Fleeing fame, the writer Anatole Hirsch decides to publish his new book under the name of his cousin, Martin Bassane. This book wins the Prix Goncourt. A film inspired by the story of Romain Gary.Read More »
This is a live action film adaptation of “Too Loud a Solitude” released in the Czech Republic in 1996, one year before Bohumil Hrabal’s death. And there is a big eastern egg in the film that Hrabal played a cameo role in this film.Read More »
A young woman by the name of Jeanne Fortier finds herself the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice
Quote: The first half of the sixties saw a mini-boom of French old melodramas of the nineteenth century.The most celebrated of them “Les Mysteres de Paris” (someone’s reading that book in Cloche’s film) was filmed by André Hunebelle in 1962 with poor results;Riccardo Freda tackled D’Ennery’s “Les Deux Orphelines” (which was made by Griffith as “Orphans of the storm” in the silent era and remade by Maurice Tourneur in the thirties ) and “Roger la Honte” . Maurice Cloche took “la Porteuse de Pain” (= bread carrier)-which he had already filmed in 1949-and succeeded measurably well;the loooong novel was simplified with good results.Read More »
Quote: Post-’68 France as “a curious country” of befuddled fathers and obscured revolutionaries. The middle-aged Everyhomme (Philippe Noiret) is a widowed watch-tinkerer in Lyon, who gets his politics from TV news and “likes to be legal” too much to cross a red light on an empty street. The necessary shock arrives: His son (Sylvain Rougerie) is on the run, having killed a factory security guard. Gallicizing Georges Simenon’s novel, Bertrand Tavernier handles the moment with control, self-effacement, and muted compassion: Noiret’s dazed bus ride back home after being told the news, the activist paraphernalia in the boy’s room (scrawled on the wall is Céline’s dictum about pastoral battlefields) unnoticed by an imploding father fumbling for a bed.Read More »
Quote: La Pointe Courte: How Agnès Varda “Invented” the New Wave
In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’s claim that she had seen virtually no other films before making it (after racking her brain, she could come up with only Citizen Kane). Whether Varda’s assertion was true or the whim of an artist who does not wish to acknowledge any influence, La Pointe Courte is a stunningly beautiful and accomplished first film. It has also, deservedly, achieved a cult status in film history as, in the words of historian Georges Sadoul, “truly the first film of the nouvelle vague.”Read More »
A lone survivor from a British naval ship is obsessed with getting revenge on a German U-boat crew that massacred his shipmates in the water.Read More »
Quote: January, 1920. 350,000 French soldiers remain missing in action. Major Dellaplane tirelessly matches the dead and the wounded with families’ descriptions. Honor and ethics drive him; he hates the idea of “the unknown soldier.” Into his sector, looking for her husband, comes a haughty, politically connected Parisian, Madame Ir├¬øne de Courtil. Brusquely, Dellaplane offers her 1/350,000th of his time, but as their paths cross and she sees his courage and resolve, feelings change. After he finds a surprising connection between her missing husband and a local teacher, Ir├¬øne makes Dellaplane an offer. This man of action hesitates: has he missed his only chance?Read More »
Philippe Noiret plays a rich, Parisian banker whose daughter, Carolina, is kidnapped by a ruthless organization. They threaten to have her abused by the sadistic clients of a brothel they run if Father doesn’t pay the ransom on time.Read More »
