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An illustration of the more or less weird people in the nightlife of the revel region of a French town. In the center of the (almost non-existing) plot are barmaid Anita and a reverend. Anita cares for the Caribbean dealer Bobby like a mother, but he’s too cool to listen to her warnings. When he’s caught by the police, Anita has pity for her friends who are without “neige” (snow, probably cocaine) now, and tries to help them out.Read More »
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Andrzej Zulawski’s L’important c’est d’aimer is a film of dishevelled lyricism, bursting with noise and anger; an insane storm-tainted flamboyant opera; a visual symphony with apocalyptic emphasis featuring sleaze-bags, clowns, drop-outs, wimps, bastards, and “puppet shows depicting lives of complete scoundrels and ruined careers.” Where some people will see nothing but a graphic canvas of pain, horror and a bloody parade of violence, others who analyze the darkness will see a call for compassion. This is the story of a fragile woman, Nadine Chevalier, who supports her failure-obsessed companion to the bitter end, and who meets a photographer weighed down by remorse.Read More »
Over four years, Baudelaire worked with 20 middle school students in Saint-Denis, long enough to find the form of a film of which they would truly be the subjects: its characters, its authors and its promise.Read More »
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Elle is an alienating mixture of South American surrealism and the classic Hollywood melodrama of e.g. Douglas Sirk (of whom Sarmiento is a great fan). The husband is in love, the wife is not averse to being loved and yet they are not happy. At least, not in the usual sense of the word. The man is after all rather too much in love to be not a little paranoid and the wife, slightly Hitchcock and fairly nervous, is too carried away by his love to be not a little shocked. He regards her as a match for the Venus of Milo, cherishes her as a work of art and tries to perfect her, with all the obsessiveness that entails. Read More »
IMDb wrote:
A landowner, a politician, a countess, a General and his wife gather in a spacious manor house and discuss death, war, progress and morality. As time passes by, the discussion becomes more serious and heated.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 »
Jacques Laurent made pornographic films in the 1970s and ’80s, but had put that aside for 20 years. His artistic ideas, born of the ’60s counter-culture, had elevated the entire genre. Older and paunchier, he is now directing a porno again. Jacques’s artistry clashes with his financially-troubled producer’s ideas about shooting hard-core sex. Jacques has been estranged from his son Joseph for years, since the son first learned the nature of the family business. They are now speaking again. Joseph and his friends want to recapture the idealism of 1968 with a protest. Separated from his wife, Jacques strives for personal renewal with plans to build a new house by himself…Read More »
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At the time of Tunisian independence, owners of large boats decide to sell, while many small fishermen soon find themselves without work. Their wives then decide to pool their gold rings to sell them and thus buy boats.Read More »
Tina is a young warehousewoman in a supermarket. She is in love with Fred but still lives at her mother Nadine’s. When Nadine dies, Tina looks for meeting her father Ludovic, who she never knew. But she first meets her half-sister Lise, and Constantin, the unusual Ludovic’s lawyer.Read More »