Quote:
Bay of the Angels (La Baie des anges) stars Jeanne Moreau as a middle-aged Parisian gambling addict who leaves her husband and children and heads for the roulette tables of Nice. There she meets young and handsome Claude Mann–a meeting which coincides with Moreau’s first winning streak. She latches onto Mann in the belief that he’s a good luck charm, and remains with him even when she starts losing heavily. Mann, emotionally drained, walks out of the relationship. The film ends with Mann entreating Moreau to return with him to the bourgeois existence that she’d escaped in the first scene. Bay of the Angels was directed by Jacques Demy, just before he achieved international fame with his musical films Young Girls of Rochefort and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Jacques Demy - (1963) Bay of Angels.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 24mn
Size: 	1.41 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	960x576 
Aspect ratio:  	1.667
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 199 Kbps
BPP: 	0.166
Audio
#1:  	French 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/C27BD308B53B2FB/Jacques_Demy_-_(1963)_Bay_of_Angels.mkv

https://rapidgator.net/file/8638226177d793094c65a3c461a42157/Jacques_Demy_-_(1963)_Bay_of_Angels.mkvv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Jacques Demy – La baie des anges AKA The Bay of Angels (1963) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
In this tale, the scenes are simultaneously clear and labyrinthine.
Four people, the old man, the young woman, the soldier and the player walk around an imaginary topography across continents. They escape from their everyday existence. Each one of them starts out, alone, only to meet up and form a group, which is to move along like an expedition. Suddenly they come across a clearing, a city, a desert, an ocean. They all follow the ardent desire that drove them to leave.
Through their conversations, their discussions, rejoinders, monologues and dreams, they tell the story.
One day, the old man disappears, he who had guided the group. What remains is the search and the dream of finding hem again.

LAbsence.1992.DVDRip.x264.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 45mn
Size:	1.85 GiB
Video
Codec:	h264
Resolution:	768x576
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	2 318 kb/s
Audio
French 2.0ch MP3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/AFABA89EA034F63/LAbsence.1992.DVDRip.x264.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:German, Russian

The post Peter Handke – L’Absence AKA The Absence (1993) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A sophisticated and self-assured woman from Paris joins a middle-class rural estate as a maid and causes quite a stir among the variously uptight, perverse and violent inhabitants.

The.Diary.of.a.Chambermaid.1964.1080p.Hybrid.1080p.BluRay.FLAC1.0.x264-ZoroSenpai.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 37 min
Size: 	15.1 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x820 
Aspect ratio:  	2.35:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	21.7 Mb/s
BPP: 	0.575
Audio
#1:  	French 1.0ch FLAC @ 287 kb/s
#2:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 86.1 kb/s (Commentary by film historian Imogen Sara Smith)
#3:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 91.6 kb/s (Commentary by associate professor and head of film & television studies, monash university and co-editor of rouge magazine Dr. Adrian Martin)

https://nitro.download/view/99F9420E6B567F1/The.Diary.of.a.Chambermaid.1964.1080p.Hybrid.1080p.BluRay.FLAC1.0.x264-ZoroSenpai.mkv

Language(s):French, English
Subtitles:English (US), English (UK), German, Greek, Portuguese (Iberian), Romanian, Spanish (Castilian)

The post Luis Buñuel – Le journal d’une femme de chambre AKA Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Detective Marco is assigned to investigate a murder that has occurred at an exclusive boarding school for adolescent girls. The victim is a popular, wealthy girl found strangled in her bed. The school director tells Marco she expects him to find the killer outside of the school, and she bristles at his insistent interrogations of the school staff and the students. Marco learns that two sadistic games were played the night of the murder and that the victim had been tied up. There are a number of suspects, including a teacher with an unnatural affection for one of the girls; a suspicious Spanish gentleman at the town-inn, and some of the pupils themselves.

Dortoir des grandes (1953, 1080P, IPTV).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 41 min
Size: 	2.18 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	50.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 989 kb/s
BPP: 	0.029
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC @ 93.4 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/06EB11DE9D2D115/Dortoir_des_grandes_(1953,_1080P,_IPTV).mkv
https://nitro.download/view/E92463E9646FD77/Dortoir_des_grandes_(1953,_1080P,_IPTV).eng.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Henri Decoin – Dortoir des grandes AKA Girls’ Dormitory (1953) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
In the carefree days before World War I, introverted Austrian author Jules strikes up a friendship with the exuberant Frenchman Jim and both men fall for the impulsive and beautiful Catherine.

Quote:
When François Truffaut was a twenty-three-year-old film critic, in 1955, he read an autobiographical first novel by a seventy-four-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succeed in making films, I will make Jules and Jim.” Six years later—after constantly rereading and even partly memorizing Roché’s novel—he more than redeemed that promise. Sixties audiences didn’t merely see his movie. They wanted to live it.

Jules and Jim begins in Paris before World War I and introduces us to two aspiring writers. Jules is a shy, diminutive Austrian (Oskar Werner is all pained charm), a born onlooker who masks his aggressiveness as passivity. He can’t get the girls, but his friend Jim can. A lanky, not-quite-dashing Frenchman (played with melting standoffishness by Henri Serre), Jim is a Left Bank Don Quixote to Jules’s Sancho Panza. When we first meet them, they are living out a genial but somewhat lackluster bohemianism, brimming with talk about writing and women. But for all their love of books, these pals come alive only when they meet the magnificently desirable and dangerous Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). She marries the stolid Jules, who’s too low-key and dull to keep her, and becomes the lover of Jim, who refuses to subject himself to her will.

Although the film is named for the men, its animating force is Catherine, a creature both utterly timeless (Jules and Jim first see her visage in a photo of a Greek statue) and forever changing: at different points, she plays the roles of Charlie Chaplin and street tough, vamp and doting mother. Passionate and iconoclastic, she is, in fact, the only true free spirit among them. Just as the men put their talent into their art, so she puts her genius into living—or perhaps into claiming for herself the reckless male freedoms that women have been traditionally denied. Time and again, she literally dresses herself in the garb of masculinity.

On paper, the mercurial Catherine seems an implausibly grandiose con­ception, a woman both giddy and tragic, protofeminist and male-dominated, driven by Eros and Thanatos. But as played by Moreau, a pop-eyed siren with the ferocity of Bette Davis and the kitty-cat wiles of Tuesday Weld, Catherine becomes one of the modern movies’ triumphant characterizations—the anima as autocrat. Whether playing with vitriol or jumping into the Seine, she elevates capriciousness to an existential principle. When Jim says he understands her, she replies, “I don’t want to be understood.” And this is absolutely true. The movie lives in the shuddering distance between Catherine’s imperious, doomed physicality and the two men’s shifting perceptions of her, perceptions that rearrange but never destroy their glowing friendship.

Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that the greatest art is about the passing of time. Jules and Jim flies by like a dream, suffused with a sense of life’s evanes­cence. As the characters grow older, and perhaps wiser, we become aware of how much has been lost—loss of love, loss of innocence, loss of the marvelously lamplit bohemian past to the searchlight horror of Nazism. An intimate melan­choly pervades the movie’s voice-over narration, which adores the characters’ brave inquiry into love’s possibilities but is also wryly aware of the relief that accompanies the end of such inquiries. As critic Andrew Sarris once wrote, Jules and Jim celebrates “the sweet pain of the impossible and the magnificent failure of an ideal.”

From the beginning, the film itself was treated as a magnificent success, with Truffaut winning praise from such personal heroes as Jean Cocteau and Jean Renoir; he even received a gushing letter from the seventy-five-year-old Helen Hessel, the real-life, Seine-jumping model for Catherine, who told him he’d captured “the essence of our intimate emotions.” Such accolades, however, didn’t keep France’s Commission de contrôle des films from forbidding viewers under the age of eighteen from seeing Jules and Jim because of its “immoral character”—a decision that would be replicated in many other countries. From our present-day vantage point, when nudie sex scenes are de rigueur on cable TV, such a decision may seem incredible. But this was 1962, and while the New Wave may have been reinventing cinema, French censors weren’t ready to reinvent bourgeois morality.

Perhaps a bit naively for a Young Turk, Truffaut was shocked by the ban, but he clutched at the nearest straw. The president of the commission, Henry de Ségogne, told him that the board might reconsider if he could gather a series of laudatory statements from luminaries. Truffaut set about doing just that, writing to Cocteau, Renoir, and Alain Resnais requesting their support. Still, despite this illustrious backing, the commission refused to reverse its original decision, condemning itself to a tiny corner in the Pantheon of the Square, while this supposedly immoral movie would one day be shown in high school classes.

Truffaut was not yet thirty when he made this tale of triangular desire, and decades later it’s still astonishing that one so youthful could be so open­hearted, so willing to give everyone’s motives and passions their due. But if Jules and Jim casts a mature eye on the limits of freedom (by the end, everything seems uncannily, but satisfyingly, preordained), it remains indelibly a young man’s movie. It’s a lyrical joyride propelled by leaping, elliptical edits, Georges Delerue’s sublimely evocative score (one of the most memorable in film his­tory), and Raoul Coutard’s ecstatic photography, which helps underscore Truffaut’s visual ideas about the great circle of life. At one point, Coutard’s camera follows a young woman in a bar, does a 360 degree pan, and winds up watching Jules draw another girl’s face on the surface of a round table.

Almost every scene is shot through with such casual stylistic brilliance. Yet what audiences have always loved about this movie isn’t simply its technical brio but its emotional warmth, its embrace of a world in which tragedy is forever playing hopscotch with farce. Jules and Jim is a movie that enters viewers’ lives like a lover—a masterpiece you can really get a crush on.

~Criterion

Jules.and.Jim.1962.1080p.BluRay.FLAC1.0.x264-RO.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 46 min
Size: 	17.3 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x804 
Aspect ratio:  	2.40:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	22.5 Mb/s
BPP: 	0.608
Audio
#1:  	French 1.0ch FLAC @ 269 kb/s (BFI Bluray)
#2:  	French 1.0ch FLAC @ 300 kb/s (BIM Distribuzione DVD)
#3:  	English 1.0ch AAC LC @ 64.5 kb/s (Commentary #1 by coscreenwriter Jean Gruault, longtime Truffaut collaborator Suzanne Schiffman, editor Claudine Bouche, and film scholar Annette Insdorf)
#4:  	French 2.0ch AAC LC @ 72.0 kb/s (Commentary #2 by actress Jeanne Moreau and Truffaut biographer Serge Toubiana)
#5:  	French 2.0ch AAC LC @ 73.7 kb/s (Commentary #3 John Player Lecture Francois Truffaut the director discusses his films)
#6:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 74.2 kb/s (Commentary #4 actress Jeanne Moreau talks with Don Allen about her life and career)

https://nitro.download/view/263D3BC03749860/Jules.and.Jim.1962.1080p.BluRay.FLAC1.0.x264-RO.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Romanian, Chinese, Turkish

The post François Truffaut – Jules et Jim AKA Jules and Jim (1962) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

In Nazi-occupied Paris, the immoral art dealer, Robert Klein, leads a life of luxury, until a copy of a Jewish newspaper brings him to the attention of the police, linking him with a mysterious doppelgänger. Will Mr Klein clear his name?

Quote:
★★★★ Watched by Stephen M 30 Aug 2020

This one crept up on me. Initially I felt somewhat removed as I watched it. Partly because the eponymous character played by Alain Delon himself is so removed and emotionless. But you gradually come to realize that this is intentional, that he is in fact representing the detachment and lack of concern of many French citizens regarding the targeting and removal of the Jews from Vichy France. And by the end of the film it was indeed horrifying to see this done without outcry or resistance.

A mystery with a doppelganger theme, Delon plays “Mr. Klein”, an art dealer profiting on the desperation of Jews eager to flee the country. He learns early in the film that a Jewish man with the same name and appearance is using Delon as a decoy to avoid detection. For the remainder of the film, Delon seeks to find and uncover his double so as to convince the authorities of his non-Jewish heritage. He and his friends are concerned about his plight but seemingly less concerned about the overall situation..

The film is interspersed with disturbing reminders of how French Jews were seen as the “other” – the opening scene when a doctor examines a woman as he would a horse to detect Semitic traits (we later learn he’s a vet rather than a MD), a music hall performance where the audience laughs at and reviles a cruelly stereotypical portrayal, and the final harrowing scene where Mr. Klein realizes he is doomed in spite of all his efforts.

Good acting, including the smaller roles, including Jeanne Moreau as a wealthy woman. Delon has played this type of cool character before but mostly in crime films. Here the sociopathy is societal rather than tied to the criminal world and it’s ultimately chilling. Finally the depiction of 1940s Paris (sets, costumes, hairstyles, music) is perfectly done.

Mr.Klein.1976.576p.BluRay.AC3.x264.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 3 min
Size: 	3.11 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	956x576 
Aspect ratio:  	5:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 318 kb/s
BPP: 	0.251
Audio
#1:  	French 2.0ch AC-3 @ 256 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/9002840357F8B54/Mr.Klein.1976.576p.BluRay.AC3.x264.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, French, German

The post Joseph Losey – Monsieur Klein (1976) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A wealthy and bored woman is witness of a murder in affection and meets another witness. She asks him about the history of the victim and falls in love with him.

Seven.Days.Seven.Nights.(1960).720p.BluRay.AAC2.0.x264-DON.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 34 min
Size: 	6.31 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1280x546 
Aspect ratio:  	2.35:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	9 271 kb/s
BPP: 	0.553
Audio
#1:  	French 2.0ch AAC @ 299 kb/s (AAC1.0 @ 299 Kbps (quality=0.7))

https://nitro.download/view/E4073D235BD2330/Seven.Days.Seven.Nights.(1960).720p.BluRay.AAC2.0.x264-DON.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English (muxed)

The post Peter Brook – Moderato cantabile AKA Seven Days… Seven Nights (1960) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.