Synopsis:

Histoire d’eaux (Bernardo Bertolucci) – A whimsical, cross-cultural melding of east meets west romantic comedy presented in highly fractured (if unremarkable) ellipses that chronicle the couple’s chance encounter, marriage, extramarital temptation, and bizarre separation.

About Time 2 (Mike Figgis) – Multichannel split screening in the vein of Timecode, sometimes converging towards the encounter, other times intersecting temporal planes between childhood and adulthood, life and death. At each transection, the incompleteness of connection, the failure of intimacy, the painful awareness of intranscendable distance.

One Moment (Jirí Menzel) – Poetic, affectionate, lyrical, and elegy for actor Rudolf Hrusinsky composed of a wordless montage of slowed film footage spanning Hrusinsky’s entire career that embodies the human experience: toil, rest, education, romantic love, rejection, desire, aging, frailty. A recurring interstitial black screen with the words “ten minutes” becomes a constant reinforcement of transience, a career and life distilled to the precious few minutes of the film, a reflection of its brevity.Read More »

Synopsis
Tinto Brass scored his first major international success with this shocking but stylish tale of decadence in the Third Reich, inspired by a true story. Madame Kitty (Ingrid Thulin) is the proprietor of one of Berlin’s most luxurious brothels, where many members of the Nazi high command are her regular customers. Kitty is approached by Helmut Wallenberg (Helmut Berger), an S.S. official who orders her to shut down her business and act as his partner as he founds a new bordello, which will exclusively cater to the elite of the Nazi Party and the German military. Unknown to Kitty, Wallenberg’s brothel has been staffed entirely by women recruited by the S.S. for their loyalty to the Reich, and each room has been equipped with secret recording devices, which will allow Wallenberg and his staff to not only gather blackmail material against troublesome officers, but to discover who might be expressing disloyal thoughts about Hitler’s regime when their guard is down. Margherita (Teresa Ann Savoy), a pretty young prostitute working for Kitty, is especially devoted to both her job and her country, but when she falls in love with Biondo (John Steiner), a German officer and frequent customer who has grown disillusioned with both the war and National Socialism, she discovers the true purpose of “Salon Kitty,” and sets out to destroy the operation, with Kitty’s help. Both a scandal and a success in Europe, Salon Kitty initially played the exploitation circuit in the United States in an edited version titled Madame Kitty, though the shorter version still earned an X rating.
~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
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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 »

One of the very first prison escape movies, Grand Illusion is hailed as one of the greatest films ever made. Jean Renoir’s antiwar masterpiece stars Jean Gabin and Pierre Fresnay as French soldiers held in a World War I German prison camp, and Erich von Stroheim as the unforgettable Captain von Rauffenstein.Read More »

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A man who thinks he’s found an easy ride through the Army during World War I has his world turned upside down when facial injuries render him unrecognizable in this wartime drama. In the summer of 1914, Adrien Fournier (Eric Caravaca) is an engineer conscripted into the French Army, where he is made a lieutenant and assigned to join a group of soldiers helping to design and build a bridge to move troops near the front lines. While scouting a suitable location for the bridge, Fournier and his fellows are caught in the middle of an attack, and a shell explodes in his face. Fournier survives the attack, but while his limbs and his body suffer only minimal damage, his face is torn to shreds — only landing in the mud prevents him from bleeding to death (the dried muck seals off a number of key blood vessels severed by the blast). It is some time before Fournier can be moved to an Army hospital, and he cannot talk through his ruined mouth, communicating with notes scratched onto a small chalkboard. Fournier finds himself in a special hospital wing for officers who’ve suffered severe injuries (a relatively comfortable area a good bit different from the crowded and spartan wards for common foot soldiers), and as a dedicated surgeon (Andre Dussollier) struggles to rebuild Fournier’s face with the primitive means available to him, the once-handsome engineer ponders an uncertain future. Commiserating with Fournier are Alain (Jean-Michel Portal), his best friend from college; Pierre (Gregori Derangere) and Henri (Denis Podalydes), a pair of fellow officers also suffering facial injuries; and Anais (Sabine Azema), a patient and warm-hearted nurse who brings hope to the hospital’s most severely injured men. La Chambre Des Officiers was screened in competition at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.
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Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a progressive degenerative disease found in individuals who have been subjected to multiple concussions and other forms of head injury. A variant of the condition, dementia pugilistica (DP), is primarily associated with boxing. CTE has been most commonly found in professional athletes participating in American football, ice hockey, professional wrestling and other contact sports, who have experienced head trauma, resulting in characteristic degeneration of brain tissue and the accumulation of tau protein. Individuals with CTE may show symptoms of dementia such as memory loss, aggression, confusion and depression which may appear within months of the trauma or many decades later. (Wikipedia)
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Having trodden the path towards ever-increasing obscurity in the 1990s, the eternal maverick of French cinema, Jean-Luc Godard made a surprising come-back with Éloge de l’amour, his first major theatrical release outside of France for well over a decade. More sophisticated and mature than Godard’s increasingly abstract and inward-looking works of the 1990s, it is a film which manages to capture the essence of Godard’s cinema (his political concerns, his love of character, his enthusiasm for cinema and literature, to say nothing of his near-pathological contempt for mainstream cinema). At the same time, it is a challenging work, packed with content whilst employing a minimalist approach reminiscent of Robert Bresson (another great director who is often referred to in the film).
The film is divided in two contrasting parts. It begins with an author’s seemingly doomed attempts to realise a ‘project’ (perhaps a film, but we cannot be certain of this). This part of the film is shot beautifully in black-and-white, almost as a sombre elegy to monochrome cinema. This includes some stunning night shots of Paris, immediately evocative of the Nouvelle Vague cinema of the 1960s in which Godard played such a major part. Two thirds of the way into the film, the mood and style change suddenly, as if we have been propelled into a dream. Thanks to the marvels of the latest digital technology, the images suddenly take on an otherworldly form, with overly saturated colour and some occasional visual distortions.
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While the official jury opted for a long German joke, the deliberation for the FIPRESCI award in Stockholm transpired in, literally, a matter of seconds; the choice was that clear. As our citation states, “Elle est des nôtres” is an ambitious and extremely promising debut, a moving symbosis between its director, Siegrid Alnoy, and her lead actor, Sasha Andrès. Titled after a populist French song (and thus poorly translated to English as “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow”), “Elle et des nôtres” resonates with a cultish ring of unwanted belonging; she is one of us, she is one of us. In a way, Siegrid Alnoy’s first feature, which premiered at the Critics Week earlier this year at Cannes – and has proven to be one of that awful festival’s true discoveries – is about possibly the most banal yet damaging cult of them all: human society in the early 21st century. Her main character, Christine Blanc (musician Sasha Andrès, remarkable in her first feature film role) is appropriately named: she is a blank. Perpetually clothed in the same red business suit, Christine toils in limbo as a temp for bosses who don’t know her name, aspiring to full-time employment and social acceptance in her suburban Annecy environment, all indistinct malls, glass office walls and stifling sterility, approaching her daily interactions with the false veneer of politeness.Read More »

Soured on life, Mr. Clay decides to play games with the lives of others. He decides to make the “immortal” legend of a sailor seducing a rich man’s wife come true and even picks the sailor himself…Read More »