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La Cambrure (The Curve) is a short film shot in video, directed by Edwige Shaki who also wrote the scenario. Éric Rohmer was a technical advisor and editor for the movie. Despite being directed by Shaki, some of Rohmer’s trademarks, extensive dialog and beautiful young actors, including Shaki herself, are present. Edwige Shaki later was an actress in the Rohmer film The Lady and the Duke.
…a student falls in love with a young “pictorial” woman…Read More »
February 6, 1998. Ajaccio. The prefect Claude Erignac is murdered and the French anti-terrorist task forced arrest a group called “Anonymous”.Read More »
Late 17th Century: Anne de Grandcamp and Lucie de Fontenelle, two little girls from Normandy, arrive at the Saint-Cyr school founded by Madame de Maintenon for educating the daughters of impoverished nobles ruined in wars and making them into free women. Madame de Maintenon is the secret wife of Louis XIV, and empowered by his support, she offers “her” two hundred fifty girls a playful and avant-garde education. Anne and Lucie, two inseparable friends, allow themselves to be carried away by the promise of a bright future. But Maintenon has arrived at the pinnacle of power through scheming and debasing herself and she now fears the fires of hell. She is counting on her model school to atone for her past sins.Read More »
PLOT: A red balloon with a mind of its own follows a little boy around the streets of Paris.Read More »
Bresson’s brilliant adaptation of Dostoevsky’s short story (A Gentle Creature) exhibits in its lapidary sequences the political and existential revolt of a young student in Paris. Sharing a theme that can be traced from Bresson’s Mouchette to his fantastic exploration of revolutionary choices in The Devil Probably, Une Femme Douce articulates in its inimitable minimalist mode a range of issues from the ideological options of France post-May ’68 to human relationships. Dominique Sanda is not the conventional, recognizable student revolutionary, but a “gentle” philosopher whose powers of sensitivity and social scrutiny exceed and tease the prosaic, crude disposition of her bourgeois husband. The sequences in the zoo, the museum of natural history and the performance of Hamlet are powerful. On another note, look out for Indian experimental filmmaker Kumar Shahani who was assisting Bresson at this time, sitting diagonally behind Sanda in the sequence at the movie theater.Read More »
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Two women and two men meet, converse with one another and ask questions, even about the use of words, but especially about fundamental matters concerning happiness and love. Is the harmony of love reconcilable with wisdom and intelligence, with fear and fatigue? With humour, seriousness and pleasure, these men and women, who know the price of existence, seek their road together.Read More »
Time Out wrote:
Bernard (Depardieu) is a wealthy businessman, happily married to beautiful, elegant Florence (Bouquet). Much to his astonishment, he falls in love with his comparatively dowdy secretary, Colette (Balasko). It’s no office fling but the real thing, and – to Bernard – completely incomprehensible. Once again charting the outrageous repercussions of an obsessive love, Blier proceeds to explore the situation from every conceivable angle, merrily constructing and deconstructing alternative stories for all he’s worth. Although the film fails to sustain itself over 90 minutes, much of the first half is very funny and occasionally sharp; Buñuelian motifs are mischievously resurrected, and Blier’s parodies and fantasy sequences are brilliantly dovetailed in a series of waltzing, switchback camera movements that are a joy to behold. Blier is a classy, amusing film maker, but one suspects he is too fundamentally bourgeois to truly shock or surprise; and this movie ends dispiritingly with the most banal of all its potential options.Read More »
PLOT: In a small village in the south of France, Dog and Mirales live a conflicting friendship. The duo is upeneded when Elsa arrives in their village, a young woman with whom Dog will fall in love.Read More »
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Noémie and Priscilla, two teenage girls from working class backgrounds, cultivate the same violence, the same contempt of the world. They are a source of serious concern for family and friends, who sense them capable of going to extremes. Noémie (Lhomeau) has already tried to kill herself once when with the work of German Romanic writer Kleist ringing true to her, convinces equally unhappy best friend Priscilla (Tissier) to make a suicide pact. The two of them can see no reason to go on living but the practicalities and opportunity to go through with that plan is harder than they envisage.Read More »