Innocence gives way to experience. Two girls and two boys, probably about 14 or 15 years old, play a game of truth or dare. The questions and the challenges deal with sex; it’s innocent and harmless, but at each turn, each youth tries to raise the ante. Then, Paul gives a dare to Rose, and the result brings on a sudden and complete silence.Read More »
PopMatters Review :
Renowned French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse is best known for his brilliant 1956 film, The Red Balloon, winner of both an Oscar (for screenplay) and the Palme d’Or award at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. It is a short, whimsical and adventurous children’s fable about a young Parisian boy who happens upon a large, seemingly lost, red balloon and the playful, friendship, love, and dependency that develops between the two. The Red Balloon, while simple in concept, is a story suffused with the expansive wonder and pure innocence of a child’s imagination.Read More »
Subway is a 1985 French film directed by Luc Besson, starring Isabelle Adjani and Christopher Lambert and is part of the Cinema du look movement.
Having stolen some compromising documents from a powerful and successful entrepreneur/gangster at a party, a man known as Fred (Lambert) escapes from the police and takes refuge in the underground world of the Paris Métro stations and tunnels. There he joins the dwellers and befriends several colourful characters, including others who are living under the subway to avoid police arrest. While the gangster’s henchmen try to find Fred, he develops a romance with the gangster’s young trophy wife Héléna (Adjani). She had originally invited Fred to the party featured at the opening of the film, and is bored with her gilded-caged life.Read More »
“Wind From the East” (“Le Vent D’Est”) is a very deep and highly political discussion about communism, capitalism, art, revolution, intellectualism, Maoism, USSR, tradition, paradigms, poetry… It’s hard to put it in terms of “it’s about…”, since the sequence of images is not based in any form of traditional narrative. In fact, it’s the very opposite of it, its essence sprouting from the need of subversion, a need directly connected to the social/historical/political/artistic context of the 60’s and 70’s: to show things in a different way leads the viewer to see differently, therefore to think differently. A experimental cut, poetic even, given the metaphorical quality of the images. The frontiers of film language fades and encounters those of other art forms, not to weaken the film unity nor its message, but to strengthen them both.Read More »
Synopsis:
Charles is wealthy, a French venture capitalist in the 1830s; he’s also an aristocratic assassin, prompting duels for political, monetary, and sexual gain. At his aunt’s, he meets Madame Mathilde LeRoi, a virtuous and beautiful woman, and he determines to seduce her. Along the way, his lust and game playing give way to love. One of his partners in crime and seduction, a decadent marquise, determines to break Mathilde’s spell over Charles, sending her a forged letter that begins a spiral of tragedy.Read More »
Synopsis:
“A near-fatal collision between a car and a motorcycle brings about the happy reunion of Lise Tanquerelle, a busy career woman, and Antoine Lemercier, a professor of Greek at the Sorbonne. Although it has been many years since they last saw each other, in the halcyon summer of their college days, Lise and Antoine still have fond feelings for one another. Unfortunately, Antoine loathes the police with the passion of a red-blooded anarchist and Lise isn’t sure how to break the news to him that she is a police commissioner. Before she can resolve this dilemma, Lise is drawn into an investigation into the brutal killing of a former minister…”
– Films de FranceRead More »
Quote:
A slut, a star, a stud and a teen all walk into an orgy… If you think there’s a punchline to this joke, then you haven’t yet seen You and the Night (Les Rencontres d’apres minuit), a visually exquisite, occasionally hilarious, and intermittently trying meditation on sex, love, dreams, death, camp and kitsch that marks a promising feature debut from French filmmaker Yann Gonzalez. Picture The Breakfast Club remixed by Jean Cocteau, Paul Morrissey, Dario Argento and Peter Greenaway, and you’ll get an inkling of what this avant-garde item has in store.Read More »
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Jean-Luc Godard’s densely packed rumination on the need to create order and beauty in a world ruled by chaos is divided into four distinct but tangentially related stories, including the attempts by a young group of idealists to stage a play in war-torn Sarajevo and an elderly director’s efforts to complete his film.Read More »
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During the opening credits of Barbet Schroeder’s fable La Vallée, the camera swoops over a mysterious mountain range dotted with trees. The landscape glows with an eerie greenish tinge. Most of the view is obscured by thick clouds. Meanwhile, the original musical score by Pink Floyd sets an ominous tone, and a voiceover narrator tells the myth of a valley hidden by veils of mist. Later in the film we learn that the mountain range is one of the last uncharted landmasses in the world. Even on maps, large portions of the mountains are left white. Although the mountains have been explored, none of the explorers who made it to the top of the range and found the valley have returned. Not only is the journey treacherous, but local mythology claims that once the explorers find the valley they never want to leave. For the valley is paradise, and to leave paradise would bring down a curse on their souls.Read More »