Charles Berling

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In the twilight of his life, Jean-Baptiste, a painter who has always lived in Paris, says he wants to be buried in Limoges: “Those who love me can take the train”. So begins a sad, wild and marvellous journey which unites all the people that he had touched during his lifetime – his lovers, lovers’ lovers, ex-lover’s new wives, old friends, casual acqaintances, and relatives. But their shared mourning cannot conceal the heartbrakes, rivalries, jealousies and passions wich all simmer to the surface and will – over the course of the journey, funeral and wake, reach some kind of resolution.Read More »

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 »

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After Calderón and Proust, Comédie de l’innocence is another literary adaptation, this time from the little-known Italian surrealist Massimo Bontempelli. Updated from the last fin de siècle to this more recent time of uncertainty, Comédie de l’innocence’s plot is small but perfectly formed. With Aristotelian rigour it moves from the opening conundrum (a child torn between two mothers), through the complication (the confrontation between the mothers and Ariane’s brother Serge), to a satisfying conclusion. Ruiz, who takes a co-credit as scriptwriter with Françoise Dumas, keeps up the tension, however, with laconic and enigmatic dialogue. When Ariane visits the empty flat of Isabella, a nosy neighbour remarks: ‘I really don’t want to know.’ Ariane replies: ‘There is nothing to know.’Read More »