French

PLOT SUMMARY:
Formal to the point of mystification, Alain Cavalier’s La Rencontre is a bittersweet love story shot from the most oblique of angles. Two voices – one a man’s, one a woman’s – discuss a series of objects, views, pictures and body parts, swapping observations back and forth. In between listing and analyzing this parade of possessions, the film’s “characters” read each other poems, tell each other anecdotes, describe their dreams, name their hopes and fears.
Eventually, we realize they love each other; equally eventually, they realize they may no longer do so.Read More »

Synopsis:
Having been caught stealing money from his employer to pay for a holiday with his girlfriend Juliette, Michel finds himself in a prison cell. He falls into a deep sleep and awakes to find the door of his cell open. Stepping through the doorway, he finds himself in the most beautiful sun-drenched countryside. A peaceful country road leads him to a remote village whose inhabitants have lost their memory. Husbands and wives no longer recognise one another but everyone seems to know Juliette when Michel enquires about her…Read More »

During the Gulf War, Serge Daney wrote that conversation, “a typically Franco-Arab art”, was no longer possible between him and his Arab friends. Here, he is offered a setting – both real and cinematic – in which he can attempt to renew this dialogue, which has been interrupted for a time. His choice of interlocutor was an obvious one: Elias Sanbar, Palestinian, historian, director of the magazine “Études Palestiniennes” and image collector. Sanbar is an exile who archives the memory of his people: press photographs, family albums, postcards and so on. For him, images are proof of his identity. Daney, for his part, has spent most of his life watching films, but has always refused to keep still images. On both sides, there was a strong desire to confront these two attitudes to the image, and turn it into a kind of parable of North-South relations.Read More »

During the Gulf War, Serge Daney wrote that conversation, “a typically Franco-Arab art”, was no longer possible between him and his Arab friends. Here, he is offered a setting – both real and cinematic – in which he can attempt to renew this dialogue, which has been interrupted for a time. His choice of interlocutor was an obvious one: Elias Sanbar, Palestinian, historian, director of the magazine “Études Palestiniennes” and image collector. Sanbar is an exile who archives the memory of his people: press photographs, family albums, postcards and so on. For him, images are proof of his identity. Daney, for his part, has spent most of his life watching films, but has always refused to keep still images. On both sides, there was a strong desire to confront these two attitudes to the image, and turn it into a kind of parable of North-South relations.Read More »

A husband and wife meet three years after their formal separation, when they return to the provincial town where they once lived to pick up their divorce decree.Read More »

A young man is a collector of feminine conquests. One morning, leaving one of his mistresses he is addressed by one of his past flirts. As revenge, she denounces him later to the police as the murderer of her fiance who was found dead the same morning. With the help of his mistresses and some new ones he makes on the road, the young man goes in search of the man he thinks is the killer, then his blond consort with whom he fell in love at the first sight the evening before.Read More »

Quote:
Dubbed by the media as public enemy number one, Louis-Régis Savoie is serving 25 to life in prison. His son comes to visit him for the first time in five years just in time to see his father shoot a police officer and escape. On the run, Régis has more of a devil-may-care attitude than ever before despite a massive police manhunt. During his escapades he meets eight different people and plans his escape from the country. Three days later, one of those will rat to the police and Savoie is shot. Who ratted?Read More »

A recently released convict goes to a small village to lay low for a while. His contact is the local priest. Unfortunately, the priest suddenly dies and the villagers all think that the con is their new village priest.Read More »

In the solitude of his apartment, Rousseau reads shorts excerpts from Racine’s Bérénice, images of separation; he films in a café, musicians in the street, a dance, domestic intimacy, in a self-portrait that reflects the contradiction between desires and time. “For a long time I have wanted to try and see if I could create a drama with the simplicity of action which the Ancients so favoured. There are those who believe that this very simplicity is a sign of a lack of inventiveness. They do not consider that, on the contrary, all invention is to create something out of nothing.” (Racine, preface to Bérénice, 1670.)Read More »