France

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 »

Before Le Pont du Nord Rivette films Paris s’en va, a short film of approximately 25 minutes. He works with the same actors and the same technical team on both films. Henry Chapier who produced the short: “At the beginning of the ’80s nobody was interested in Rivette’s highly imaginative project Le Pont du Nord. Therefore Rivette came up with a kind of ‘transposition’ of the themes of Le Pont du Nord in the shape of Paris s’en va. Just like a painter in the Renaissance who does a sketch for a future project.”Read More »

Antoine Chapelot, a bachelor in his forties, works in a hardware shop and lives with his mother. Everything changes when he meets Caroline, a teenaged charmer who unwittingly helps him to organize a lucrative real estate scam. While he is on a roll, Antoine decides to pursue the career of a swindler a bit further by persuading a rich family that they had a long-lost American uncle who has just died a millionaire.

Like Deville’s best films, this has an eccentric relationship at the heart of the plot, vertiginous cutting and a dance-like fluidity of texture.Read More »

Synopsis
A mentally-disturbed man takes residence in a halfway house. His mind gradually slips back into the realm created by his illness, where he replays a key part of his childhood.Read More »

Quote:
A young woman visiting Paris, misses the last bus home, finds herself stranded on the outskirts of Paris. Entering a local club, she meets a troubled drug addict.Read More »

Jean-Pierre Melville’s independent and original approach to film-making on titles such as Bob Le Flambeur, Le Doulos, and Le Samourai earned him the reputation of the father, or at least the precursor, of the French New Wave. However, what is less known is that Melville spent eight years of his life between 1937 and 1945 as a soldier in the French army and then the Free French Forces, which he joined after the French defeat the Germans. Having escaped through the South of France to Spain, he became a member of the Resistance and took on the code name of Melville (after Herman Melville, the writer he most admired). Read More »

One of the first films of the French nouvelle vague, this film has been never released. In fact, Jean-Daniel Pollet did not want the film to be made available to the public at all, and it only found it way out of Archives Françaises du Film after the death of the author.Read More »

Quote:
This little-known first film from writer Paula Delsol was not well-received when it was released in France the 1960s. Thanks partly to its over-18 certification, the film was a commercial failure and Delsol only made one other film (although she later did some work for television).Read More »

Quote:
Boldly unconventional and cheerful, that’s how one could describe Babou. Never having cared about social conventions, she is suddenly faced with the realization that her own daughter is ashamed of her and therefore refuses to invite her to her wedding. Hurt in her pride, Babou tries to regain her daughter’s respect by starting anew. She accepts the challenge of selling time-sharing-flats at the Belgian seaside during the off-season, in a desperate attempt to prove her real worth and her motherly love to her daughter.Read More »