France

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With its giddily complex noir plot and color-drenched widescreen images, Made in U.S.A was a final burst of exuberance from Jean-Luc Godard’s early sixties barrage of delirious movie-movies. Yet this chaotic crime thriller and acidly funny critique of consumerism—starring Anna Karina as the most brightly dressed private investigator in film history, searching for a former lover who might have been assassinated—also points toward the more political cinema that would come to define Godard. Featuring characters with names such as Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, David Goodis, and Doris Mizoguchi, and appearances by a slapstick Jean-Pierre Léaud and a sweetly singing Marianne Faithfull, this piece of pop art is like a Looney Tunes rendition of The Big Sleep gone New Wave.Read More »

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Two young women, marginalised by society, go on a destructive tour of sex and violence. Breaking norms and killing men – and shattering the complacency of polite cinema audiences.

Baise-moi (Fuck Me) is a 2000 French thriller film written and co-directed by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi and starring Karen Lancaume and Raffaëla Anderson. It is based on the homonymous novel by Despentes, first published in 1999. The film received intense media coverage because of its graphic mix of violence and explicit sex scenes. Consequently, it is sometimes considered an example of the “New French Extremity”.Read More »

Synopsis:
Catherine Breillat’s adaptation of An Old Mistress stars Fu’ad Ait Aatou as Ryno de Marigny, and Asia Argento as Vellini, two lovers in 19th century Paris. The two have been passionately involved for nearly a decade, but de Marigny attempts to end their relationship now that he is engaged to Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida), a respectable young woman. As the bride-to-be’s grandmother forces de Marigny to confront his past as a notorious womanizer, the film flashes back to reveal the intense decade the lovers shared. Although de Marigny appears to want to shut Vellini out forever, her passions may be far too much for him to deny.Read More »

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Many great movies are classics. A few stand as landmarks. The merest handful—perhaps four or five in a century—deserve to be called revolutions. Breathless belongs unequivocally in the final category. Since its first screening in 1960, Jean-Luc Godard’s astonishing debut has lost none of its power to thrill an audience or change the way we see the world.

Godard dedicated the film to Monogram Pictures, the company which made the low-rent gangster cheapies that Breathless was drawing on and greatly sending up. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Michel, a small-time crook who kills a highway patrolman. Though on the lam to Italy, he heads to Paris and hooks up with his girlfriend Patricia, a boyish American whose allure is her cool capriciousness. As they talk, make love and lackadaisically dodge the cops, Godard shows them to be the kind of young people that the movies had never before shown—alive in the present tense, oblivious to conventional morality, eager to try on world views like so many hats. Theirs is an instinctive existentialism, and Godard’s leading actors make it almost impossibly glamorous.Read More »

Synopsis:
Frédéric, a shy small-town man, falls in love with Anne, a middle class woman married to Didier, who cheats on her with top model Barbara. Catherine, a very determined woman, is secretly in love with Frédéric and in order to keep him away from Anne, pushes him into Barbara’s arms. After a while, she gives herself to him. On the other hand, Didier is forced to leave the country due to a swindle. Anne decides to follow him but, before leaving, she exchanges a last kiss with Frédéric. Catherine understands she has lost the game. Frédéric remains by himself. Read More »

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Jean-Luc Godard, the unabashed enfant terrible of French cinema, creates a lighthearted, bizarre and atmospheric utopia in Alphaville. Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), an Outland agent, checks into an Alphaville hotel as Ivan Johnson, a reporter from Figaro-Pravda (the first of many unusual alliances). The hotel manager assigns him a room, a Seductress and a bottle of tranquilizers for the evening. A disembodied voice, the synthetic voice of the ubiquitous Alpha 60 supercomputer, announces room availability and incoming telephone calls, and monitors every inhabitant’s behavior. Refusing the services of the ever-obliging Seductress, he briefly struggles with an unknown assailant, but is eventually left alone to study his mission: to locate a missing agent named Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), and the elusive Professor Vonbraun (Howard Vernon), creator of Alpha 60. He arranges a meeting with Natascha Vonbraun (Anna Karina), who knows nothing of her father, and enlists her as his guide through the logically crafted nightmare of Alphaville.Read More »

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Jean-Luc Godard wrote, directed, and edited this mind-boggling comedy. “The Idiot” (also known as “the Prince” and played by Godard himself) has been guaranteed financing for a film, if he can deliver it within 24 hours. But he encounters all sorts of hilarious problems as he attempts to do so. Meanwhile a pop group (Les Rita Mitsouko) works on a new album. (-DVD cover)

With a tip of the hat to Jerry Lewis, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and (for good measure) Dostoyevsky, Jean-Luc Godard wrote, directed, edited and stars in this mind-boggling comedy. The rambling plot involves a hapless filmmaker (Godard) and his attempt to meet a deadline for delivering a film. From there the movie branches out into an abstract, episodic structure. “…engages even as it baffles…The confusion that results, punctuated by glimmerings of understanding, is the point” (A.O. Scott, The New York Times).Read More »

Synopsis
A young woman finds out she is condemned to gradually lose her sight while spending her summer vacation at a beach resort. While her mother Maud has vowed to make Ava’s month of holidays an unforgettable experience, Ava decides to take a another route.Read More »

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The director Gaspard Bazin is preparing a new feature film. For now, he is still in the casting and financing stages. He’s asking the help of Jean Almereyda, a producer once fashionable but now at low ebb, who has more and more difficulties to raise cash for his company. His wife, Eurydice, dreams of being a movie star. Between the two men, a perverse game is starting, Almereyda wishing to please his wife, but the unrepentant seducer reputation of Bazin holds him to require a part for Eurydice…Read More »