Synopsis:
‘Mario di Donati, a deserter from the Italian army, lives in Paris under a false name with Germaine, his French lover. When the latter learns about his hidden past, she feels hurt by Mario’s lack of trust in her and she distances herself from him. In despair, Mario surrenders to the law but, at the time of trial, he runs away to join the woman he loves…’
– Guy BellingerRead More »
Martha, an eighty-year-old former Canadian dancer, has been living in Paris for decades. Now losing her head, she is threatened to be sent to an old people’s home. No way. Martha decides to call her niece, Canadian librarian Fiona, for help. Alas, when her relative arrives in the French capital, Martha has disappeared. Worse, Fiona loses both her identity documents and money after falling into the Seine. Now alone in Paris, the young woman is desperate. It is at this point that Dom, a homeless man who lives in a tent on the Île aux Cygnes, unexpectedly comes into her life…, for better or worse.Read More »
Quote:
From Venice to Illiers, a journey into the memory of Proust.
Made for French television on the occasion of Marcel Proust’s centenary.
Guy Gilles’ film freely intersperses documentary language with fiction, embodied in the figure of a visitor in search of the places and faces that Proust loved, from the Illiers-Combray of his childhood to the longed-for Venice that he never got to know.
With the participation of Patrick Jouané, Céleste Albaret, Pierre Larcher
and the voice of Emmanuelle Riva
Collaboration: Jean-Pierre Desfosse, Philippe Rousselot, Gérard Alary, Denise Baby, Prosper Seban.
ORTF production
, Roger Stéphane (broadcast June 17, 1971)Read More »
Gianni and Maretta live for three years a relationship that sees them happily in love. The decision to get married radically changes their lives, impacting negatively on their relationship. Cohabitation and daily routine stifle their passion and restrict the cultivation of their respective interests, fatally distant and irreconcilable.
After clumsy attempts at betrayal, they both realize that mutual love is not gone, but it’s just suffocated by forced cohabitation, and so they save their relationship by resuming the menage as an engaged couple, made of amorous encounters that enrich their lives, but lived far apart, each one at his house.Read More »
Jean-Paul Belmondo delivers a subtly sensual performance in the hot-under-the-collar Léon Morin, Priest (Léon Morin, prêtre), directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. The French superstar plays a devoted man of the cloth who is desired by all the women of a small village in Nazi-occupied France. He finds himself most drawn to a sexually frustrated widow—played by Emmanuelle Riva—a religious skeptic whose relationship with her confessor turns into a confrontation with both God and her own repressed desire. A triumph of mood, setting, and innuendo, Léon Morin, Priest is an irreverent pleasure from one of French cinema’s towering virtuosos.Read More »
Étienne, a married writer, gives a lift to a young hitchhiker called Rudy who is mixed up with a gang of thugs. Étienne takes a liking to Rudy and brings him home, where a strong homoerotic attraction soon develops between them. Étienne also tries to extricate Rudy from his dangerous life in the streets, and seems ready to go to any lengths to achieve this goal.Read More »
Burned-out, over-the-hill actor Giovanni returns to Bologna for the funeral of his twin, Pippo, a wealthy suicide unlucky in love. The family tells Pippo’s mother it was an accident, but there’s a problem: Vanda, Pippo’s one-time fiancée, won’t grieve and refuses to come to the funeral. At a family dinner, Vanda talks about the note Peppo left. Again the family tries to keep mom in the dark. They assign Giovanni to persuade Vanda to keep up appearances. He sees her unhappy relationship with her father, who suspects her of sleeping with a doctor. Why she sees the doctor, how Giovanni and she deal with their mutual attraction, and his rebirth become the film’s focus.Read More »
a title with a comma in the middle for a film divided in two parts. A film in black and white with a dark side and a jovial side. The first part of the title evokes politics, as the story recalls the days of the Algerian War of Independence; the second part represents the mood that hovers over the eminently painful images. There isn’t even a hint of daylight in the freedom of the title. It only lives metaphorically in the darkness and languor of the night. — description by Violeta Kovacsics in the book “Philippe Garrel: Filmmaking Revealed”Read More »
‘Liberte, la nuit’ is not really a political film, or, at least, a film about politics. Its central figures are an aging revolutionary helping Algerians in the anti-colonial war against France, his separated wife, a dressmaker who gives them guns, and his mistress, a French Algerian emigree. Such a set-up might offer opportunities for allegory – white Algeria returning to the aging bosom of the fatherland, and all that. The film’s most dynamic sequence is pure political thriller, an assassination by the OAS, confusingly shot and edited on grainy stock that evokes both documentary immediacy and the whirring of a surveillance camera, complete with exciting car chase. The human relationships – especially the drawn-out separation of Jean and Mouche, are said to be caused by his political activity, while his contact with others has some basis in his ‘work’. Even, as I say, his final escape with an apolitical menial has political overtones; and their idyll is ultimately no escape from history.Read More »