This 2003 documentary by Francis Girod revisits the town of Sardent, the location for LE BEAU SERGE as well as the site of director Claude Chabrol’s introduction to cinema as a young man. It features interviews with Chabrol and actors Jean-Claude Brialy and Bernadette Lafont.Read More »
Review by Jonathan Rosenbaum:
It’s been a full quarter of a century, but I still harbor fond memories of a low-budget French comedy called Valparaiso Valparaiso, a first feature starring Alain Cuny and Bernadette Lafont that I saw at Cannes in 1973. A lighthearted satire about the myopia of romantic French revolutionaries, it details an elaborate hoax perpetrated on a befuddled leftist–a character so absorbed in the glory of departing for Chile to fight the good fight as a special agent that he doesn’t even notice the political struggle going on around him on the French docks when he leaves. Read More »
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Leon is a tailor and he believes men are coming to see his trollop sister Marie to have their palms read. Then Arlette, a young provincial girl saved from suicide by Marie, comes to live in the apartment…Read More »
A few days of a dandyish French intellectual in his late 20s named Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Leaud), who’s living with and supported by his lover, Marie (Bernadette Lafont); she’s in her mid-30s and runs a small boutique. In the first scene he borrows a neighbor’s car and tracks down a former girlfriend, Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), who’s just started a new semester at the Sorbonne, and tries to persuade her to marry him, only to discover that she’s just agreed to marry someone else. (We and Alexandre briefly glimpse Gilberte with her husband, played by Eustache, toward the end of the film, in the liquor section of a department store.) After hanging out with an equally idle friend (Jacques Renard) at the Deux Magots cafe, Alexandre follows a young woman after she leaves a nearby table, asks for her phone number, and scores; the remainder of the film is devoted to his courting of her.Read More »
“In some ways more obscure and difficult than Jean-Luc Godard, with whom she has collaborated in various capacities since 1972, Anne-Marie Mieville continues to puzzle even as she sharpens her mise en scene. This 80-minute feature from 1997 is the most interesting solo effort of hers I’ve seen, though I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, especially during the third and final sequence. In the first and most impressive sequence, an extract from Plato’s Gorgias is dramatized inside a bourgeois household, with Callicles (Bernadette Lafont) performing various household chores as she quarrels with Socrates (Aurore Clement). In the second, Godard turns up on a theater stage to rehearse a monologue condensed from a passage in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism below a huge photograph of Arendt as a young woman, an image that recalls the opening of Bergman’s Persona.Read More »
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“In a tightly knit rural community, Marie and her mother are outcasts, living in a small wood cabin. Marie is exploited and abused by both her employer, a lesbian landowner, and her oversexed male neighbours, who include the town’s mayor and a seemingly respectable shopkeeper. When her mother is killed in a road accident, Marie decides it is time to turn the tables on her tormenters. She starts to make them pay for her sexual favours, and, thanks to her innate talent for seduction, she soon becomes the wealthiest person in the area. In the end, her neighbours decide that Marie is a corrupting influence and contrive to have her forced out of the village. Marie, however, intends to have the last laugh…”Read More »
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Paul, a middle-class young man, in a break with his sphere, meets a group of wandering vegetarians who live begging; he decides to join them.Read More »
László Szabó is mostly famous as actor : his filmo as an actor is like a best of the so-called french new wave from the early 60s up to now, or something like that…he also directed a very few films himself, in Hungary (his homeland) and in France.
the AMG clerk wrote :
“An enigmatic man, blind in one eye […] is the hit man in this French thriller. The films opens with this man, in dark glasses, walking into a bar and shooting a barkeeper. With the help of an unscrupulous doctor, the gunman has donated one of his eyes to a government official who is sitting in the bar at the time. As the film proceeds, he is shown receiving training in shooting at targets using sound, alone. As the gunman continues his devastating activities, it appears clear that his actions are part of an elaborate conspiracy by high-ranking government officials.”Read More »