Michael Lonsdale

A young tourist is sexually assaulted by two men in the countryside. After she manages to escape, a party of local hunters agree to track her in order to cover up the scandal.Read More »

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Four voices attempt to reconstruct the story of the Vice-Consul of Lahore and Anne-Marie Stretter. The soundtrack is that of India Song while the images take the viewer through the empty rooms and the garden of a ruined palace.Read More »

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The same voyeuristic story, told by two different men: first by Michaël Lonsdale, in a « fiction » version, then by Jean-Noël Picq, in a « document » version. The way the film was shot is worth mentioning: Eustache first got his friend Jean Noël-Picq to sit down with a group of people (including The Mother and the Whore’s Françoise Lebrun) and recount a strange episode in his life: how in the men’s room of a local restaurant, he found a hole in the wall and peered through, finding that he had a perfect view of the ladies’ room. He became a regular patron, and his daily dose of scopophilia turned into an addiction until one day, with some relief, he found that the hole had been plastered over. Then Eustache “remade” his own film in a scripted, 35 mm version, with the critic Jean Douchet as the “director” and Michel Lonsdale in the Picq role. One of the cinema’s great curiosities, A Dirty Story exerts a mysterious – and often uncomfortably voyeuristic – fascination.Read More »

A satire about the French small businessman: A naive, middle-aged and paternal managing director (Mondy), subject to takeover by a wily American conglomerate, becomes besotted with Darc, supposedly the PR man’s niece but actually a callgirl hired as an inducement for the night.Read More »

“Seuls is a film about the symbolic order of love, a sort of fantastic thriller on Oedipus…” ~Francis Reusser

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Jean (Niels Arestrup), the lead character in this psychological journey is torn by a search for his lost childhood, the overwhelming need to love a woman of his dreams (someone he has invented), and a struggle with his latent bisexuality. Jean finds some photos inside an automatic photo station that look like his mother who died soon after he was born. He starts to fantasize about the woman, giving her a name and identity and waiting for her to appear. During this time, he meets Carole (Christine Boisson) and has an affair with her, all the while pretending he has this other relationship with the woman in the photo. Significantly, the couple who introduce him to Carole is childless, and they eventually split up – perhaps a comment on the importance of childhood to the adult world. In the end, Carole discovers that Jean’s “other woman” has no real existence, causing a crisis that finds a symbolic expression as the last scenes close on the story.Read More »

Marguerite Duras’s most celebrated work is a mesmerizing, almost incantatory experience with few stylistic precedents in the history of cinema. Within the insular walls of a lavish, decaying embassy in 1930s India, the French ambassador’s wife (Delphine Seyrig) staves off ennui through affairs with multiple men—with the overpowering torpor broken only by a startling eruption of madness. Setting her evocatively decadent visuals to a desynchronized chorus of disembodied voices that comment on and counterpoint the action, Duras creates a haunted-house movie unlike any other. (-criterion.com)Read More »

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In Paris, a young woman, Louise Haines Pearson, visits her disturbed friend Nena who tells her that she has just written a book on the history of a little girl troubled by her senses, perhaps because of the tyranny of his mother and the absence of her father. Louise recognizes the difficulties of this little girl, being herself deeply affected by the indifference of her husband.Read More »

Synopsis: Julien, a movie director, is on the phase of editing his new film, “Juliette sacrifiée”. Hurried by his producer, he asks for the help of a professional editor. It is Anne, with whom Julien is soon falling in love. During the whole of the movie, both are sitting in front of the editing table, where they listen to music, talk about politics and what movies should and should not be about, make love, and finally end up editing the film as was planned.Read More »

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A group of friends listen as one man tells them a story about a time when, in a small cafe, he discovered a peephole into the ladies’ bathroom and became addicted to looking through it at female genitals. They ask him questions and come to conclusions about sex. This is a filmed, scripted version. Then, the actual person who this happened to relates the same story; this time, however, it is an unscripted documentary, in which the same things occur as in the scripted one.Read More »