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A man entranced by his dreams and imagination is love-struck with a French woman and feels he can show her his world.
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Michel Gondry assembles alternate version of his The Science of Sleep
from cut scenes and B-roll footage.Read More »
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The presences of the exemplary Nouvelle Vague icons Bernadette Lafont and Bulle Ogier in the female lead roles notwithstanding, what cachet 1971’s Les Stances a Sophie has accrued over the years is largely extra-cinematical. Its soundtrack, composed and performed by the legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago … was for many years a much sought-after item among contemporary jazz fans, and with excellent reason. Like many free-music pioneers, the Art Ensemble decamped to Paris in the late ’60s, where there was both a larger and more welcoming audience for its work and at least one pioneering record label (BYG …) throwing studio time at any number of adventurous artists. The Ensemble’s work for this soundtrack finds them folding classical themes and contemporary soul stylings into its already effortlessly eclectic and daring musical bag. “Theme de Yoyo,” with Bass declaiming a critique of the battle of the sexes that’s a raw counterpoint to some of the more politely limned tensions playing out in the film at that point, is an ever-bracing piece that suggests all sorts of post-Brechtian possibilities for movie music—possibilities that really haven’t been too thoroughly explored since. It’s also pretty killer when listened to entirely on its own.Read More »
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La France est notre Patrie (English: France Is Our Mother Country) is a 2015 Cambodian-French film directed by Rithy Panh. This latest film of the director is a story of a failed encounter between two cultures, two sensitivities, two realms of imagination: an encounter which resulted in a colonization not exempt from brutality while it could have avoided wars, chaos and destruction. Primarily based on extracts of archive film shot mainly in Indochina in the early twentieth century until the fall of Dien Bien Phu, this film is a continuation of a cinematographic reflection about time, memory and looking.Read More »
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“In a tightly knit rural community, Marie and her mother are outcasts, living in a small wood cabin. Marie is exploited and abused by both her employer, a lesbian landowner, and her oversexed male neighbours, who include the town’s mayor and a seemingly respectable shopkeeper. When her mother is killed in a road accident, Marie decides it is time to turn the tables on her tormenters. She starts to make them pay for her sexual favours, and, thanks to her innate talent for seduction, she soon becomes the wealthiest person in the area. In the end, her neighbours decide that Marie is a corrupting influence and contrive to have her forced out of the village. Marie, however, intends to have the last laugh…”Read More »
This film was inspired by a chapter from the Quran. It is a post-apocalyptic story set in a world where those that survive, are divided between the remnants of cities and agricultural zones. Both of these factions are ruled by corporations and populated by elites. In the areas called Dead Lands, genetically incompatible immigrants suffer from drought and epidemics.Read More »
Synopsis
Seoul, the present day. Yeong-shin (Im Su-jeong), who works for a publishing company, has been married to architect Hwang Ji-seok (Hyeon Bin) for five years. One Thursday, while he is driving her to the airport for a two-day business trip to Japan, she tells she him she is leaving him for another man. Ji-seok reacts in a muted way, not even asking her who the other man is. Some time later, on the day the other man — photographer Kim Seong-hun (Ha Jung-woo) — is due to pick her up with her things, Yeong-shin and Ji-seok find themselves closeted together in the house as the rain pours down outside from a hurricane that has been causing havoc in the region. And then Ji-seok finds a stray kitten crying on the patio outside.Read More »
Unfinished film by Jean Eustache (1961, or ’63), with Jean-André Fieschi, Chantal Simon, Paul Vecchiali and André S. Labarthe.
7 minutes – No sound
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Premier film de Jean Eustache, librement inspiré d’une nouvelle de Maupassant, inachevé et sans bande son. Ce film retrouvé il y a une dizaine d’années fait l’objet d’une projection inédite. « Un homme invite des amis, pour leur donner lecture d’un texte sur le cinéma dont il est l’auteur et qui vient d’être publié. On pense qu’il s’agit de « Vivre le film », l’article publié par Jean-Louis Comolli dans les “Cahiers”. L’ambiance a quelque chose de très Nouvelle Vague » Cahiers du cinéma n° 523, avril 1998Read More »
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Road movies haven’t been a staple of Québecois cinema. Yet recently, there were two examples and I watched them back to back. One is the very low-key Papa à la chasse aux lagopèdes, a superb odyssey of one man driving north to find himself. A very original movie where there is basically just one character in a monologue with the camera he just purchased. The same François Papineau of that movie would go on to play one of the two main characters in Route 132. He is not well-known, but seeing these two may convince you to look forward to his next project. As they are two here, rather than just one, Route 132 turns to the troublesome nature of male friendship, similar to what Paris, Texas did for brotherly love. Both of these Quebec road movies, as a negative review point out underneath, have very little in term of story to tell. It isn’t Lost Highway or anything like that, it just lack any sort of paradigm, it’s flawed and it flirt with caricature at times, but remain interesting throughout, as are most of Louis Bélanger movies and especially Gaz Bar Blues, it’s more about the characters than the story and the locationsRead More »
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Laura Rossellini, a widow from Rome, vacations on the Algarve coast one hot summer. One day while sunbathing, she finds a wounded man named Robert drifting in the surf on a rubber raft. She takes him home, and, after he is revived, learns his story. As they talk, their mutual attraction grows, until a group of armed men suddenly arrives looking for Robert.Read More »