Alain Cavalier

AMG :
“French director Alain Cavalier ventures into pseudo-documentary territory with his 2002 film René. Purportedly concocted as a means for Cavalier to help actor Joël Lefrançois lose weight while not making a straight documentary about Lefrançois’ ordeal, René instead focuses on fictional children’s theater actor René (Lefrançois) from provincial France who is undergoing a bit of a personal crisis. Having just been abandoned by his girlfriend, René decides dieting is the only way to win back her love.Read More »

An American sculptor settles in Paris, convinced that this city will be good for his work. However, to survive, he has to sell the New York Herald Tribune at night.

The assistant director on this film was Maurice Pialat.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘The son of a French industrialist, Clément is a right wing extremist who belongs to a secret militant right wing organization that uses whatever means necessary, including violence, to achieve its goals. His wife Anne, a former German actress who gave up her career to be the doting wife, knows somewhat of his extremist views, and suspects he would indeed kill if need be as witnessed by what she finds hidden in their house. He often treats her poorly, especially out in public as she maintains the façade of her former celebrity, which he believes is her acting like a whore. Regardless, she is compelled to stay in the marriage. After he and a right wing colleague assassinate a Communist figure, that assassination which goes slightly awry, Clément and Anne hide out in the country home of Clément’s childhood friend, Paul, who knows nothing about Cléments extremist views. Paul is a democrat and pacifist. Clément is forced to leave to pursue a mission, leaving Anne behind.’
– HuggoRead More »

Synopsis
A father-daughter relationship is melded, strained, and deepened by a shared angst: the grandmother in the family left her home by train and never arrived at her destination. The father Pierre (Jean Rochefort) is distraught that the police could basically dismiss the issue as inexplicable, and he decides to retrace on foot the voyage his mother should have made. His daughter Amelie (Camille de Casablanca) goes with him, and the story evolves as the two walk along the train tracks, searching in the nearby terrain and bushes for any evidence that might point to what happened. Along the way, their once antagonistic and distanced relationship (Amelie is a student, her father is a picture-restorer) begins to work itself out…Read More »

the AMG clerk wrote :

“Exploring a dystopian future which has parallels to those found in Brazil, Fahrenheit 451, and 1984, this film, tells of a place where a military junta has taken control and requires people to think, speak, and act in precise ways: anyone who fails to do so is killed. The story is told entirely without the use of spoken dialogue. Symbolic imagery replaces much of what would have been spoken in a narrative, establishing the situation and setting. In the story, two brothers are part of an underground organization opposed to the totalitarian regime. Members of the underground identify themselves using pieces of torn photographs. Reviewers found that the story is told intelligibly and quite swiftly, despite the absence of dialog, but is not quite lively enough to satisfy action buffs.”Read More »

The experience of living through two periods of depression and the quiet expectation of a third has endowed a filmmaker with the capacity to perceive the true beauty of life and to capture it on film. He films everything he sees, without favour and without preference, providing it awakens within him a feeling of love. His only worry is that he feels he may have lost some part of that essential quality of his art: innocence…Read More »

Review from the New York Times website, by Vincent Canby :
“Thérèse”, Alain Cavalier’s cool, unsentimental, astonishingly handsome consideration of the life of St. Therese of Lisieux (1873-1897), is a far cry from “The Song of Bernadette.” Here are no heavenly choirs, no visions bathed in celestial light, no skeptics suddenly transformed into believers by miraculous, not otherwise explicable phenomena. Instead, “Thérèse” is resolutely objective. It examines the religious faith and exaltation of Thérèse Martin, later to be known as the Little Flower of Jesus, in the pragmatic way with which she herself seems to have accepted the experience of her conversion. As played – radiantly and with a good deal of humor – by Catherine Mouchet, Thérèse remains a mystery not to be analyzed but to be accepted as a fact of church history.Read More »