A few stories are mixed, but all starts with Claire who one day brings back to Gregoire one of his books found at the university. Gregoire is the tenebrous romantic king, and Claire falls in love with him. But there is also Gregoire’s circle, his disturbing neighbour, his maybe crazy grandmother Diane, his former teacher Hugo. And this is mixed up with Sebastien’s attempts to seduce Claire then her mother Anne. And also Claire’s psychiatrist.Read More »
“A strikingly atmospheric work – intense, dark and at times extremely disturbing… ~FrenchFilms
Synopsis:
A few weeks into a preparatory course for entry to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, Delphine witnesses the suicide of a fellow student, Claude. Traumatised by the experience – which is made more acute by the fact that Claude spoke to her a short while before she killed herself, Delphine finds herself drawn to unravel the mystery of the tragic death. She is attracted to Claude’s charismatic boyfriend, Axel, in spite of his cruelty and extreme political views. Axel agrees to have sex with Delphine if she first manages to sleep with Claude’s brother, Bertrand, a cadet who hopes to enter the elite military academy, St. Cyr. Through Bertrand, Delphine finds out more about Claude’s life and the reason for her suicide…Read More »
Synopsis
Rose, a 16-year-old girl who was abandoned by her parents and taken in by social services, and her fiancé, 22-year-old Michel, are enjoying their first great and innocent love affair in Paris in 1979, at the height of the popularity of the Le Palace nightclub. They are part of the trendy bunch who only live for partying and exuberance. At a party one evening, they meet Lucille and Hubert, a couple of fifty-something middle-class bohemians, who will take them under their wing and turn their lives upside down.
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Guy Lodge in Variety wrote:
“One Fine Morning” sounds an innocuous title for a grownup relationship drama — destined, perhaps, to be confused on streaming menus with the George Clooney-Michelle Pfeiffer romcom “One Fine Day” — and in a sense, the mellow, melancholic cinema of French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve is its own kind of comfort viewing. But as with many facets of her filmmaking, there’s a smarter, sadder, more literary undertow to the title’s sunny simplicity. “Un beau matin” in French, it’s lifted from a haunting poem by poetic realist Jacques Prévert, which describes in plain imagery the conflict of facing absence in your life, all while pretending there’s literally nothing there.Read More »
Synopsis:
The story revolves around a brother and sister who are nearing their fifties – Alice is an actress, Louis was a teacher and a poet. They no longer speak to one another and have been avoiding each other for over twenty years, but the death of their parents will force them to cross paths.Read More »
Synopsis : 1959. Guilty of a double-murder, a man is beheaded. At the bottom of the basket that just welcomed it, the head of the dead man tells his story: everything was going so well. Admired priest, magnificient lover, his earthly paradise seemed to have no end.Read More »
Marie-Christine Questerbert’s La Chambre Obscure (The Dark Room) stands apart as a costume drama set in Italy in the 14th century.
Aliénor is the daughter of Gérard de Narbonne, a distinguished doctor of medicine of the 14th Century. She puts the skills she has inherited from her father to good use by curing the king of France of a life-threatening fistula. By way of recompense, she asks to marry Bertrand de Roussillon, whom she has loved since childhood. Alas, Betrand has no love for Aliénor, and rather than consummate the marriage he goes off to fight in Tuscany…Read More »
A shy maths graduate takes a holiday in Dinard before starting his first job. He hopes his sort-of girlfriend will join him, but soon strikes up a friendship with another girl working in town. She in turn introduces him to a further young lady who fancies him. Thus the quiet young lad finds he is having to do some tricky juggling in territory new to him.Read More »
Quote:
Raúl Ruiz’s City of Pirates is (de)composed under the sign of Surrealism, with its trust in ecstasy, scandal, the call of the wild, mystification, prophetic dreams, humour, the uncanny. Given the surprising swerves and disorientations evoking Buñuel and Dalí, and the confidence in a poetic discourse recalling Eluard and Péret, one wonders if Ruiz didn’t elaborate his scenario using the Surrealist mode of automatic writing. Troubled, graceful Isidore – Ducasse and Duncan? – is a purely Surrealist heroine, part Ophelia, Salomé, Bérénice, prone to trances, somnambulism, hysterical seizure, contact with the ‘other side’. Her calm violence links her to the real life murderesses – Germaine Berton, the Papin sisters – exalted by Breton’s circle, and by Jacques Lacan. Indeed, Lacan’s notion of a psychoanalysis in which the analyst stays off his patient’s wavelength, inspired by the idea of ‘surrealist dialogue’ in which paired monologues at cross purposes strike sparks of meaning off each other, underpins the scatty trajectory of Ruiz’s own graphomania, snared this time as the tale of a Pirate’s City.Read More »