Philippe Garrel

  • Philippe Garrel – Le Coeur fantome AKA The Phantom Heart (1996)

    1991-2000DramaFrancePhilippe Garrel

    A hangdog, middle-aged painter falls in love with a tender young college student after he leaves his philandering wife and his children in this romantic French drama. To console himself, the fundamentally bohemian Phillippe finds comfort in the arms of various prostitutes, especially Valeria. It is while searching for her that he meets lovely Justine, the student. Sparks fly and they move into together. Things go well until Phillippe begins pining for his children. This makes insecure Justine terribly jealous and tumult erupts until the aging artist is able to discover the true source of his anxieties.Read More »

  • Philippe Garrel – J’entends plus la guitare AKA I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore (1991)

    1991-2000DramaFrancePhilippe Garrel


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    Review by Alice Liddel

    “J’entends plus la guitare” is dedicated to the memory of Nico, the Swedish model and actress who was director Garrel’s muse, most famous as the blonde Marcello meets at the castle party in “La Dolce Vita”, and the singer with the haunted monotone on the Velvet Underground’s extraordinary “Banana” album. the heroine of the film is a blonde German who, like Nico, turns to drugs – her last appearance is marked by a pun on heroine/heroin (the Velvets’ most famous song), and the Velvet-esque guitar of the title is no longer heard by the hero, or the director. The female is usually signalled in Garrel’s films by music, as if music itself was somehow a feminine principle – the “Je”, therefore, is plausibly the director’s, offering the film as a mea culpa, blaming himself for a death triggered by pure male egotism. Gerard is one of the least likeable characters in European cinema, an emotional vampire who needs to suck the emotional blood out of countless women, leaving them diminished, empty, to save himself from a similar fateRead More »

  • Philippe Garrel – Liberté, la nuit (1984) (HD)

    Drama1981-1990ArthouseFrancePhilippe Garrel

    ‘Liberte, la nuit’ is not really a political film, or, at least, a film about politics. Its central figures are an aging revolutionary helping Algerians in the anti-colonial war against France, his separated wife, a dressmaker who gives them guns, and his mistress, a French Algerian emigree. Such a set-up might offer opportunities for allegory – white Algeria returning to the aging bosom of the fatherland, and all that. The film’s most dynamic sequence is pure political thriller, an assassination by the OAS, confusingly shot and edited on grainy stock that evokes both documentary immediacy and the whirring of a surveillance camera, complete with exciting car chase. The human relationships – especially the drawn-out separation of Jean and Mouche, are said to be caused by his political activity, while his contact with others has some basis in his ‘work’. Even, as I say, his final escape with an apolitical menial has political overtones; and their idyll is ultimately no escape from history.Read More »

  • Philippe Garrel – Elle a Passé Tant d’Heures Sous les Sunlights… AKA She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps (1985)

    1981-1990ArthouseDramaFrancePhilippe Garrel

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    Quote:

    Faceted, fragmented, and oneiric, Philippe Garrel’s Elle a passé tant d’heures sous les sunlights… (She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps) is more exorcism than expurgation, elegy than lamentation – an abstract, yet lucid chronicle of love and loss, death and birth sublimated through textural, self-reflexive impressions, visceral gestures, and metaphoric tableaux. A profoundly personal film dedicated to the memory of friend and fellow filmmaker (and May 68 idealist) Jean Eustache, and haunted by the unreconciled specter of Garrel’s failed relationship with Nico, the film opens to a crepuscular image of a couple – perhaps an actor and his lover (Jacques Bonnaffé and Anne Wiazemsky) as apparent surrogates for Garrel and Nico … more on SFSRead More »

  • Philippe Garrel – Le Bleu des origines (1979)

    1971-1980ArthouseFrancePhilippe Garrel

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    Extremly beautiful avant-garde film by Philippe Garrel, one of his silent ones. Nico, Zouzou and (almost a cameo) Jean Seberg are portraited by the camera with mistical intimacy. Is the last of the seventh garrel’s films with nico, and the last aparition of Seberg on a screen before her death.Read More »

  • Chantal Akerman, Bernard Dubois, Philippe Garrel, Frederic Mitterand, Vincent Nordon, Philippe Venault – Paris vu par… vingt ans après (1984)

    1981-1990ArthouseChantal AkermanFrancePhilippe GarrelShort Film

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    Directors:
    Chantal Akerman, Bernard Dubois, Philippe Garrel, Frederic Mitterand, Vincent Nordon, Philippe Venault

    “Two young French filmmakers, Bernard Dubois and Philippe Venault, had the provocative idea of making a follow-up to the 1964 anthology film, Paris vu par, that became a manifesto for the emerging directors of the New Wave. Unfortunately, the unity of that movement is long gone, and this new project is wildly uneven, ranging from the brilliant (Chantal Akerman’s opening sketch, J’ai faim, j’ai froid, is an entire coming-of-age film compressed into 12 frenetic, hilarious, and ultimately touching minutes) to the intriguing (Philippe Garrel’s Rue Fontaine offers a rare Stateside opportunity to see the work of this acclaimed avant-gardist, whose work suggests a crossing of John Cassavetes with early German expressionism) to the mediocre (the segments by Dubois, Venault, and Frederic Mitterrand) to the unwatchable (Vincent Nordon’s Paris-Plage, certainly the longest 13 minutes in film history). A sad lesson emerges–that the French have no more new ideas than we do–but the Akerman itself is worth it all.” -Jonathan RosenbaumRead More »

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