While pregnant with her first child, Emma learns that she has breast cancer. Her doctor advises an abortion; recommended treatment is, according to him, incompatible with pregnancy. Her partner, Simon, encourages Emma to consult another specialist, Dr. Morin, who maintains that treatment can be carried out even while she’s pregnant. Emma regains her confidence. The body that had let her down becomes a source of life: now she must fight for two.Read More »
“The odyssey of a young woman who becomes addicted to self-mutilation…” ~EyeForFilm
Synopsis:
Esther (Marina de Van) is a smart, weirdly attractive, professional woman on the way up. She grafts extra hours at work and soon achieves promotion. She has a supportive boyfriend and what most normal people would call a fairly successful living. But she has another agenda.
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Harry knew Michel in high school; they meet again by accident, Harry inserts himself in Michel’s life… and things take a sinister turn.Read More »
Synopsis:
The charmed life of a successful young engineer is thrown into chaos following a decidedly uncomfortable dinner with his powerful boss and the man’s socially scabrous wife in With a Friend Like Harry director Dominik Moll’s twisted, semi-supernatural thriller. Upon relocating to an ultra-modern community in the south of France with the promise of a lucrative position at powerful Richard Pollock’s (André Dussollier) hi-tech firm, Alain Getty (Laurent Lucas) and his wife, Benedicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg), find their life together going better than they ever imagined. Happy in his work and deeply in love with his beautiful wife, Alain relishes his newfound success before a fateful dinner with Richard and his venomously eccentric wife, Alice (Charlotte Rampling), casts a dark thunderhead over Alain’s azure skies. Read More »
Quote:
You cannot help but think of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre during a shot in The Ordeal where the camera spins across the leering, giggling faces of a twisted inbred family and their blood-covered, shrieking victim, and you really cannot help but think of it when they cut to an extreme close-up of the victim’s eye darting nervously back and forth. We’ve seen this movie before, where an innocent (played here by Laurent Lucas) has his car break down in the middle of nowhere. He is taken in by an eccentric innkeeper (Jackie Berroyer), and for a while The Ordeal is an intriguingly freakish character study of an older man falling in love with a younger man, believing him to be his dead wife. But their insinuating dialogue eventually gives way to a sadistic (and familiar) torture tale. Read More »
Quote:
According to ancient mythology, Tiresia was both a man and a woman. Blinded by the rage of the goddess, the gods granted him higher vision. This version of the myth takes place in the suburbs of Paris. Tiresia is a Brazilian transexual of extreme beauty, earning her living as a prostitute, she shares an appartment illegally with her brother Terranova. With his morbid and poetic ideals, he falls madly in love with her, finding no other way to keep her for himself, he decides to kidnap her. Robbed of her daily fix of hormones, Tiresia finds herself slowly turning back into a man.Read More »
Quote:
Philippe Seigner, a charming business school graduate from the French Pyrenees, starts his career in business consulting at the posh Paris seat of McGregor. His first serious task is a delicate one, an audit at the Janson food cans factory in the provinces, which is about to be taken over. As he soon realizes, this will mean sacking about 80 employees, as his boss Hugo Paradis knew from the start. However, his Paris girl friend reproaches him collaborating with ruthless capitalism, as if any of the downsizing could be stopped or mitigated by him bowing out. Nevertheless, as he gets to knew the threatened staff better he considers risking his career when his boss orders him to chose who should go. Meanwhile the factory staff starts realizing what’s about to happening.Read More »
Quote:
Paul and Marguerite are a five years old couple. Their love is strong, deep, tragic… visceral. Paul wants to control things. Marguerite is more free…Read More »
BRENDAN KELLY, The Gazette, Published: Monday, January 15 2007 wrote:
In film and life, all roads lead to Montreal.
Filmmaker Noel Mitrani returned to his place of birth and found home; French actor Laurent Lucas – and the character he portrays in Sur la Trace d’Igor Rizzi – followed their hearts
Sur la trace d’Igor Rizzi, the remarkable first feature from Montreal-based filmmaker Noel Mitrani, is a poetic look at a former French soccer star living in self-imposed exile in snow-covered Montreal. So it’s only appropriate that the film, which opens this Friday, is the result of a collaboration between two guys who, like the film’s anti-hero, made the decision to abandon France and come live here in Quebec.Read More »