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Thread: Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center 2013

  1. #31
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    Shalimar Preuss: MY BLUE-EYED GIRL (2012)

    The documentary style seems to exert a pointless tyranny here over natural material of a family at the beach in summer time in southwestern France, but without a sufficient effort to weave the material into something effective. No French release, VOD; debuted at Rotterdam. Hints of drama come, but are wasted, when the oldest girl turns out to be conducting a secret romantic correspondence with an inmate at a very nearby prison.

  2. #32
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    Catherine Crosini: THREE WORLDS (2012)

    Finally something rare in this Rendez-Vous, a conventional thriller, a noirish moral one about a hitherto upright and correct man who's worked up from lowly origins to being named head of a huge garage and car dealership, and then dries a company car into a man at night and with two childood friends, runs away, ten days before he is to marry the boss's daughter. Raphaël Personnaz excels as the man who runs, and Clotilde Hesme as the bourgeois medical student who sees him and calls 911. Corsini previously made the 2007 Rendez-Vous film LES AMBITIEUX and the Kristin Scott Thomas vehicle, LEAVING.

  3. #33
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    Stephen Holden raves about the movie RENOIR in his Wednesday Feb. 27, 2013 NY Times preview piece for the 2013 FSLC/Unifrance Rendez-Vous, which begins today Feb. 28 and runs to March 10. Read his article here.
    After its success with the French films “The Artist,” which won the Oscar for best picture in 2012, and “The Intouchables,” which earned a whopping $400 million worldwide, the Weinstein Company is gambling that lightning will strike again with this year’s opening-night film, “Populaire.”
    We haven't gotten to see POPULAIRE in the press screenings, just as we didn't get to see INTOUCHABLES last year.

    Holden also logically singles out IN THE HOUSE and AUGUSTINE for special mention, as well as THÉRÈSE DESQUEYROUX, YOU WILL BE MY SON, and THE NUN. I'm a bit surprised at his mentioning YOU WILL BE MY SON, which hasn't gotten such good reviews in France, but I'll decide when I see it today; Niels Arestrup usually delivers, though he can't always save a picture.

  4. #34
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    I certainly hope you are making contributions to this site, Chris.

    http://rendezvouswithfrenchcinema.com/
    Colige suspectos semper habitos

  5. #35
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    That's the Unifrance French governmental film promotion site I think. I contribute to their and the US reps' intreests by writing reviews of the Rendez-Fous series films elsewhere.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 02-28-2013 at 07:10 PM.

  6. #36
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    Héléna Klotz: THE ATOMIC AGE (2012)

    It's just a short film about two young pals who spend an unsuccessful evening clubbing in Paris, but this young filmmaker, daughter of a prof at France's prestigious La Frémis film school, has made it into a visual poem that's amazing and true to youthful friendship, disillusion, and longing.

  7. #37
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    Patrice Leconte: THE SUICIDE SHOP (2012

    A French 3D animated musical about a shop catering to the suicidal. The lives of the family running it are turned around eventually when a younger brother (voiced by Kacey Mottet Klein) comes along who's born with a big smile on his face. Some French critics thought this faux Gothic, without real conviction, and there may be some truth in that, but if you like the theme, it's watchable and fun.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-02-2013 at 03:54 PM.

  8. #38
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    Gilles Legrand: YOU WILL BE MY SON (2012)

    Films about wine-making like films about art or about music are often disasters and this glossy one is an example with its transparently evil and mean head of the great vinticultural family who insists on pushing out his own hard-working but understandably not very confident son in favor of the flashier son of his general manager, who's dying of pancreatic cancer. Using an actor as good as Niels Arestrup for the role of the father can't save the picture from seeming totally predictable and simplistic. Yet the film will play, and there is already talk of a US adaptation set in California. Prepare for talk about smoke and oak and fruits and berries and shots of people diving in tanks of grapes.

  9. #39
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    Guillaume Nicloux: THE NUN (2013)

    A striking-looking but conventional and tonally uneven version of Denis Diderot's controversial anti-clerical novel of the later 18th century, with a young Belgian actress, Pauline Étienne in the main role as the girl sent away to a nunnery because she's not wanted at home. Isabelle appears nearly half-way in as a lesbian mother superior. Beautiful but plodding. Jacque Rivette did a version of this in 1966 starring Anna Karina.

  10. #40
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    Georges Franju: THÉRÈSE DESQUEROUX/THERESE (1962) redonsidered.

    I've seen the 1962 Georges Franju version of THÉRÈSE DESQUEYROUX offered for comparison with the 2013 Rendez-Vous's Claude Miller version, and added the following additional paragraph to my Festival Coverage review of Miller:

    The Rendez-Vous also included a one-time screening of Georges Franju's 1962 version of François Maurois's Thérèse Desqueroux starring Emanuelle Riva, Philippe Noiret, and Édith Scob (of Franju's famous Eyes Without a Face) as Bernard's sister. Franju's film is a grand black and white early Sixties French art film, closer to Maurois in its flashback frame structure, some literary references exchanged between Thérèse and Jean Azevedo, and in more liberal use of Thérèse's voiceover, which can come at any moment, in any scene, and more stylish in every way, though the style is interchangeable in some ways with the work of several Nouvelle Vague directors of the period. Sami Frey as Jean Azevedo seems less a pretty boy, more intelligent. Above all instead of Tautou's pathetic, limp quality, there is the poetic sadness of Riva so memorably displayed in Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour. Franju's version is set in the present, so it makes its points about the tyrannies of provincial ignorance and materialism with more immediacy. Franju's film has more notable actors and is more stylish. Certain aspects of the narrative -- Thérèse's original motivation for marrying Bernard, the gradual process by which she falls into poisoning him with arsenic -- are more embroidered by Miller, but in "explaining" things he may only weaken the force of Maurois's stark story, whose surreal "horror movie" aspects Franju seized upon so neatly half a century ago. Maurice Jarre's music for Franju's film is as distinctive as everything else, though a jazzy passage during the honeymoon dinner shot feels obtrusive. The writer for the French daily L'Express compares the two films, finds the new one "insipid," and concludes we'd do best to remember Claude Miller for his 1976 feature debut, The Best Way to Walk.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-02-2013 at 04:08 PM.

  11. #41
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    Links to the reviews:

    Augustine (Alice Winocour 2012)
    The Atomic Age (Héléna Klotz 2012)
    Bad Girl (Patrick Mille 2012) .
    The Day of Crows (Jean-Christophe Dessaint 2012)
    The Girl from Nowhere (Jean-Claude Brisseau 2012)
    Granny’s Funeral (Bruno Podalydès 2012)
    In the House (François Ozon 2012)
    Jappeloup (Christian Duguay 2013)
    Journal de France (Raymond Depardon, Claudine Nougaret 2012)
    A Lady in Paris (Ilmar Raag 2012)
    La Maison de la radio (Nicolas Philibert 2013)--CANCELLED
    My Blue-Eyed Girl (Shalimar Preuss 2012)
    The Nun (Guillaume Nicloux 2013)
    Populaire (Régis Roinsard 2012)--NO FSLC PRESS SCREENING
    Renoir (Gilles Bourdos 2012)
    Rich is the Wolf (Damien Odoul 2012)
    The Suicide Shop (Patrice Leconte 2012)
    Thérèse Desqueyroux (Claude Miller 2012)
    Three Worlds (Catherine Corsini 2012)
    You, Me and Us (Jacques Doillon 2012)
    You Will Be My Son (Gilles Legrand 2012)


    Roundup.

    For me this was not the best Rendez-Vous; there weren't films I cared as much about as in other years. I'd most recommend the soon-to-be-US-released In the House (François Ozon 2012). It's sharp, bold, funny, and a return to for form Ozon. I personally very much enjoyed Jappeloup (Christian Duguay 2013) , a biopic about a man and his champion show-jumping horse. Not very ground-breaking, but beautiful, and it has heart. Also The Atomic Age (Héléna Klotz 2012) is a little film that might look clichéd, but is poetic and beautiful; it does everything right and is very cinematic and very French. Those are the good ones. I might also mention the somewhat shapeless Journal de France (Raymond Depardon, Claudine Nougaret 2012). After all, it is a journalistic run-through of the whole second half of the Twentieth Century. Depardon was a hell of a photojournalist. I'd also recommend The Girl from Nowhere (Jean-Claude Brisseau 2012), a small, offbeat film, a bit of a surprise from Brisseau. Three Worlds (Catherine Corsini 2012) is an ordinary film, without much originality. But in this field it was welcome because it's very watchable and exciting.

    The rest were would-be's or also-rans or washouts. As for Renoir (Gilles Bourdos 2012) , which some ooed and ahed over, it's too pretty and too generic, and doesn't feel like a particularly important moment in Auguste or Jean Renoir's lives. Thérèse Desqueyroux (Claude Miller 2012) may be hyped as special if it gets to US art houses, but it's a bit limp, especially if you watch the sharp, angular 1963 Georges Franju version. Something is seriously wrong with the very moody and poetic Augustine (Alice Winocour 2012), another film about psychology and women in the nineteenth century. It tries too hard and is too full of itself. Sorry not to have seen Populaire: it may be pretty thin, but it's reportedly fun and nice to look at. People liked You Will Be My Son (Gilles Legrand 2012) and think it plays well and there's even a Hollywood remake planned, but it seems to me to have a horribly deterministic and obvious plot setup. As for You, Me and Us (Jacques Doillon 2012), it may be utterly French with its endless nattering abut relationships, but I agree with the Cannes reviewer who said it was like Éric Rohmer without the charm or the sense of structure. Surely Doillon is going through an odd, self-indulgent period not worthy of his best work. The Nun (Guillaume Nicloux 2013) doesn't work. It's clumsy and overbearing and has no rhythm. You would not even want to hear what I'd have to say about some of the others.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 03-20-2013 at 05:33 PM.

  12. #42
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    Richard Brody has a NYer column about NYC French films showing in New York this weekend. I wish I could give my own first hand report on the revival of Jacque Rivette's little known LE PONT DU NORD but I'm not there anymore so I cannot. Brody comments on the Rendez-Vous girlie film LES COQUILLETTES in a ridiculously overblown fashion, but I have said it does what it sets out to do very successfully. And I second Brody's comment on how the French often recognize US movie quality (like the now also revived HEAVEN'S GATE) before we do, noting the good reception of Apatow's THIS IS 40, just Metacritic 59 but Allociné French press rating a very good 3.5, retitled amusingly 4 ANS, MODE D'EMPLOI ("Age 40 User's Manual"). And here I am in the East Bay again and the best ting to see is ON THE ROAD or maybe the new Jack and the Beanstalk or Oz movies or a very plasticky-looking new animation called THE CROODS. I do not see ANY French films showing in the Bay Area right now (SIGH).

    [RICHARD BRODY'S MOVIE BLOG IN THE NEW YORKER, March 22, 2013]

    what-to-see-this-weekend.jpg

    One of the most exhilarating recent performances in a movie isn’t exactly new, but it’s in a 1981 movie that is only today getting its U.S. theatrical release: it’s by the great, tragically short-lived actress Pascale Ogier (who died in 1984, at the age of twenty-five), in Jacques Rivette’s “Le Pont du Nord” (North Bridge), opening today at BAM Cinématek (I have a capsule review of it in the magazine this week). She was the daughter of Bulle Ogier (a luminary of the French cinema since the sixties) with whom she co-stars. Mother and daughter share a screenplay credit with Rivette and Suzanne Schiffman, and their engaged inventiveness is on view throughout the film. The story, shot on a scant budget, entirely out of doors and on location in Paris, is, like so many of Rivette’s films, a work of dark whimsy: a world of grim mystery shimmers through its puckish, colorful surfaces and playful activity.

    Here, two lonely women connect by force of circumstance—one, Marie (Bulle Ogier), a little older, leaps into Paris from the back of a truck after her release from prison and tries to find her boyfriend, Julien (Pierre Clémenti); the other, Baptiste (Pascale Ogier), a helmeted wanderer on a scooter, young, tautly aggressive, with a martial bearing, a fierce gaze, and a paranoid streak, nearly runs into her and then teams up with her (“Once is an accident, twice is chance, three times is fate”). Marie, it turns out, was drawn into a plot of political crime that she has renounced but that Julien hasn’t quite abandoned. Baptiste, a self-styled guardian angel, steals Julien’s briefcase and, while uncovering the web of crime and politics, also finds a strange map of Paris that suggests a board game—one that the women play with their urban jaunts and that takes them deeper into the heart of espionage and of the city itself.

    In a sense, Paris itself is the star of the film; Rivette brings the characters through obscurely picturesque locations—vast but recondite staircases, seemingly concealed public stages, desolate corners of bustling squares—all of which seem menaced by reason and time. The first shot of the film, reminiscent of the dominant motif of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Two or Three Things I Know About Her,” shows an array of huge rectilinear cranes dangling over the cityscape in the process of transforming it; those transformations—the demolition of shadowy old industrial hulks and opaque and stony outmoded neighborhoods in favor of a clean and transparent architectural (and psychological) modernity—are the very core of the drama. Marie’s quixotic political activism and Baptiste’s freelance heroism both come off as obsolete remains of a roiling romantic age in the process of demolition.

    Baptiste’s paranoia has a marvellous onscreen correlate—with her jackknife, she tears through the city, cutting the eyes out of advertising posters. She’s a martial-arts expert whose aggressive streak gives the movie its first sublime jolt, a few minutes in, when she scoots up to a dapper man (Jean-François Stévenin) on a fancy motorcycle and defiantly edges over to him with a glare thrown at him like a gauntlet. Her paranoia proves well-founded; their confrontations recur throughout the film and build to a grand, surprising, ironic and poignant martial arts showdown that is as much a cinematic coup of invention as it is a showcase for Pascale Ogier’s forthrightly physical artistry. In its own way, “Le Pont du Nord” is Rivette’s “The Conversation,” with the bug transformed into a network so vast that it veers into the metaphysical and yet so ambient that it’s indistinguishable from the irresistibly alluring face of the city itself.

    The subterranean wonders of daily life come through in an altogether different way in a new French film, “Les Coquillettes” (elbow macaroni), screening Monday and Tuesday in the New Directors/New Films series. It’s directed by Sophie Letourneur, who also co-stars as herself, a filmmaker with a film (her real-life short film “The Shady Sailor,” which I wrote about here) in the Locarno Film Festival. She travels there with two friends, Carole (Carole Le Page) and Camille (Camille Genaud)—but I’m telling the story all wrong. The three friends are hanging out one night in a Paris apartment and reminiscing about their Locarno jaunt, and their telling of it overlaps with—and often conflicts comically with—the flashbacks showing the events in question. The drama concerns romance—Carole’s pursuit of a minor playboy of an actor, Camille’s flirtation with a young man, Martin (the film critic Julien Gester), Sophie’s fixation on the well-known young French actor Louis Garrel—and involves lots of talk and action having to do with bodily functions and comforts and discomforts, lots of Franglais (“cupcakes,” “see you soon,” “glamor,” “badges,” “le life”), the push and pull of petty slights and tiny defeats and victories. Camille recalling running exultantly in the rain as she was about to discover that she “wasn’t into” Martin exemplifies the movie’s subtly formalistic magic, the transformation of the physical into the psychological, of matter into memory.

    “Nowhere else does one have this passion in questions of form, this seriousness in mise en scène—which is Parisian seriousness par excellence.” Thus, Nietzsche, in “Ecce Homo,” from 1888. He didn’t live long enough to read Proust, let alone view films by Alain Resnais, but “Les Coquillettes” makes the point—its loopy and unstrung frivolity is deadly serious, held together by an exquisitely and (seemingly) effortlessly complex structure reminiscent of Resnais’ work, with the thread of identity being spun forward even as it’s pulled along, with its knots and breaks and tangles.

    France makes its triple return—not as accident or chance but, therefore, as destiny—at Film Forum, with the screening (today through Thursday) of a new restoration of Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate.” While American critics dragged it through the mud at the time of its release in 1980, many French ones were quick to recognize its greatness—and so it has so often been, and so it still often is, with the best of American movies. (The generally enthusiastic, and consistently substantial, discussion of Judd Apatow’s “This Is 40” when it was released in France last week ago, under the title “40 Ans: Mode d’emploi”—“Forty, a User’s Manual”—is a recent example.)

    Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...#ixzz2OJlCxhoy

  13. #43
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    A lot of mediocre films in this Rendez-vous, but that is always the case. The Rivette film played at the Film Comment Selects, a much better series historically than Rendez-vous, in 2005. Some Rivette films are a challenge to program (Out 1 for example) because of their extreme length.

  14. #44
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    More mediocre films than usual. There have been some quite memorable ones in previous years.

    Film Comment Selects is indeed a more interesting but also somewhat iffy series. Some very interesting things. Lots of oddball stuff, some pretty weird. I would have done better indeed to come earlier and see some of the FCS press screenings. I mentioned in my intro to this years FCS three or four of the films I really wanted to see. But it was not to be.

  15. #45
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    See my New Directors reports, Oscar. There were several great Latin American films. What comes to mind is the Brazilian one, THEY'LL COME BACK.

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