Quote:
At age 50, Eugene Green — who left the U.S. in 1969 to settle in France — proves himself to be the mutant offspring of Robert Bresson and Manoel De Oliveira. First-time scripter-helmer’s exquisite oddity, “Every Night,” shows complete mastery of the austere, formal tradition perfected by his elders, but he makes it his own with bursts of satire and an insistence on crispy anachronistic diction that solemnly honors every last consonant. Pic has been holding its own at the oldest functioning arthouse in Paris since its publicity-free March 28 release, which was announced only via give-away postcards.

The indie effort threw local crix for an ecstatic out-of-left-field loop. Fest programmers should give this odd duck a gander, but Yanks may have to pull teeth to get the director to accompany his pic: Green goes out of his way in interviews to bad mouth his native America as a hopeless cultural backwater.

Updated from a Gustave Flaubert novella posthumously published in 1912, Green’s pic covers 12 years in the lives of its three protagonists, starting in 1967. At 17, two provincial buddies part: Henri (Alexis Loret) is sent to Paris to study for exams; Jules (Adrien Michaux) stays behind to write a play in verse.

Emilie (Christelle Prot), the wife of Henri’s tutor, runs off to the U.S. with Henri. They miss France’s student revolution of May ’68, eventually return to France and go their separate ways. As the years pass, the two men write letters to each other, and Jules and Emilie exchange ardent epistles without ever meeting.

Pic’s incredible over-stylization could have been risible, with lengthy voiceovers, deliberately framed shots of feet and doorways and a sense of visual economy. Though deeply literary, it is at all times completely cinematic and quietly gripping.
Although the two young men barely crack a smile, they do seem to crack the nut of existence. The older Emilie dabbles in so-true-it’s-funny radical feminism en route to finding both herself and inner peace. Deadpan humor about the pitfalls of romance feels a bit like early Hal Hartley — if Hartley made every line of dialogue sound like a phonics lesson.

The cumulative effect of so much stiff ritualistic behavior and strictly pronounced speech — a closing credit thanks the cast “for respecting the French language” — is packed with emotional resonance for those who can accept the venture’s unyielding construct.

Two lead lads are dreamily handsome in their carnal and ethereal pursuits, with Loret a no-nonsense man of action and Michaux more reflective. As the woman, Prot is always fascinating to watch. In addition to beautifully lit and carefully composed interiors, lensing in Paris and Avignon celebrates nature as surely as the script worships the recitative ebb and flow of language.

1.75GB | 1h 54m | 656×572 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/7BFBC1EEA262BE7/Eugene_Green_-_(2001)_Every_Night.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/10710B55ADA3BC4/Eugene_Green_-_(2001)_Every_Night.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Eugène Green – Toutes les nuits AKA Every Night (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
In Correspondences, Eugene Green returns to his familiar themes of interconnectedness, communion, and transcendent love (most recently illustrated in Green’s sublime feature Le Pont des arts) to create a tale of young love in the digital age. Presented as a series of emails read offscreen that are juxtaposed against isolated frontal shots of the anonymous lovers and the (interior) spaces they inhabit, the film also subtly evokes Alain Resnais’s baroque, nouveau roman puzzle film Last Year at Marienbad in its interplay of memory and seduction (or more appropriately, memory as seduction).

522MB | 36m 11s | 608×320 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/B6B183F0AA7EF8D/Correspondances.avi
https://nitro.download/view/BCF839D188E5D9E/Correspondances.srt

https://rapidgator.net/file/2dec7a42755d4c9c96e6de93a33775bc/Correspondances.avi https://rapidgator.net/file/d1cf7cd7aea4a2efb391e2946d5df9eb/Correspondances.srt

Language:French
Subtitles:English

The post Eugène Green – Correspondances (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Some filmmakers have difficulty traveling between the short format and feature films, the former more often than not feeling like exercises, excerpts, or condensations, or the latter, in rarer cases (given the relative death of the short format some 60-odd years ago) seeming simply like brief ideas outstaying their welcome. The aesthetic of writer/director Eugène Green is so clean and simple in this age of image saturation and hyper-abundant kinetics that his “mini-film” Les Signes feels as natural and fluid as his fascinating longer features like 2004’s Le Pont des Arts and 2003’s miniature knight’s tale, Le Monde Vivant. Honing his mise-en-scène to the most essential elements—his actor’s faces, specific objects (like a lantern, cups of cider, and Tintin adventures), small fragmentations (a family’s shoes as they enter their house), and the sea of the port town setting—Green reaches a sublime, tactile atmosphere as weighted as it is in the immensity of meaning within all things and all words as it is light, comic, and limpid in the marvelous stiltedness of its theatre, of the affectation of Green’s deep-believing romantics, and of their silly, admirable assuredness. Like many who have such a unique and pleasing form, with every new work one wants to re-iterate the ways the director envisions his film, but to avoid redundancy I will point the reader to my reviews of Le Monde Vivant and Le Pont des Arts for brief descriptions of Green’s minimalism.

Inspired by a mysterious, glowing triptych by photographer Maitetxu Etchevarria, Les Signs catches the movement towards…something else, of a small family whose fisherman paterfamilias disappeared at sea ten years ago. The mother (Green regular Christelle Prot) lights a lantern in the window facing the harbor each night, and when her older, teenage son (Achille Trocellier) chastises her for giving up the search for his father she replies that she hopes, and her internalization is clearly her way of searching. The son, having reached a rebellious, obstinate age, talks up the town to find an alternative to this father’s possible death, and latches onto the idea that his father never was on the boat that went missing at sea. The youngest son (Marin Charvet)—too young to remember his father or feel invested in the sorrow and interiority of his mother or the energy and frustration of his brother—spends his time solving puzzles, his name for re-assembling broken things (like a vase), and while his mother is wary to leave him alone in the house by himself, fearing she may lose him too, the boy declares his readiness to be on his own. In the face of this deadlock of expectations comes an amnesiac and wayward sailor in the form of perfectly cast Mathieu Amalric, whose lazy eye combines with Green’s affinity for shooting his characters straight on to create a kind of humble sage out of Amalric’s gentle but uncanny expression. Amalric asks the older son if he has listened to what the gulls have to say about his father’s disappearance, and later the mother finally leaves the house only to be kindly affronted by the sailor in a café (where lurks Green and Etchevarria smiling over a Tintin book), and asked if she would recognize the man she has been waiting for after ten years has passed. The family re-assembles back home in the twilight, finding a mysterious package delivered containing Etechvarria’s triptych, and each sees in their own panel their location on their own lives’ path: the young son, left by himself, finally is at home; the older son exists where his father has disappeared to, out in the world in all its mystery and concreteness; and the mother is between the two, aligned towards the unnamed panel, the path connecting the home to the outside world.

Green’s simple tale does not bank on the spiritual revelations that conclude his previous movies, the kind of enlightenment that, in his mise-en-scène is as physical as it is spiritual. Les Signs is a more humble and, if possible, discreet film, that ends on the rare note of discovering not the solution or the resolution, but rather the next step in a path that leads onward. This is of course crucial in a story that surrounds the obsession of an event that took place a decade ago, and Green uses moments as subtle as the late-act shifting in camera focus from the lantern-in-the-window to the harbor outside it to signify this simple, hopeful movement. It is a progress not necessarily past the traumatic event from long ago, but rather towards a growth away from a helpless stasis, forlorn and abstract in the case of the wife, inflexible and utterly material in the case of the older son, and perhaps absent for the youngest, who puts things together but knows not why. Thus, in speech, comes from the sailor the idea of the father going out in the world to become wise and then returning a different man, Etechvarria’s nebulous photographs of paths through the darkness, and the inclusion of Tintin’s exotic adventures that, echoing Green’s Baroque philosophy, marry a protagonist frozen in years and experience but one whose journeys always, eventually return home. It is a charming, idiosyncratic work, as it so richly blends those two qualities most alluring in Green’s films, of an utter clarity in his characters and their lives, and of an unknowable mystery inside them that allows them to take that next step. In Les Signes it is perhaps the most mysterious of all steps, one that is only—but powerfully in that “only”—an acknowledgement that there is a step, and a path, and that life at the moment is not the end but only part of a journey.

255MB | 31m 29s | 720×324 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/26A8B545022195B/Les_Signes.avi

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English hardcoded

The post Eugène Green – Les Signes (2006) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Named for the famous seventeenth-century Roman church Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, which was designed by the legendary architect (and Bernini rival) Francesco Borromini, LA SAPIENZA echoes Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia in its tale of Alexandre Schmid (Fabrizio Rongione), a brilliant architect who, plagued by doubts and loss of inspiration, embarks on a quest of artistic and spiritual renewal guided by his study of Borromini. His wife Aliénor (Christelle Prot), similarly troubled by the crassness of contemporary society – as well as the couple’s lack of communication and passion – decides to accompany him. In Stresa, a chance encounter with adolescent siblings Goffredo (who is about to commence his own architectural studies) and his fragile sister Lavinia upends the couple’s plans. As Borromini’s spirit and the vertiginous splendour of his structures spin a mysterious web among them, within the course of a few days the foursome experiences a series of life-altering revelations.

https://nitro.download/view/7B9F3788F94C2C9/La_Sapienza_SD.mkv

Language(s):French, Italian
Subtitles:English (soft subs), French (soft / for the non-french parts)

The post Eugène Green – La Sapienza (2014) first appeared on Cinema of the World.