Quote:
With its bigger-name cast and audio-visual sparkle, “Saint Laurent” also seems the safer commercial bet for international distribs, effectively the “Coco Before Chanel” to its rival’s “Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky.” Sony Pictures Classics has already snatched it the film off the rack for the U.S., and should be feeling a little more confident than “Yves Saint Laurent” guardians the Weinstein Co. Still, Bonello’s sexier number must gamble on sustained audience interest in a chilly figure whose life — notwithstanding the drugs, desires and debauchery that go with the high-fashion terrain — wasn’t extraordinarily dramatic.

Bonello’s film covers less chronological ground than “Yves Saint Laurent” but goes a little harder on the hedonism, as you’d expect from the heedless director of “House of Pleasures” and “The Pornographer.” Bonello’s script, written with regular Jacques Audiard collaborator Thomas Bidegain, focuses less on Saint Laurent’s troubled romance with life partner Pierre Berge (which formed the spine of Lespert’s film) than on his individual neuroses, insecurities and delusions. As such, it’s a less flattering portrait, with machete-cheekboned Gaspard Ulliel an aloof, glassy presence throughout; he’s a more dreamily charismatic presence than Pierre Niney, the twitchy lead of the last film, though he bears less of a physical or behavioral resemblance to the subject. The upside for Saint Laurent’s admirers is that Bonello’s film reflects more of the designer’s tortured creative drive in its dark onyx surfaces; it’s the slightly deranged auteur portrait that a fellow artist and iconoclast deserves.

Entirely skipping past Saint Laurent’s youth, his early apprenticeship with Christian Dior and the foundation of his relationship with Berge (a fine, under-exploited Jeremie Renier), the film instead begins with the designer at the zenith of his celebrity — coinciding, unsurprisingly enough, with his emotional and spiritual nadir. Somewhat randomly, we open on an addled, depleted Saint Laurent conducting a telephone interview in 1974 — fleetingly recounting his traumatizing Algerian War experience and subsequent electroshock therapy — before rewinding to 1967, where his thriving company hums with high-pressure activity. (Production designer Katia Wyszkop’s pristine white re-creation of the YSL atelier evokes an emergency room more than it does a fashion house, perhaps foreshadowing Saint Laurent’s self-imposed physical decline.)

This moderate rewind is one of several odd structural decisions in the film, which Bonello evidently intends as more of a sensory history than a personal one — though that interpretation doesn’t excuse a rather banal montage that races through his 1968-1971 collections, crassly split-screened with archive footage from the May 1968 unrest and the Vietnam War. Key friends and collaborators are introduced without ceremony, and developed little beyond that. Models Betty Catroux (Aymeline Valade) and Loulou (Lea Seydoux, in what amounts to little more than a cameo) provide muse-like inspiration and vague emotional support, while more time is expended on Saint Laurent’s frustrated sexual dalliance with preening Karl Lagerfeld model Jacques de Bauscher (a perfectly cast Louis Garrel) than on his more lasting, conflicted partnership with Berge.

More detail, surprisingly, is expended on Berge’s deft, thankless management of Saint Laurent’s business affairs, well captured in an extended, busily bilingual scene in which Berge defends the independence of the YSL name (which he touchingly claims as his own) from an American investor (Brady Corbet) wary of the designer’s apparent decline. The Yank has reason to be: The further Bonello’s film delves into the 1970s, the less disciplined the storytelling becomes, frenziedly evoking Saint Laurent’s substance-hazed mental breakdown with recurring religious imagery, CGI serpents slithering across the frame and a homoerotic troupe of singing army legionnaires. Some pointed domestic detail survives the chaos, however: One grimly witty scene finds the designer’s beloved pug pup Moujik fatally strung out on assorted pills found on the floor.

Like “Yves Saint Laurent,” Bonello’s film chooses to omit the 1980s and 1990s, similarly climaxing with the triumphant creative comeback of his Moroccan-inspired 1976 collection — presented by editor Fabrice Rouaud in a fragmented split-screen format that appears to visually cross-reference the designer’s Piet Mondrian period of the previous decade. That’s all well and good, but the decision to intercut this final act with scenes of Saint Laurent (now played with crepe-surfaced weariness by Helmut Berger) in his 21st-century dotage is a misguided one, needlessly cluttering an overlong film that has hitherto demonstrated no allegiance to conventional biopic timelines.

Tech credits, as ever with Bonello, are mouth-wateringly accomplished, ensuring that its subject suffers as beautifully as possible from first scene to last. Cinematographer Josee Deshaies lights the film as shimmeringly in its neon-night club scenes as in more intimate glimpses from Saint Laurent’s gilded apartment, suggesting that no small moment of his life was ever left entirely undesigned. Bonello’s musical choices, meanwhile, range from soaring if over-familiar opera cues to Creedence Clearwater Revival to occasional Moroder-esque synths on his self-composed score.

The clothes, however, are obviously the prize contribution here, with Anais Romand’s wardrobe all the more impressive considering the absence of the YSL house’s blessing. Every garment here is covetable, from Saint Laurent’s own loudly natty tailoring to the iridescent jewel tones of his Marrakech-chic gowns to a simple shift dress created in his studio that he deems “as short, neat and precise as a gesture.” Not one word of that description applies to Bonello’s film, but Yves Saint Laurent also knew as well as anyone where excess was required.

Bertrand Bonello - (2014) Saint Laurent.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	2h 30mn
Size:	2.91 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	1024x556
Aspect ratio:	1.85:1
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	2 463 Kbps
Audio
French 5.1ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/6EF5B5725BCC565/Bertrand_Bonello_-_(2014)_Saint_Laurent.mkv

Language(s):French, English
Subtitles:English

The post Bertrand Bonello – Saint Laurent (2014) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

In a near future where artificial intelligence reigns supreme, human emotions have become a threat. To get rid of them, Gabrielle must purify her DNA by going back into her past lives. There, she reunites with Louis, her great love. But she’s overcome by fear, a premonition that catastrophe is on the way.

La bête AKA The Beast (2023).576p.BDRip.France_VN.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 25 min
Size: 	3.52 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x552 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.221
Audio
#1:  	French 5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/66C9FD77312DB15/La_bete_AKA_The_Beast_(2023).576p.BDRip.France_VN.mkv

Language(s):French, English
Subtitles:English (SRT & ASSA Subtitle Muxed as Optional), French, French SDH (VOBSUB Subtitle Muxed as Optional)

The post Bertrand Bonello – La bête AKA The Beast (2023) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A group of young, multiracial radicals execute a series of terrorist attacks across Paris and then take shelter for the night in a shopping center while a massive manhunt is conducted outside.

Quote:
Bertrand Bonello’s last film, a Yves Saint Laurent biopic, followed the famed 20th century designer from enfant terrible into the 2000s and his doddering old age. Saint Laurent’s fashion may have changed the world, but that world is now being changed by forces far more radical than any of his designs. The enfants terrible of Paris in Bonello’s latest movie, Nocturama, aren’t provocative artists but rather a gang of 20-something Parisian terrorists. Shockingly, despite the ties to radical Islam of the attacks in France over the last year and a half, the terrorism of Nocturama’s youths seem to be enacted without explanation, as if in a cultural vacuum. When originally conceived, this cinematic possibility of Bonello’s clearly had the aim of presenting an abstract action. But since the real world has yet again surpassed the cinema by realizing the horrors originally considered on the silver screen, this enthralling film feels all the more strange by being at once utterly devoted to and disconnected from the moment.

Nocturama.2016.FRENCH.1080p.WEB-DL.h264.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 10 min
Size: 	4.49 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	1920x802 
Aspect ratio:  	2.40:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	4 540 kb/s
BPP: 	0.123
Audio
#1:  	French 5.1ch AC-3 @ 384 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/10FAD1552650A37/Nocturama.2016.FRENCH.1080p.WEB-DL.h264.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/E2488412A559AF6/Nocturama.2016.FRENCH.1080p.WEB-DL.h264.en.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:Dutch,English

The post Bertrand Bonello – Nocturama (2016) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Spiritual disciplines span the spectrum from quiet personal self-reflection to physically militant offensives against the ego that tyrannizes us all. Writer/Director Bertrand Bonello’s latest film On War deals with the latter.

On War is a film about purging—the purging of self, of attachment to the world, and of attachment to assumptions about one’s self in the world. As the characters in the film suggest, it is only through this purging that a person may fully release into the immediacy of joy and pleasure. And it is joy and pleasure, things real and authentic, that our protagonist Bertrand (Mathieu Amalric) is searching for.

On War opens with Bertrand, a filmmaker researching his latest work who, while onsite at a local funeral parlor, convinces the storeowner to allow him to stay beyond closing hours in order to get a better feel for the location. Alone in the store, Bertrand lays in a coffin, which accidentally closes on him and locks. The next morning he is let out by the owner, and, clearly shaken from the experience, which he describes as something akin to resignation into clarity, quickly leaves the store and begins to reevaluate his life. The following night Bertrand meets a mysterious man who, having listened to Bertrand’s description of his experience, invites him to a mansion in the country where investigations into what is required to experience true unfiltered spiritual, mental, and physical pleasure are the main objective.

With the exception of a brief stint back in the world, Bertrand remains at the mansion. From here the film follows Bertrand as he dives deeper into his psyche. People come to take him “home.” People dance. People swim naked. People wear masks. People get shot. At the mansion people both live and die.

The matriarch/patriarch of the mansion is the androgynous Uma played by the forever decadently delicious Asia Argento. In addition to being a spiritual guide for the mansion’s inhabitants she also plays a mean analog synthesizer, the avant-garde music from which she pipes into the forest on the property via speakers hung from trees facilitating meditative states for those soaking up its frequencies. The people living at the mansion are there to change, and while Uma plays the role of mother and father, she too struggles with balancing her role as the leader of a spiritual army, her own femininity, and actually feeling anything when there is a death on the commune. But war, Uma’s chosen path, inevitably leads to death, and Bonello’s latest film deals with death in both its religious and physical dimensions, subject matter that does not always sit well with a passive audience. […]

Although On War does give the viewer quiet a bit to see (a few guns, some raw emotion, some nudity, some blood) so much of the film happens in the gaps, the “What could that be referring to?” moments of the film. You see, On War is not without its Charlie Kaufman qualities. For instance, what is Bertrand reading at the beginning of the film, and why does he keep referring to it? Why does Bertrand, a filmmaker, share the same first name as the filmmaker of On War? Who is the man who introduces Bertrand to the mansion? What’s with the voice over lifted from Apocalypse Now? What’s with all the masks? What’s with that giant dog? All of these questions allow the film’s greatest moments to play out not on the screen (though there are many during the entire 2 plus hours of film), but rather in your mind and in the conversations you will no doubt be having after seeing the piece.

Bertrand Bonello - (2008) De la querre.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2h 6mn
Size: 	1.94 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x552 ~> 1021x552
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 000 Kbps
BPP: 	0.201
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/4589C8B3E39C267/Bertrand_Bonello_-_(2008)_De_la_querre.mkv

Language(s):French, English
Subtitles:English (optional)

The post Bertrand Bonello – De la guerre AKA On War (2008) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Bertrand Bonello’s daughter has just turned 18. But the moment this young adult officially begins to “spread her wings” coincides with a global health crisis. Locked indoors, she experiences life in a state of limbo.

Coma.2022.FRENCH.VOF.1080p.WEB.EAC3.5.1.H264-LiHDL.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 17 min
Size: 	1.30 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 023 kb/s
BPP: 	0.039
Audio
#1:  	French 5.1ch E-AC-3 @ 384 kb/s (FR VOF : EAC3 5.1)

https://nitro.download/view/51D3EC277BF5AA3/Coma.2022.FRENCH.VOF.1080p.WEB.EAC3.5.1.H264-LiHDL.mkv

Language(s):French,English,German
Subtitles:Sorry None

The post Bertrand Bonello – Coma (2022) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Bonello seized on the idea of making a cinematic tribute to Ingrid Caven when he first heard her sing at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, but the portrait he eventually made finds her exploring a more expansive range of performance styles and moods. A former member of R.W. Fassbinder’s cinematic troupe—the two were married for a brief stretch in the 1970s—and the ostensible subject of a fictional biography by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, Caven spends Bonello’s movie singing a rich repertoire of songs, some of them traditional ballads, others non-verbal, and still others verging on abstract performance art. Ingrid Caven: Music and Voice is a showcase for a truly sui generis musician—a sort of cabaret singer for the 21st century—and a respectful tribute to one artist from another.

2.02GB | 1h 38m | 1920×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/633F86E7121B592/Ingrid_Caven,_musique_et_voix_(2012).mkv

Language(s):French,German,English
Subtitles:None

The post Bertrand Bonello – Ingrid Caven, musique et voix AKA Ingrid Caven: Music and Voice (2012) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
According to ancient mythology, Tiresia was both a man and a woman. Blinded by the rage of the goddess, the gods granted him higher vision. This version of the myth takes place in the suburbs of Paris. Tiresia is a Brazilian transexual of extreme beauty, earning her living as a prostitute, she shares an appartment illegally with her brother Terranova. With his morbid and poetic ideals, he falls madly in love with her, finding no other way to keep her for himself, he decides to kidnap her. Robbed of her daily fix of hormones, Tiresia finds herself slowly turning back into a man.

1.89GB | 1h 51m | 1010×546 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/8D581D2095CC72C/Tiresia.2003.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv
or
https://nitro.download/view/5F8BD50FF205151/Tiresia.2003.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.part1.rar
https://nitro.download/view/41C4B979121A1AB/Tiresia.2003.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.part2.rar

Language:French
Subtitles:English

The post Bertrand Bonello – Tiresia (2003) first appeared on Cinema of the World.