Mathieu Carrière

The story of two men with very different lives but united for the pleasure of killing.Read More »

A historical drama set in the 1950s, based on real-life events. Rosemarie Nitribitt comes out of a remand center, runs away from her foster parents, and ends up working as a barmaid in a Frankfurt nightclub. A wealthy French businessman offers to set her up in return for tape-recordings of her sex sessions with German VIPs.Read More »

In 1917, the First World War is raging. Julien is from Luxemburg, so instead of having to go to war he studies piano in Paris. One day his friend Jacques, also a musician and now a fighter pilot on the front, invites him to spend a few days in his family’s empty house in Bray. The housekeeper, a beautiful but mute woman lets Julien in, but his friend is late and he is obliged to wait. In the meantime, he starts reminiscing of the pre-war days spent with his friend and Jacques’ girlfriend Odile.Read More »

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Based on an introspective feminist book by Ingeborg Bachmann which I haven’t read but is described as a difficult fragmented work that exposes emotional reactions and stream-of-consciousness meditations on her identity vs. three men in her life, two lovers who try to control her or take over her identity, her obsessive love, and her scary father. The author, Bachmann, died in hospital after a fire in her house. Schroeter takes these real-life and written elements and applies his own treatment to the whole mess, showing scattered fragments of her life mixed with many and endless emotional breakdowns, fire and mirrors used as artsy symbols, a writer’s block, existential explorations on identity, some references to her interests in Wittgenstein, and various surreal imagery involving violinists, her father in a Nazi uniform, and lots of flames, all together in one jumbled emotional mess, like the inside of a schizophrenic woman’s mind. Unrewarding arthouse piece.Read More »

A new gardener arrives at the superb property of a French cultural attaché in Portugal. This frail young man does not have the head nor the figure for the job. And for good reason: Johann is a painter who, after a recent break-up, has fled to find the calm necessary for his work. This intrusion causes disturbances, admitted or not, in this small protected world.Read More »

Marguerite Duras’s most celebrated work is a mesmerizing, almost incantatory experience with few stylistic precedents in the history of cinema. Within the insular walls of a lavish, decaying embassy in 1930s India, the French ambassador’s wife (Delphine Seyrig) staves off ennui through affairs with multiple men—with the overpowering torpor broken only by a startling eruption of madness. Setting her evocatively decadent visuals to a desynchronized chorus of disembodied voices that comment on and counterpoint the action, Duras creates a haunted-house movie unlike any other. (-criterion.com)Read More »

Each night in Paris, hundreds of men and women anonymously use telephone lines that date from the German Occupation and are no longer listed to talk to each other, to love each other.

The plot of Le Navire Night concerns a love affair between a young man and a woman, F., who first make contact by telephone one night, quite by chance. They have never seen each other or met before, but a relationship begins as a result of the conversation; F. continues telephoning. He, however, never learns F.’ s full name, telephone number or address, and all initiative for the relationship falls to her. The affair unfolds purely as an affair of the human voice, but this adds to the sexual intensity of the relationship rather than detracting from it: ‘C’est un orgasme noir,’ one hears the voice of Bulle Ogier saying. ‘Sans toucher réciproque. Read More »

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In the early 1950s, in a seaside town, Isabelle, a girl in her late teens,is about to spend an apparently eventless summer between her mother, her friends and a small job for a photographer whose business is lagging. But Isabelle is not the mentally balanced young lady she seems to be. In fact she is doubly traumatized, firstly by the rape she suffered eight years before from a Nazi officer and secondly by the suicide of her father shortly after. What she wants deep inside herself is to find a man, young or less young, who will bring her tenderness and happiness. Will Luc, a young German, or Monsieur Vaudois, her married boss, give her what she lacks?Read More »

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Vain clothing buyer Hugo meets beautiful Myriam on the subway and pursues her, discovering to his delight that she’s a prostitute. The crafty Myriam, of course, has more in mind for their encounter than smug Hugo bargained for. Love Rites turns the sexual tables with perverse exactitude.Read More »