French

Synopsis:
Lydia is a law student who, although she has many admirers, is struggling to make ends meet. With no family to help her, she turns to her friend Alice. The latter proposes a scheme that will allow Lydia to make some easy money. All she has to do is to pay a visit to the writer Jacques Ferny and pretend to be the daughter he has been looking for. With the help of an old letter, Lydia succeeds in winning Ferny’s confidence, but his wife is suspicious and starts her own inquiry…Read More »

Synopsis wrote:
César runs a bar along Marseilles’ port, assisted by his 23 year old son, Marius. Colorful characters abound: M. Panisse, an aging widower and prosperous sail maker; Honorine, a fishmonger with a sidewalk stall near the bar; her daughter, Fanny, who helps her sell cockles; and, various old salts. Friends since childhood, Fanny and Marius love each other, but Marius has a secret wanderlust: every ship’s whistle stirs a longing for foreign lands. When M. Panisse seeks Fanny’s hand in marriage and when a departing clipper needs a deckhand, Marius and Fanny must decide who and what they love most. César, with his generous, comic spirit, tries to guide his son.Read More »

In his office covered with books where our centuries, philosophical and poetic millennia, are stacked up, at the height of his 88 years, Michel Deguy does not stop vituperating and “throwing firecrackers”. He challenges, adjures, gives clues, sounds the ecological alert, poetizes an alert thought, tirelessly turns a pensive tongue, sentinels words in their use, words and “things”.

Assuming its formal modesty, the film sets itself a great ambition: starting from a head-on conversation with the poet, to dive into the heart of poetic writing as he practices it, at the heart of his “eco-poeticological” thought.
Les Editions de L’œilRead More »

The 35-year-old ministry official Baron Leisenbohg had the stage career ten years ago as the cast of the “Queen of the Night”, opera that promoted singer Klare Hell. Klare shows no gratitude however.Read More »

After a raucous visit from the wealthy Uncle Arthur (The Death of a Lumberjack’s J. Léo Gagnon), working class Montreal couple Roland (O.K. … Laliberté’s René Caron) and Berthe (Mustang’s Luce Guilbeault) are left feeling slighted by his meager gift of $500. Hungry for more, Berthe hatches a plan to descend on Uncle Arthur’s remote country house and steal his small fortune with the help of her delinquent brother and cousin. When the robbery spirals out of control, allegiances shift, blood is spilled, and Roland’s dimwitted lodger Ernest (J.A. Martin Photographer’s Marcel Sabourin) takes center stage in a harrowing battle for Arthur’s stolen cash.Read More »

Quote:
It is difficult for me to articulate quite why it is that I adore Jacques Nolot’s Avant Que J’Oublie (2007), or Before I Forget as it is known to English speakers. Ostensibly your typical French drama about middle class angst, alienation and spiritual decay, the film deals with an ageing gay man who looks back over his life with considerable bitterness as he considers all the things he lost and all the things he failed to gain. However, while filled with negativity about his own past, the central character Pierre (played by Nolot) is gripped by terror when he thinks about the future as his health dwindles, his sex drive sputters and his days come to be consumed by talk of money, food and how he will most likely die alone. Read More »

From Charles Tesson, Cahiers du cinema 333 (March 1982):
Raul Ruiz filmed the gardens of the Château de Versailles. The first one, French, focuses on the King’s Square (a space where everything is arranged in order to be seen). The other one, English, is the exact opposite, because from any point within it, one falls out of view. Within these two constructions, the labyrinth and the concentric circles, Ruiz conceives a ‘photo-roman’ plot: a husband and his mistress rendez-vous in the English garden (one understands why) and, through a series of accidents and afraid of being seen, he relocates to the other garden. There he runs into his wife who is with her own lover, into the ex-husband of his wife who is with his new mistress, and into the new lover of his ex-wife….Read More »

In the fictitious island of Ojeda, people lives a dictatorship and the island is a penal colony with ordinary and political prisoners together. When the Governor Mariano Vargas is murdered by a sniper, his idealistic secretary Ramón Vázquez is assigned director of security in charge of the prison. Vázquez is in love with the widow Inés Rojas and they have a love affair. But when the new governor Alejandro Gual Miguel arrives in the island, he wants Inés to be his lover. Further he forces the killer to sign a false confession telling that Vázquez is the responsible for the attempt against the previous governor and blackmails Inés. But Inés is a female fatale that knows the political games and manipulations.Read More »

Marseilles in the 1930s. A respected gangster, Justin, finds himself in a deadly feud with his rival, the unscrupulous Esposito. The latter plans to steal a cargo of opium bound for China and to have Justin killed. The scheme backfires, and Justin and his cohorts flee with the stolen drugs. Later, Justin saves a young woman, Totone, from drowning, and she is easily seduced by his charms. Her jealous lover, Sylvio, tries to kill Justin, but again the murder attempt is thwarted. Justin decides it is time for a final showdown with Esposito…Read More »