Sandrine Bonnaire

‘The Prisons’ continues with Jeanne (Sandrine Bonnaire) leading her countrymen in victorious assaults on the English army. But when she is finally captured and put on trial, she finds both her life and the sanctity of her body at stake.Read More »

A part of Joan of Arc’s life. At the beginning, Jeanne (Joan) has already left Domremy, she is trying to convince a captain to escort her to the Dauphin. It ends during Jeanne’s first battle, at Orleans. Meanwhile, Jeanne is depicted more as a warrior than a saint (all cliches are avoided), with only her faith for strength.Read More »

Synopsis:
With his raw style of filmmaking, Maurice Pialat has been called the John Cassavetes of French cinema, and the scorching À nos amours is one of his greatest achievements. In a revelatory film debut, the dynamic, fresh-faced Sandrine Bonnaire plays Suzanne, a fifteen-year-old Parisian who embarks on a sexual rampage in an effort to separate herself from her overbearing, beloved father (played with astonishing magnetism by Pialat himself), ineffectual mother, and brutish brother. A tender character study that can erupt in startling violence, À nos amours is one of the high-water marks of eighties French cinema.Read More »

Erotic Suspense After Mistaken Identity

In Patrice Leconte’s sardonic psychological thriller, ”Intimate Strangers,” Sandrine Bonnaire portrays a Gallic answer to one of Alfred Hitchcock’s sleek blond women of mystery. Imagine the Grace Kelly of ”Rear Window” or the Kim Novak of ”Vertigo” sprawled seductively on an analyst’s couch, smoking cigarettes and confiding her sexual frustration to a repressed, wide-eyed shrink who is obsessed with her.Read More »

Quote:
Under the Sun of Satan opens to an inherently solemn ritual as a senior priest, Canon Menou-Segrais (Mauric Pialat) shaves a spot on the top of the head of a pensive young priest named Father Donissan (Gérard Depardieu) who, in turn, uses the occasion to express his feelings of profound estrangement and inutility from the practical concerns of their congregation. Acknowledging both his mediocre scholastic aptitude at the seminary that nearly prevented him from becoming ordained, and his indebtedness to Menou-Segrais for his admission into the parish ministry (despite the young priest’s perceivable disapproval of his superior’s spiritual resignation and complacency), Donissan nevertheless declares his intention to request the archbishop for a re-assignment, preferably to a Trappist monastery where he believes that his temperament and secular detachment would be more conducive to their contemplative, monastic life of humble (and seemingly unobtrusive) service.Read More »