Quote:
Marisa Paredes is Leocadia (“Leo”) Macias, a woman writing “pink” romance novels under the alias of Amanda Gris that are very popular all across Spain. Unlike her romantic novels, her own love life is troubled. Leo has a less than happy relationship with her husband Paco, a military officer stationed in Brussels then later in Bosnia, who is distant both physically and emotionally.

Leo begins to change the direction of her writing, wanting to focus more on darker themes such as pain and loss, and can no longer write her Amanda Gris novels, whose publishers demand sentimental happy-endings, at least until her contract is up.

She begins to reevaluate her life through her relationship with her husband, her supposedly best friend Betty, her “crab-faced” sister Rosa and her bickering elderly mother. She also meets Angel, a newspaper editor who quickly falls for Leo and her writing.

1.80GB | 1h 45mn | 1024×510 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/BB2ADACAE079F3C/Pedro_Almodovar_-_(1995)_The_Flower_of_My_Secret.mkv
or
https://fikper.com/Lv6vuD28l6/Pedro_Almodovar_-_(1995)_The_Flower_of_My_Secret.mkv.html

Language(s):Spanish,French
Subtitles:English

The post Pedro Almodóvar – La flor de mi secreto AKA The Flower of My Secret (1995) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Pedro Almodovar’s films are a struggle between real and fake heartbreak–between tragedy and soap opera. They’re usually funny, too, which increases the tension. You don’t know where to position yourself while you’re watching a film like “All About My Mother,” and that’s part of the appeal: Do you take it seriously, like the characters do, or do you notice the bright colors and flashy art decoration, the cheerful homages to Tennessee Williams and “All About Eve” (1950) and see it as a parody? Even Almodovar’s camera sometimes doesn’t know where to stand: When the heroine’s son writes in his journal, the camera looks at his pen from the point of view of the paper.

“All About My Mother” is one of the best films of the Spanish director, whose films present a Tennessee Williams sensibility in the visual style of a 1950s Universal-International tearjerker. Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone never seem very far offscreen. Bette Davis isn’t offscreen at all: Almodovar’s heroines seem to be playing her. Self-parody is part of Almodovar’s approach, but “All About My Mother” is also sincere and heartfelt; though two of its characters are transvestite hookers, one is a pregnant nun and two more are battling lesbians, this is a film that paradoxically expresses family values.

The movie opens in Madrid with a medical worker named Manuela (Cecilia Roth) and her teenage son Esteban (Eloy Azorin). They’ve gone to see a performance of “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1993) and now wait across the street from the stage door so Esteban can get an autograph from the famous actress Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes). She jumps into a taxi (intercut with shots from “All About Eve” of Bette Davis eluding an autograph hound), and Esteban runs after her and is struck dead in the street. That sets up the story, as Manuela journeys to Barcelona to inform Esteban’s father of the son’s death.

There is irony as the film folds back on itself, because its opening scenes show Manuela, now a transplant coordinator but once an actress, performing in a video intended to promote organ transplants. In the film, grieving relatives are asked to allow the organs of their loved ones to be used; later Manuela plays the same scene for real, as she’s asked to donate her own son’s heart.

The Barcelona scenes reflect Almodovar’s long-standing interest in characters who cross the gender divide. Esteban’s father is now a transvestite prostitute. In a scene worthy of Fellini, we visit a field in Barcelona where cars circle a lineup of flamboyant hookers of all sexes, and where Manuela, seeking her former lover, finds an old friend named Agrado (Antonia San Juan). The name means “agreeable,” we’re told, and Agrado is a person with endless troubles of her own who nevertheless enters every scene looking for the laugh. In one scene, she dresses in a Chanel knockoff and is asked if it is real. As a street hooker, she couldn’t afford Chanel, but her answer is unexpected: “How could I buy a real Chanel with all the hunger in the world?” There are unexpected connections between the characters, even between Esteban’s father and Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz), a nun who works in a shelter for battered prostitutes. And new connections are forged. We meet the actress Huma Rojo once again, and her girlfriend and co-star Nina (Candela Pena): “She’s hooked on junk and I’m hooked on her.” When Nina flakes out, Manuela is actually able to understudy her role, having played it years ago. And Agrado finds a job as Huma’s personal assistant. Meanwhile, the search goes on for the missing lover.

Manuela is the heroine of the film and its center, but Agrado is the source of life. There’s an extraordinary scene in which she takes an empty stage against a hostile audience and tries to improvise a one-woman show around the story of her life. Finally she starts an inventory of the plastic surgeries that assisted her in the journey from male to female, describing the pain, procedure and cost of each, as if saying, “I’ve paid my dues to be who I am today. Have you?” Almodovar’s earlier films sometimes seemed to be manipulating the characters as an exercise. Here the plot does handstands in its eagerness to use coincidence, surprise and melodrama. But the characters have a weight and reality, as if Almodovar has finally taken pity on them–has seen that although their plights may seem ludicrous, they’re real enough to hurt. These are people who stand outside conventional life and its rules, and yet affirm them. Families are where you find them and how you make them, and home, it’s said, is the place where, if you have to go there, they have to take you in.

2.19GB | 1h 41m | 1024×440 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/4C3EA0D6DAF7020/Pedro_Almodovar_-_(1999)_All_About_My_Mother.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/274FC72D19F60B8/Pedro_Almodovar_-_(1999)_All_About_My_Mother.srt
or
https://nitro.download/view/31303DD63C7ACD9/Pedro_Almodovar_-_(1999)_All_About_My_Mother.part1.rar
https://nitro.download/view/F9325398A250239/Pedro_Almodovar_-_(1999)_All_About_My_Mother.part2.rar
https://nitro.download/view/F6DC7295337E77C/Pedro_Almodovar_-_(1999)_All_About_My_Mother.part3.rar
https://nitro.download/view/274FC72D19F60B8/Pedro_Almodovar_-_(1999)_All_About_My_Mother.srt

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English

The post Pedro Almodóvar – Todo sobre mi madre AKA All About My Mother (1999) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
A cleverly composed, prefiguring episode in Three Lives and Only One Death shows Mateo Strano (Marcello Mastroianni) in simultaneous, tripartite images (in a similar vein as Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad and Lina Wertmüller’s Love and Anarchy) through mirrors and split-screening as he continues to awkwardly fidget with his necktie even after a secondary point-of-view shot indicates that he has already placed his hands on the dinner table while waiting for his wife, Maria (Marisa Paredes) to return to the room. It is a logically irreconcilable moment that punctuates Mateo’s already bizarre story that he recounts to the reluctant André (Féodor Atkine), a polite stranger whom he intentionally engages in conversation at a local bistro: the abstracted old man’s explanation for his inadvertent abandonment of his wife years earlier after impulsively renting a larger apartment on a nearby street one day, only to discover that tiny, demanding fairies inhabited the strangely morphing apartment – unanticipated roommates that would subsequently consume his time and attention (not to mention, household goods) over the next twenty years by modulating his own experienced reality. However, the fantastic – if not mad – tale would prove to be only the first in a series of strange phenomena articulated by an unnamed radio personality (Pierre Bellemare) who further narrates equally inscrutable events of a mild mannered professor of negative anthropology, George Vickers’ (M. Mastroianni) withdrawal from society and his relationship with a compassionate prostitute named Tania (Anna Galiena), the unexpected change in fortune of a struggling, overly affectionate young couple, Martin (Melvil Poupaud) and Cecile (Chiara Mastroianni) who mysteriously inherit a chateau with an instinctually bell-trained butler (M. Mastroianni), and a wealthy industrialist, Luc Allamand (M. Mastroianni) whose seemingly ideal life with his beautiful young wife Helene (Arielle Dombasle) turns into upheaval after a self-actualized, imagined crisis.

Three Lives and Only One Death captures the whimsicality and droll, tongue-in-cheek humor that pervades Raoul Ruiz’s densely structured, organically fluid, and elaborately conceived, baroque cinematic puzzle-fables. Ruiz sustains the film’s playful illusionism and deliriously absurdist tone through sublime trompe l’oeil (literally, to deceive the eye) compositional effects: deceptive mirroring angles and reflection shots; seemingly static camera perspectives that capture shifting distances and tracking between objects (the walls of Mateo’s apartment, and Tania’s increasing proximity towards her husband (Jacques Pieiller) upon inspecting photographs that illustrates her growing interest in reverting to her sordid, former life); inanimate objects that appear to move and transform (note the wallpaper that comes to life at the sound of Maria’s voice – who is ironically wearing a similarly bold print blouse while singing – that serves as an oblique reference to the colorful, over-coordinated mise-en-scene and costuming of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). Presenting a logically tortuous and (appropriately) fractured narrative from the point-of-view of a psychologically imbalanced, yet prominent, successful, and charismatic protagonist, the film becomes an existential, modern allegory on identity, role-playing, and social multiplicity. — Strictly Film School

1. 250 scenes, 250 films, the alchemy of Raoul Ruiz

2. A Talk with Raoul Ruiz

3. Interview – Melvil Poupaurd

(All extras are in French language with English & Portuguese subtitles)

2.69GB | 2h 05m | 960×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/1EE93B5D126368F/Raoul_Ruiz_-_(1996)_Three_Lives_and_Only_One_Death.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/3590564EEAACC76/Three_Lives_and_Only_One_Death_Extras.rar

Language:French
Subtitles:English

The post Raoul Ruiz – Trois vies et une seule mort AKA Three Lives and Only One Death [+Extras] (1996) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

experimentalconversations.com wrote:
Like Godard, Francois-Jacques Ossang seems beached by the outgoing tide of that century, creating works variously engaged with sifting and evaluating its legacy. The Festival’s guest of honour, Ossang is a fascinating figure deserving of far wider international recognition than he currently receives. A child of the punk generation, he is also a poet and novelist, as well as lead singer of the band Mesagero Killers Boys. The Different Directions mini-retrospective included one of his three features, Docteur Chance (1997), and three more recent shorts, all projected in 35mm at the Town Hall Theatre. He describes Docteur Chance as a ‘monument’ to the 20th century but, unlike Godard’s Histoire(s) in which the filmmaker presides over a ritual autopsy in a museum, Ossang insists on the necessity of a ‘live’ and thus more vulnerable state to experience the last century’s death-rush. His 20th century is the century of speed, of the machine, of the Futurists, Burroughs, cinema (especially silent cinema) and Rock’n’Roll. Of ‘no future’, where oblivion is precisely that and what is spent is spent. This is the source of his vulnerability when compared to the older Godard, who has entombed himself to examine the leavings of Time from a perspective almost outside its flow, a voice from Beyond whose body becomes the images it has witnessed. Ossang in Docteur Chance still requires a body moving in space for time to run out on, and, more importantly, to experience and even initiate speed. The breathless, fragmented road movie-thriller world of Docteur Chance, Ossang’s only colour film, is a South America of the mind where the viewer always feels a step behind the action. Myriad cultural references come in to play, giving the hero’s flight the scope of a century- Georg Trakl sells potions from his chemical laboratory, William Burrough’s guiding voice issues from aeroplane radios, and the mysterious missing comrade at the end of the quest could only be played by Joe Strummer. It’s as if Ruiz had decided to make a Peckinpah film.

1.16GB | 1h 35mn | 720×432 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/F24583111BEA281/Docteur.Chance.1997.avi https://nitro.download/view/1F3CCBAC7AE6644/Docteur.Chance.1997.srt

Language(s):French, occasional English & Italian
Subtitles:English

The post F.J. Ossang – Docteur Chance (1997) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis
On September 27, 1810, the French troops commanded by Marshal Massena, were defeated in the Serra do Buçaco by the Anglo-Portuguese army of general Wellington.

Despite the victory, Portuguese and British are forced to retreat from the enemy, numerically superior, in order to attract them to Torres Vedras, where Wellington had built fortified lines hardly surmountable.

Simultaneously, the Anglo-Portuguese command organizes the evacuation of the entire territory between the battlefield and the lines of Torres Vedras, a gigantic burned land operation, which prevents the French from collecting supplies.

This is the setting for the adventures of a multitude of characters from all social backgrounds – soldiers and civilians, men, women and children, young and old – to the daily routine torn by war and dragged through hills and valleys, between ruined villages, charred forests and devastated crops.

Highly persecuted by the French, already tormented by an unmerciful weather, the mass of fugitives continues to move forward clenching the teeth, just to save their skin, loaded with tenacious will to resist the invaders and retreat them from their country. Or even hoping to take advantage of the disarray to satisfy their basic instincts.

All of them, whatever nature or motivations – the idealistic young lieutenant Pedro de Alencar, Clarissa Warren, the malicious little english girl, the shady dealer Penabranca, the vindictive Sergeant Francisco Xavier or the lusty prostitute Martírio -, all gather by different paths to the lines of Torres, where the final battle will decide the fate of each one of them.

https://nitro.download/view/78733E04302C3FF/Linhas_de_Wellington.avi
https://nitro.download/view/3C54AA019BD9F69/Linhas_de_Wellington.en.srt
https://nitro.download/view/2B33C952E5EB188/Linhas_de_Wellington.pt.srt

Language:Portuguese, English, French
Subtitles:English for non-English dialogue and Portuguese for non-Portuguese dialogue (.srt)

The post Valeria Sarmiento – Linhas de Wellington AKA Wellington Lines [Theatrical Cut] (2012) first appeared on Cinema of the World.