The Son of Gascogne (1995)
October 9, 1995
FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW;Maybe He’s The Son Of a Film Legend
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: October 9, 1995

There really isn’t much difference between a favorite screen image and a personal memory of youthful passion, except that one exists on film and the other only in our private mental movies. That insight lies at the heart of Pascal Aubier’s delicious comic bouillabaisse of a film, “The Son of Gascogne.” The film, which the New York Film Festival is showing tonight at 9 and tomorrow night at 6 at Alice Tully Hall, is a fable about an innocent young man who inherits a mystique that has everything to do with old movies and old loves and our eagerness to confuse the two.

One evening in a Paris bar, Harvey (Gregoire Colin), a waifish tour guide for a group of folk singers from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, is picked out of the crowd by a boisterous stranger named Marco (Jean-Claude Dreyfus). An overbearing, ruddy-faced chauffeur, Marco informs the young man that he bears such an astonishing resemblance to Gascogne, a legendary 1960’s film maker and New Wave pioneer who died in a car crash, that he must be Gascogne’s son.

Marco claims to have known the director from the time he himself played a small part in a Gascogne film that has become a cult classic. All over Paris, he says, there are friends and colleagues of Gascogne’s who would be delighted to know that the director had a son, and he insists on making the introductions.

As it happens, Harvey grew up fatherless in Le Havre. His mother has always refused to discuss the circumstances of his paternity. Could it be?

Reluctantly, Harvey allows Marco to arrange introductions to assorted luminaries of the French cinema, who appear as themselves. They include Stephane Audran, Jean-Claude Brialy, Claude Chabrol, Bulle Ogier and Marina Vlady, among many others. Harvey finds himself instantly welcomed as a member of their extended family, and he becomes a nostalgic lodestone. As they pour out their personal anecdotes about Gascogne, their faces take on a youthful glow, and Harvey begins to see himself in his father’s image. So potent is Gascogne’s mystique that Harvey suddenly finds himself pursued by beautiful women eager to make love to a legend, even if the encounter has to be secondhand.

In the collective memories of Gascogne, the dead film maker emerges as the soul and essence of the French New Wave, with a legend that outstrips Truffaut and Godard together. A tireless womanizer who apparently had an affair with every woman who crossed his path, he also emerges as a borderline sociopath, a liar and practical joker who liked to assume false identities.

As if this weren’t enough, the ingeniously plotted film weaves in subplots of intrigue and romance. Gascogne supposedly died while working on an epic film that disappeared, although some claim to have viewed the rushes. The existence of a son opens up the possibility that the lost movie may somehow be retrieved. Marco, sniffing opportunity, turns out to be far less reputable than he first appeared.

At the same time that Harvey is embraced by Paris’s smart set, he is falling in love with Dinara (Dinara Droukarova), his Eastern-bloc counterpart on the tour. Dinara just happens to be a film student obsessed with “Breathless.” As she and Harvey deliriously skip down the streets of Paris, the movie intercuts their frolics with shots of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. At moments like this, the film, which is Mr. Aubier’s third feature (his first since 1976), becomes almost too giddy for its own good.

But it is easy to forgive the small excesses and occasional loose ends. Like the 60’s films to which it pays such sentimental homage, “The Son of Gascogne” surges with a passion for movies and for the tempestuous, fantasy-ridden life surrounding their making. As a robust but sophisticated valentine to the French cinema, it is nearly the equal of Truffaut’s classic “Day for Night.”

The.Son.of.Gascogne.1995.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/3FB5D2885FE455D/The.Son.of.Gascogne.1995.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English hard

The post Pascal Aubier – Le Fils de Gascogne AKA The Son of Gascogne (1995) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
“Fun and Games (for Everyone): a pitch black and milky white film shot during one of Olivier Mosset’s exhibition openings. A psychedelic game of improvisation joins the Zanzibar group with Salvador Dalí, Barbet Schroeder and Jean Mascolo… the solarized image reminiscent of thick strokes of a paintbrush.” – PHILIPPE AZOURY

“Bard, in this second film, again leaves the field open to an incessant coming and going of Parisians attending the opening of the minimalist painter Olivier Mosset and whose exhibition consisted of 10 paintings, all alike: white with black circles painted in their center. It’s the revolution criticizing art and painting… and Serge criticizing cinema!” – JACKIE RAYNAL

“(On Fun and Games) Light can become volumeless graphic expression and dehumanize the actors until their faces are «absorbed» erasing all detail and creating an attractive environment.” – HENRI ALEKAN

“I had nothing to do with the film, it just was filmed at my exhibition.” – OLIVIER MOSSET
—

1968 was a very good year for Serge Bard alias Abdullah Siradj. At just 21, this Enfant Terrible of the Zanzibar group was lucky enough to be financed by the “art patroness” Sylvina Boissonnas. He made three films in 35mm, very experimental in nature. The first film was called “Destroy Yourselves.” Shot in March 1968, it made headlines in May 1968 in the columns of Maoist filmgoers for its radical Warholian side (long still shots of some superstars – Caroline de Bendern, Alain Jouffroy, Thierry Garrel) and visionary in its anticipation, already in March, of the strikes and demonstrations of May 68. Noblesse oblige, it was one of the Zanzibar group’s first revolutionary films.

“Fun and Games for Everyone,” Serge Bard’s second film shot in 1968, was also filmed in 35mm with Henri Alekan in control of the lights and the camera. Bard, in this second film, again leaves the field open to an incessant coming and going of Parisians attending the opening of the minimalist painter Olivier Mosset and whose exhibition consisted of 10 paintings, all alike: white with black circles painted in their center. It’s the revolution criticizing art and painting… and Serge criticizing cinema! Alekan asked LTC film labs to flash the negative before processing it, giving the film a semi-negative look.

Like Warhol’s screen tests, Bard films people passing back and forth in front of the camera and paintings. Shot with a 50mm lens, we recognize the whole fashionable intelligentsia of the period: Barbet Schroeder, Amanda Lear, Jean Mascolo, Pascal Aubier and the imposing Salvador Dali who exclaims in front of one of the paintings: “It’s WERmeer!”

To further confuse the soundtrack, Serge asked Barney Wilen to compose haunting psychedelic music, very present during this 53-minute film essay. – Jackie Raynal

Serge Bard - Fun and Games for Everyone.mkv

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Language(s):French
Subtitles:Not needed

The post Serge Bard – Fun and Games for Everyone (1968) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Introduction
A factory siren sounds, workers punch in, the machinery starts. A worker opens small bags under a spout that spews beans into the bag. The worker must open a new bag quickly before the spout…

62MB | 6m 28s | 592×432 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/687CEDF307AC805/La_Mort_du__Rat_-_Pascal_Aubier_-_1975.avi

Language(s):None
Subtitles:None

The post Pascal Aubier – La mort du rat AKA Death of the Rat (1973) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Review by Jonathan Rosenbaum:
It’s been a full quarter of a century, but I still harbor fond memories of a low-budget French comedy called Valparaiso Valparaiso, a first feature starring Alain Cuny and Bernadette Lafont that I saw at Cannes in 1973. A lighthearted satire about the myopia of romantic French revolutionaries, it details an elaborate hoax perpetrated on a befuddled leftist–a character so absorbed in the glory of departing for Chile to fight the good fight as a special agent that he doesn’t even notice the political struggle going on around him on the French docks when he leaves. The film was so marginal that two years passed between its completion and its modest premiere at the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, and you won’t find it mentioned in any of the standard reference books. No, I take that back: Jean-Michel Frodon gives it a third of a sentence in his over-900-page L’Age moderne du Cinema Francais de la Nouvelle Vague a nos jours (1995), linking it with two other films of the early 70s inspired by the French Communist Party and critical of leftists. Valparaiso Valparaiso had the sort of heart and lyricism, however, that lingered in a few post-New Wave movies of that period.

998MB | 1h 33m | 656×400 | avi

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https://nitroflare.com/view/325B373B1F27617/ValparaisoValparaiso.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Pascal Aubier – Valparaiso, Valparaiso (1971) first appeared on Cinema of the World.