Paris –1943. Paris is going through one of the hardest winters of its history -occupied and tortured by the Germans, freezing and starving, the City of Light hardly deserves its name. But Sophie Vasseur only just witnesses that misery. She has been recruited as the accompanist of Irene Brice, an opera singer, one of the few ‘lights’ still shining in Paris. Her husband Charles, a brilliant and rich businessman who loves her passionately, efficiently supports her agents and sponsors in protecting her from the unbearable reality, and Sophie, the shadow, cuddles in the shelter. Through all the ordeals that cost the life of so many, Charles carries Irene and Sophie, not even surprised to find themselves safe in London. But untouched by the universal suffering, Irene will create her own. Sophie could do something, but, unable to get out of her role of passive shadow and to understand she has power on her own, will she? A fascinating picture of destiny and how it affects human beings, whether they try to control it or not. Beautiful classical music too. -imdb reviewer

The.Accompanist.1992.1080p.NF.WEB-DL.x264.DDP2.0-PTerWEB.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 51mn
Size:	4.32 GiB
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Video
Codec:	x264
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Audio
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https://nitro.download/view/B2FA72AEE7618E3/The.Accompanist.1992.1080p.NF.WEB-DL.x264.DDP2.0-PTerWEB.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Claude Miller – L’Accompagnatrice AKA The Accompanist (1992) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

When a bus breaks down in the desert, the passengers decide to stage “King Lear.”

Thinking Inside the Box
Rating * Has redeeming facet

The King Is Alive, directed and cowritten by Kristian Levring, is the fourth film to have the dubious honor of qualifying for certification under the rules of the Dogma 95 manifesto, whose professed aim is to get back to the basics of realism — shooting, for example, in natural locations with handheld cameras, direct sound, and natural lighting. But what’s basic or realistic and what isn’t, in terms of film history and technique? The manifesto also insists that movies be shot in color, a rather ahistorical reading of what’s basic — unless one labels all possible uses of color in film realistic and all possible uses of black and white artificial.

If that’s the operative assumption, The King Is Alive triumphantly refutes it. The movie was shot with three digital video cameras — unlike Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogma film The Celebration, which was shot with only one, and Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (not a Dogma film, but made by one of Dogma’s founders), which was shot with a hundred — and that might make it seem new as well as passe. Certainly the look Levring, one of the original four cosigners of Dogma 95, gets from these cameras is fresh and at times even startling, featuring vivid, deeply saturated colors that practically glow in the dark; African desertscapes that seem sculptural (the film was shot in Namibia); and natural lighting effects that are often beautiful — at least according to conventional art-photography notions — such as sunlight streaming through windows and faces starkly silhouetted in close-ups.

I’m not entirely convinced that the cameras or settings are the only things responsible for this look. If Jean-Marc Lalanne — reviewing this film at last year’s Cannes festival for the newspaper Liberation — is to be believed, most of the film’s “absolutely antinaturalist” color and lighting effects were achieved during postproduction, presumably through lab work, thereby breaking the first part of the fifth rule of Dogma 95, which decrees, “Optical work and filters are forbidden.” I don’t have enough technical knowledge to decide whether Lalanne is correct, but Levring definitely breaks the manifesto’s tenth rule — “The director must not be credited” — as, I believe, all the other filmmakers with Dogma 95 certificates have done. I think Levring has also broken the eighth rule — “Genre movies are not acceptable” — since The King Is Alive clearly belongs to a venerable subgenre in which Westerners traveling through the third world are brought together by chance, become stranded in the middle of nowhere, fight for survival, get on one another’s nerves, and show their worst sides.

Most examples of this subgenre involve plane wrecks, such as Sands of the Kalahari (1965) and Flight of the Phoenix (1966), two of the better entries that come to mind. Of course, given that both of these examples are from the 60s, what seems familiar or even shopworn to me might seem fresh or even innovative to someone younger — another example of how subjective any notion of “getting back to basics” can be.

Instead of a plane wreck, The King Is Alive has a bus full of tourists that runs out of gas in a small, deserted mining town in the African desert after steering off course because of a faulty compass. Otherwise the film differs from its genre predecessors mainly in its sexual candor, in its multifaceted unpleasantness — almost everyone in the group despises almost everyone else and goes out of his or her way to prove it — and in its odd decision to have the oldest member of the group, Henry (David Bradley), stage a production of King Lear while waiting for Jack (Miles Anderson), the most practical member of the group, to return with fuel for the bus.

Another spin on the formula is the inclusion of a wizened and hermitlike black sage, Kanana (Peter Kubheka), who sits around all day; he doesn’t speak a word of English, but as the offscreen narrator, he delivers a vague, poetic, and highly implausible commentary in his native tongue (subtitled in English) about the stranded people, all of whom, except the bus driver, are white. A sample of Kanana’s folk wisdom: “They ate a bit less every day. They said words the rest of the time.” The tourists’ only food, incidentally, is canned carrots — some of them dangerously spoiled — left behind by the miners. Kanana’s source of food, or whether he eats at all, is never revealed.

Henry’s decision to rehearse and stage King Lear is no more plausible, unless one translates the bored and unresourceful tourists into a troupe of bored actors — which is possibly what Levring had in mind. Taking his actors into the Namibian desert, he encouraged improvisations, some of which he used, and it appears that when he ran out of these he followed the lead of Henry in furnishing his cast with lines from King Lear. Some of these lines match the situations and the characters, but more often they don’t — an interesting device in itself, though its connection with the rest of the film is unclear.

Henry furnishes his companions with lines from the play by jotting down the ones he can remember on separate rolls of paper, then distributing them. How is it that he happens to remember most or all of the lines in Lear? The movie never gets around to explaining. In the press notes, Levring does say that his inspiration was an Englishman he knew who lived in the Mojave Desert and arranged evenings of Shakespeare with someone who worked in a nearby diner and someone else who worked at a filling station. Presumably it’s easier to substitute an African desert for one in the American southwest if you regard both as abstract or symbolic locations — fitting metaphysical backdrops for a figure like Kanana.

If I’d been interested in this movie’s acrimonious characters I might have appreciated the actors’ performances more. French actress Romane Bohringer seems mainly wasted playing a woman who’s Henry’s first choice for Cordelia, and Jennifer Jason Leigh acts up a storm playing an American bimbo who turns out to have more brains than expected; she winds up with the role. The other actors play characters who are too narrowly conceived to make for much interesting acting — Bruce Davison and Janet McTeer are cast as an American couple, Chris Walker and Lia Williams as an English couple, David Calder as a cynical Brit wrestling with a midlife crisis, the late Brion James (who played Leon, one of the replicants in Blade Runner) as an alcoholic businessman, and Vusi Kunene as the bus driver. Only the characters played by Kunene, Anderson, Bradley, and Kubheka are allowed to retain even a trace of dignity.

To be fair, Levring sets up some interestingly jagged editing patterns when he crosscuts toward the end of this movie, and the shots throughout are almost always visually striking. More generally, The King Is Alive justifies itself periodically as a set of experiments, a film more interested in seeking than in finding. But if this metaphysical stew is getting back to realistic basics — in terms of perceptions about human nature or aesthetics — I can only wonder what an artificial, decadent cinema must be like.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader, 2001

The.King.Is.Alive.2000.DVDRip.x264-E411-CG.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 45mn
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https://nitro.download/view/E81C929DFD4767A/The.King.Is.Alive.2000.DVDRip.x264-E411-CG.mkv

Language(s):English,French
Subtitles:English,Dannish,Finnish,Swedish,Norwegian

The post Kristian Levring – The King Is Alive (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The lives of tortured artists have always made for fascinating film fare. From Amadeus to Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, dramatic re-creations of the often-frenzied, always-tormented lives of “great” men and women have captivated audiences. Since genius is often synonymous with self-destruction, it should come as no surprise that director Agnieszka Holland’s presentation of the relationship between two 19th century poets is overflowing with grimness, grief, and anger. Yet, even though we never feel much sympathy for either Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio) or Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis), the material is nevertheless strangely compelling.

Total Eclipse opens in 1871 as established poet Verlaine invites the wild 16-year old Rimbaud to live with him. The youth, who possesses a keen intellect but little regard for conventional etiquette, astounds his host while simultaneously horrifying Verlaine’s young, pregnant wife, Mathilde (Romane Bohringer). Soon, with his promises of intense experiences and new insights into life, Rimbaud seduces Verlaine from his family. The two men, now sexual partners as well as friends, bounce from Paris to Brussels to London, arguing about the existence of love and whether indeed “the only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.”

The story related in Total Eclipse is ambitious. What transpired between Verlaine and Rimbaud more than one-hundred years ago has influenced poetry since, but has never been dramatized for the screen until now. The relationship is complex, encompassing just about every emotion from love to hate — a profoundly unhealthy attraction that poisons not only the lives of the two principals, but that of everyone who has contact with them. What befalls the Verlaines’ marriage is only the first tragedy.

As scripted by Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Carrington), the presentation of Verlaine and Rimbaud’s story is erratic. At times, it’s absorbing — almost hypnotic — but those stretches don’t last. There are other sequences when the film becomes ponderous and pretentious, and where over-the-top acting blunts dramatic impact. The narrative also has a tendency to jump from year-to-year and place-to-place. As far as the characters are concerned, they’re interesting only when they’re together.

The performances by the two leads are as uneven as the story itself. DiCaprio (The Basketball Diaries) and Thewlis (Naked) both have moments when they truly shine — the latter as a pathetic man questing for something to re-ignite his inspiration and the former as a cruel, torn youth who sees human society as a hypocritical, ugly place. Cesar-winning French actress Romane Bohringer (Savage Nights) is a model of solid, consistent acting, making the most of limited screen time.

Despite its flaws, Total Eclipse is the kind of movie that stirs thoughts and ruminations about the nature of genius, the true meaning of art, and the unfailing capacity of great people to destroy themselves and others. Holland has not matched the success of two of her previous films — Europa Europa and Olivier Olivier — but this picture is still a respectable examination of a fascinating historical relationship.

Total.Eclipse.1995.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

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Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 51mn
Size:	1.83 GiB
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https://nitro.download/view/F8E96F9E77A9064/Total.Eclipse.1995.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Agnieszka Holland – Total Eclipse (1995) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“Mina Tannenbaum” follows the ups and downs of a long-term friendship between two Jewish French women.
Young Mina and Ethel meet at ballet class, and instantly take to each other. Through the years, they maintain their closeness, even when their paths diverge. Mina, thin and lovely, goes through a period of intense shyness and then tries to become a successful artist; the plumper Ethel, insecure and often ashamed of her body, struggles to get her career as a journalist off the ground.
Then a misunderstanding threatens the relationship… with potentially tragic results.

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https://nitro.download/view/D87D0EC48B979B7/Mina_Tannenbaum.avi https://nitro.download/view/9487A5FFB704678/Mina_Tannenbaum.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Martine Dugowson – Mina Tannenbaum (1994) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Vic + Flow Saw a Bear is a darkly mysterious tale of lesbian two ex-cons, Victoria and Florence, trying to make a new life in the backwoods of Quebec. Seeking peace and quite, the couple the slowly begin to feel under siege as Vic’s probation office keeps unexpectedly popping up and a strange woman in the neighborhood soon turns out to be an increasingly menacing shadow from Flo’s past. With it’s collection of complex and eccentric characters, unexpected plot twists and unsettling humor, director Denis Cote (Curling, Bestiaire) has created an original film that is as once traumatizing, uplifting, and utterly breathless.

1.46GB | 1h 35m | 720×400 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/5B18BF9C4B915D7/Vic_et_Flo_ont_vu_un_ours.mkv

Language:French
Subtitles:English,French

The post Denis Côté – Vic + Flo ont vu un ours AKA Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (2013) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Paul and Marguerite are a five years old couple. Their love is strong, deep, tragic… visceral. Paul wants to control things. Marguerite is more free…

1.22GB | 1 h 25 min | 921×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/D9A2EFB97D30B1F/Bertrand_Bonello_-_(1998)_Something_Organic.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/9813A80ED4E1FFF/Bertrand_Bonello_-_%281998%29_Something_Organic.srt

Language:French
Subtitles:English

The post Bertrand Bonello – Quelque chose d’organique AKA Something Organic (1998) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Adapted from director Collard’s own novel, Les Nuits fauves won the filmmaker a French César for Best Debut Director just days after he died of AIDS-related illness (the film took four Césars, including Best FIlm, in 1993).

Quote:
This shocking (and shockingly good) French drama makes up in sheer visceral power whatever it lacks in brevity and pacing. The semi-autobiographical tale of an HIV-positive musician, photographer, and filmmaker, Cyril Collard’s Les Nuits fauves has the talkiness of French New Wave, the cultural fluency of early-’70s Hollywood, and the personal/political urgency of the early-AIDS epidemic. On paper, the story sounds like one that’s been told too many times: Selfish artist type screws whomever he wants, whenever he wants, and pays the price.

Les.Nuits.Fauves.1992.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	2h 1mn
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https://nitro.download/view/6B7C010D82A5796/Les.Nuits.Fauves.1992.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language:French, Spanish
Subs:English, Italian

The post Cyril Collard – Les Nuits fauves aka Savage Nights (1992) first appeared on Cinema of the World.