Gérard Meylan

  • Robert Guédiguian – Mon père est ingénieur AKA My Father Is an Engineer (2004)

    2001-2010DramaFrancePoliticsRobert Guédiguian

    “…It began with the a couple much like Joseph and Mary, only in a modern French setting. This fable continued for a little longer, until it became revealed that it was a story being read to a near-catatonic woman by an older lady. The younger of the women turns out to be Natasha, a pediatrician amongst the poor in Marseilles, and a political activist. She is the central character, and the rest of the film delves into her story, through flashbacks, and the contradiction that she represents.Read More »

  • Robert Guédiguian – Le voyage en Arménie AKA Armenia (2006)

    2001-2010DramaFranceRobert Guediguian

    Barsam, Anna’s father, is seriously ill. Before he dies, he would like to bequeath something to his daughter: a sense of doubt. As he flees to Armenia, he leaves several clues in his wake so that Anna can come after him. For Anna, this journey she is obliged to make in an unknown country, becomes what her father wanted it to be: an initiation, a sentimental journey, a second adolescence. She finds him in a little village, lost in the Caucasian mountains, seated dreaming under a blossoming apricot tree. She will come to doubt her identity, her relationships and her commitments.Read More »

  • Robert Guediguian – La Ville est tranquille AKA The Town Is Quiet (2000)

    1991-2000DramaFranceRobert Guediguian

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    From Stephen Holden review in NYT: “In his unsettling urban panorama, “The Town Is Quiet,” the director Robert Guédiguian invests the French port city of Marseille with the same epic sense of drama that infused Robert Altman’s “Nashville.” Raw, wrenching and more starkly tragic than Mr. Altman’s satire, “The Town Is Quiet” evokes a similar vision of a city as a teeming organism in violent, spasmodic flux.
    Like “Nashville,” the film is a sprawling mosaic of interlocking stories whose characters run the social gamut, from right-wing upper- class politicians to young North African immigrants to blue-collar dock workers. As much as the director grasps the anxieties of the city’s well-heeled establishment, his sympathies lie with the sufferings of its underdogs, the struggles of its working class and the dreams of newcomers pouring into the city through its teeming harbor. If his identification with the common people recalls Frank Capra, the go-for-broke passion with which he expresses that vision is closer to Pier Paolo Pasolini.”Read More »

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