Romance

Synopsis:
The sea is at first quite dark for the sailors Aliosha and Yussuf. Adrift, they reach an island where they meet Mashenka, a beautiful girl they both immediately fall in love with…

seagullfilms.com

One of the films revered by French filmmakers such as Godard and Otar Iosseliani, this marvelous picture, a spontaneous and joyful romantic comedy shot at eye-popping locations, stars the delicious Elena Kouzmina as a bouncy island beauty wooed by two young shipwrecked Caspian fisherman. And it’s more fun than Alexander Nevsky.Read More »

Plot summary
A beautiful film which is basically about a man, a piano player, who meets and falls in love with a beautiful and voluptuous woman, who, by some strange procedure, leaves the man unable to move but with a permanent priapism! After some time he becomes sick of it and she relieves his paralysis. Eventually she gets bored and decides to leave, but he can’t take it because he loves her.Read More »

From Criterion

Cultures and families clash in Mira Nair’s exuberant Monsoon Wedding, a mix of comedy and chaotic melodrama concerning the preparations for the arranged marriage of a modern upper-middle-class Indian family’s only daughter, Aditi. Of course there are hitches—Aditi has been having an affair with a married TV host; she’s never met her husband to be, who lives in Houston; the wedding has worsened her father’s hidden financial troubles; even the wedding planner has become a nervous wreck—as well as buried family secrets. But Nair’s celebration is ultimately joyful and cathartic: a love song to her home city of Delhi and her own Punjabi family.Read More »

Lake is an unusual boy: he is a young man with an old soul who discovers he has an odd fixation on the elderly. Realizing that some day, if fate allows, he will be one himself, he is particularly fascinated by old men. He imagines their age to be a beautiful thing and recognizes how these men were once young and vibrant and attractive, as he is now. Although Lake has a girlfriend his own age, named Desiree, he wonders sometimes if his fixation on old men is unnatural and unhealthy – perhaps even sexual. When his mother, who is a nurse, takes on a management job at an old folks home, Lake jumps at her offer of a summer job as an orderly there. Gradually, Lake comes to discover that the old people in the institution are being given psychotropic drugs to keep them in a catatonic state. Lake befriends one old man in particular, Mr. Peabody, who still seems to have some fight left in him. They begin to form a strong bond. Mr. Peabody charms Lake with romantic stories of his youth and …Read More »

Quote:
ONE YEAR, TWO COMPUTERS AND AN OCEAN BETWEEN THEM

One couple, one year apart and two distant cities: Los Angeles and Barcelona. Love is Alexandra and Sergio’s only weapon and their computers their only tools to fight the 10,000 kilometers that stand in the way of their future together.
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synopsis – AMG:
The lives of five L.A. natives intertwine in this romantic comedy from independent filmmaker and former Robert Altman protégé Alan Rudolph. Eve (Lesley Ann Warren) is a bar owner who has sworn off permanent commitments, seeking only the temporary sexual satisfaction of men. Her roommate Ann (Genevieve Bujold) is her polar opposite. In reality, Ann is secretly the radio sex therapist Dr. Nancy Love, but she has little romantic experience despite her profession. Into their lives comes Mickey (Keith Carradine), a recent mental patient who might be an enigmatic pathological liar. Though she’s powerfully attracted to Mickey, Eve’s kept at arm’s length by her lover Zack (Patrick Bauchau), a married man whose wife (Rae Dawn Chong) also finds Mickey irresistible.Read More »

A Winter’s Tale is the second installment in French director Eric Rohmer’s Tale of Four Seasons series. Rohmer’s intention with these films is to “focus on attractive, intelligent, self-absorbed if not entirely self-aware young women who present their dilemmas with clarity and elegance and express their feelings in inspired and witty dialogue.”

Plot: Felicie and Charles have a serious if whirlwind holiday romance. Due to a mix-up on addresses they lose contact, and five years later at Christmas-time Felicie is living with her mother in a cold Paris with a daughter as a reminder of that long-ago summer. For male companionship she oscillates between hairdresser Maxence and the intellectual Loic, but seems unable to commit to either as the memory of Charles and what might have been hangs over everything.
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AMG: Gallic actress-turned-director Josiane Balasko – a Euro cinema mainstay best known for her unconventional romantic lead in Bertrand Blier’s 1989 Trop belle pour toi – helms and co-stars in Cliente, a quirky and offbeat look at the bittersweet life of a male prostitute, which Balasko co-adapted from her 2005 novel with screenwriter Franck Lee Joseph. Eric Caravaca stars as Marco, a French hustler in his mid-30s whose path criss-crosses with that of infomercial actress Judith (Nathalie Baye) in a local park. A nascent divorcee, she’s in the mood for a quick fling, and follows suit with Marco, but this infuriates her sister, Irene (Balasko). Both sexual partners intend to enjoy the liaison as a one-time engagement; for better or worse, it soon repeats itself on multiple occasions and evolves into a deep-seated and very sticky relationship with lots of emotional strings. Significantly, this makes matters very complex and messy for Marco, who happens to be married to hairdresser Fanny (Isabelle Carre) and shares a residence with her, her mother (Catherine Hiegel) and her goth-decked sister (Marilou Berry, Balasko’s real-life daughter)). Fanny, it seems, harbors no knowledge of Marco’s real profession; when she discovers the truth, she systematically attempts to use her husband’s profession to her own selfish advantages in lieu of objecting passionately or leaving him.Read More »

Quote:
Perhaps the film is more personal for Catherine Breillat. Is it a record of her working methods during this period? Her films have always dealt with sexuality and maybe the filmmaker was simply using the medium to express her own thoughts and experiences. I love that; a great deal of why I love the cinema is the auteur theory which states the director is the author of a film; that links in an artist’s work can be found from work to work. Breillat surely qualifies, and I can see how this film influenced her later work. For example, it seems to be a precursor or even a veiled prequel to Sex Is Comedy, an infinitely more insightful look at the filmmaking process and sexual manipulation, and there’s a series of shots showing 2 characters descending a spiral staircase that she would repeat 30 years later in Bluebeard. The problem with Nocturnal Uproar is that it isn’t insightful about the cinema, it isn’t insightful about relationships, and it isn’t even honest about sex. I don’t want to sound perverted but the sex scenes in this film almost all look fake, though it is obvious that actress Laffin is being touched between her legs. The film develops into a woman’s sexual obsession for a man who toys with her, someone who may or may not have alternate intentions with his amours. This is a great subject for a film but it is arrived at a little too late.
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