from the director’s work are interspersed with colleagues’ comments on Taiwan’s new wave film history and the famed director’s place in it.Read More »

  • Olivier Assayas – Irma Vep (1996)

    1991-2000DramaFranceOlivier Assayas

    Quote:
    As much as Olivier Assayas resists having his themes and styles pinned down, one is tempted to put Irma Vep at the center of the French filmmaker’s shape-shifting oeuvre. A virtually ad-libbed project—written, shot, and edited, like Wong’s Chungking Express, in a creative rush between larger productions—it uses a gallery of frazzled characters to crystallize many of Assayas’s obsessions and, casually and boldly, makes the medium itself the most frazzled character of all. Appropriately, the setting is a hectic Parisian movie shoot in which director René Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud), once respected but now shaky and befuddled, plans to remake Louis Feuillades’s 1915 serial Les Vampires. Read More »

  • Olivier Assayas – “Carlos” (2010)

    1991-2000CrimeDocumentaryDramaFranceOlivier Assayas

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    The story of Venezuelan revolutionary, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez

    Review:
    A television production in format but not form, Olivier Assayas’ ambitious Carlos spans many years and many hours in recasting the life story of Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal. With a script that hews closely to the facts of the life of Illch Ramírez Sánchez (who adopted the “Jackal” moniker once he became a revolutionary), this action-oriented drama finds its talented director in territory that he recently explored with his similarly themed, but entirely fictional, works Boarding Gate and demonlover. Just as those two movies depicted espionage as a globalized phenomenon, Calros shows the international face of terrorism. Like those movies, this globe-trotting epic has as many scenes set in anonymous airports as in identifiable cities. Even more peculiarly, though, like those genre exercises, Carlos offers a kinky combination of sex and guns that, making this more titillating and exciting than standard biopic fare.Read More »

  • Olivier Assayas – L’enfant de l’hiver AKA Winter’s child (1989)

    1981-1990DramaFranceOlivier AssayasRomance

    Synopsis:
    Feckless aspiring architect Stéphane leaves his pregnant girlfriend for theater designer Sabine; Sabine in turn vainly attempts to overcome her violent obsession with an actor in her theater company. A game of emotional chutes and ladders ensues as these two nearly-lost souls awaken to their true feelings and futilely attempt to regain their former lovers. –InbaselineRead More »

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