After 25 years of married life, Julien and Clemence Bouin have ended up hating each other. Living in a dilapidated house soon to be demolished, their lives are filled with bitterness and regret for the happy past both have lost. When Julien adopts a stray cat and smothers it with affection, Clemence’s suppressed resentment turns to hatred…Read More »
gaze.ie wrote:
Bambi is the story of Marie-Pierre Pruvot, born Jean-Pierre in a small village in the former French colony of Algeria. She struggled in her early life as a boy but found a way out of her colonial life when a Parisian cabaret show came to town. Encouraged and enchanted, she moved to Paris, assumed the stage name of ‘Bambi’ and began her life as a female cabaret star.
GAZE veteran Sébastien Lifshitz lovingly tells her story using long interviews with the charismatic performer, stunning scenes of her return to Algeria and captivating old Super-8 footage from Marie-Pierre’s own collection.
Having overcome a difficult childhood and a tough gender transition, when surgery and hormonal treatments were still in their infancies, ‘Bambi’ is now a radiant woman in her late seventies and one of the most charismatic and engaging people you will ever seen on screen.
Winner, Teddy Award for Best Documentary, Berlinale 2013Read More »
A full decade ahead of the New Wavelet Christian Jacque, Louis Jouvet and a belle equipe were showing the Godards and Truffauts how the Big Boys do it and neither Godard nor Truffaut ever made anything even remotely as good as this and Godard never will. It all comes together like clockwork from Henri Jeanson’s caustic script, written at times with a quill dipped in vitriol, to Christian Jaque’s perfect direction which coaxes performances close to perfection from Louis Jouvet on down. Ludmilla Tcherina is especially effective in her very first film which gives her lots of chances to remind us that she was first and foremost a great ballerina and Francois Perier shines as the callow youth besotted with her to the point of attempted suicide. Louis Seigner was still popping up fairly regularly in films at this time (1946) and etches a standout portrait of a ruthless businessman prepared to sacrifice his son on the altar of Mammon and let us not forget Marguerite Moreno adding yet another unforgettable portrait to her gallery of grotesques.Read More »
Sokol and Lorna, two Albanian emigrants in Belgium, dream of leaving their dreary jobs to set up a snack bar. They need money, and a permanent resident status. Claudy is a junkie – he needs money to satisfy his addiction. Andrei, the cigarette smuggler, must hold up for a while outside Russia; he has loads of money. Fabio, the Italian taxi driver and aspiring gang boss, elaborates a clever scheme: he will pay Claudy to marry Lorna so that she acquires a Belgian citizenship. Then she is to re-marry Andrei, who will in this way obtain the coveted EU passport – and pay a hefty price to Fabio and Lorna for the service. Like all plans, this one will not survive the contact with reality.Read More »
Synopsis:
Pierre (Pierre Richard-Willm), a young lawyer, has enormous debts due to his mistress Florence (Marie Bell), and her whims of luxury life. Pierre has gone too far and put the family firm in jeopardy. They ask him to expatriate. To avoid scandal, Pierre joins the Foreign Legion. In Morocco, near the desert, Pierre goes with his comrades of the Legion to a bar-restaurant-brothel, owned by a shady character, Mr. Clement (Charles Vanel). Clement lives more or less with Ms.Blanche (Françoise Rosay) who is a fortune teller with cards, as a hobby. But Clement is also after his girls now and then. Pierre is still obsessed with Florence but he meets Irma (Marie Bell), one of Clement’s girls, who is the double of Florence except for hair color. Irma has had an accident and has lost part of her memory at a certain point of her recent past, and Pierre slowly persuades himself she is Florence, but cannot remember it. Advised by Ms.Blanche, Irma finally accepts to act as if she was Florence because she is falling in love with Pierre. Near the end of his contract with the Legion, Pierre receives news from France. He has inherited a fortune. He asks Irma to come to France with him, and they make plans. But Clement tries to rape Irma and Pierre has to kill him.Read More »
Quote:
La France est notre Patrie (English: France Is Our Mother Country) is a 2015 Cambodian-French film directed by Rithy Panh. This latest film of the director is a story of a failed encounter between two cultures, two sensitivities, two realms of imagination: an encounter which resulted in a colonization not exempt from brutality while it could have avoided wars, chaos and destruction. Primarily based on extracts of archive film shot mainly in Indochina in the early twentieth century until the fall of Dien Bien Phu, this film is a continuation of a cinematographic reflection about time, memory and looking.Read More »
Katrina wishes to have children but her boyfriend Louis doesn’t. She falls in love with his best friend Ron, who becomes the man of her life. One night, returning drunk together from a birthday party, the two friends are involved in a car accident in which Ron loses his head and Louis his body. Thanks to a head transplant the two men survive, merged into one person. Katrina must now deal with the body and mind of two men to fulfill her dream.Read More »
A word from an expert on the area: dbmonteil of the IMDb:
“La Foire aux chimères” is a jewel, a sparkling diamond. It would deserve one hundred comments, and that would not be enough.
Pierre Chenal was a film noir director who made moderately successful movies before the war: “L’Alibi” which featured von Stroheim too and his first version of “The Postman always rings twice “, “Le Dernier Tournant (1939). But the 1946 work is much superior, being at once a film noir, a baroque melodrama and a fairy tale.
Frank, a disfigured man (von Stroheim) meets at a fair a beautiful blind long-haired blonde Jeanne (Madeleine Sologne) who is a knives thrower’s partner; this man, Robert, has a lover, Clara. Jeanne marries the ugly man, undergoes an operation and recovers sight. But,as says Marilou, Frank’s housekeeper a proverb says “happiness is a misfortune you cannot see”.Read More »
The most famous passage from Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s self-proclaimed “experiment in film-truth” (i.e., cinema verité, a term the directors coined) involves a young woman prowling the streets of Paris with a microphone and a simple question: “Are you happy?” This was a bold prompt to put to any face in 1960, let alone a working-class one; “quality of life” wouldn’t become a quantifiable concept in the social sciences for another decade. But what precedes this vox-pop set piece enhances its ambition even further; in a brief, seldom-discussed scene, the young woman glances bashfully at the camera while the directors determine her willingness to participate in their film. Read More »