Jacqueline Dufranne

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Small (though long), quiet (literally – there is no music score, for example), observant (like its lead), nostalgic coming-of-age tale. Not much plot, just a series of daily-life blackout vignettes. It definitely has its boring moments, but also some wonderful ones, like the boy getting his first kiss in a movie theater playing “Pandora And The Flying Dutchman”. Successfully captures both small-town and country atmosphere, thanks in large part to Nestor Almendros’ beautiful cinematography. *** out of 4.Read More »

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After the success of The Mother and the Whore, French director Jean Eustache was finally able to make Mes petites amoureuses, an equally personal but vastly different film — a portrait of his childhood in the south of France in which every footstep, every gesture, and every visual detail feels as though it’s been drawn directly from the filmmaker’s memory.Read More »

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Made in 1971 for French TV, the epic LA MAISON DES BOIS
comes from early in the Pialat’s belated
feature-filmmaking career. Rather like Loach’s DAYS OF
HOPE (Cinémathèque 2004) or Edgar Reisz’s HEIMAT
series, it begins in costume drama and an ethnographic
view of rural French life during World War One, and in
an apparently sentimental tale of war orphans. But
then it irises out from costume drama conventions into
the transcendental, exploring Pialat*s spiritual
themes, as well as the social dynamics, trauma and
collective experiences of war.Read More »