French

Quote:
If you ever wanted to understand the debate about the independence of Québec, this is likely the best documentary made on the subject. Sadly, it comes without subtitle. A few may find it somewhat demagogical… it mostly is once it enter the popular opinion, the average man take on it. But the politicians are also abhorrent and you hear it loud and clear. Those against it are very vocal, screaming anger and anguish, always yelling. Using the same scare tactics that always are used to defeat the opposition. Showing it to be dangerous, irrealistic, etc. Even, as a testament to how little have changed, taking the oil price as a measure of achievement, saying Canada have it the cheapest and that the independence of Québec would double it’s price.Read More »

Handsome young general Armand de Montriveau has searched across the seas for the woman he fell madly in love with five years ago. He finally finds Antoinette, the Duchess of Langeais, living chastely in a Majorcan convent… It was love at first sight for Montriveau upon meeting Antoinette, a married coquette who frequents the most extravagant balls of 1820s Restoration Paris, where hypocrisy and vanity reign. Flattered by his attentions, the alluring Antoinette orchestrates a calculating game of seduction, but she repeatedly refuses Montriveau. Despite his sincere romantic declarations, Montriveau’s passion remains unfulfilled. When the humiliated Montriveau eventually seeks his revenge, Antoinette’s love awakens. But it may well be too late for the star-crossed lovers.Read More »

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 »