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Les
Yeux sans visage
Eyes Without a Face
France/Italy
| 1959 | b&w | 88 mins | dir. Georges Franju, with Pierre
Brasseur,
Alida Valli, Edith Scob, Juliette Mayniel | cert. 18
What
could have been a straighforward horror film takes on a poetic
dimension in Franju's essentially tragic portrait of a doctor
(Brasseur) who has accidentally ruined his daughter's looks in a car
crash and becomes intent on reconstructing her beuaty by
“stealing” the face of a suitable donor.
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The Silences of the Palace
Samt el qusur
Tunisia/France | 1994 | col | 127 mins |
dir Moufida Tlatli,
with Amel Hedhili, Najia Ouerghi, Hend Sabri | cert. 12A
Moufida
Tlatli’s magnificent debut focuses on a group of servant
women
confined in the palace of the country’s last princes during
the
final days of French colonial rule. The film effectively conveys the
oppressive opulence of the palace and the resilience of the servant
women who are sensual, strong and full of humour. Fine performances,
sumptuous mise-en-scene and haunting music, by Anouar Brahem, makes
Silences… an exceptional work and one that lingers in the
mind.
Winner, Caméra d'Or, Cannes Film Festival
1994. Winner, Golden Tanit, Carthage 1994.
Q&A
with Dir Moufida Tlatli & Malu Halasa
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La
Charme discret de la bourgeosie
The
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
France/Italy/Spain | 1972 | col | 102 mins | dir. Luis Buñuel,
with Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Stephane Audran | cert. 15
Bunuel
sends his elegant cast on an increasingly frustrating – and
bizarrely eventful – search for a meal in this Oscar-winning
comedy of manners. The best and most accessible of the director's
Surealist comedies, the film pokes fun at European pretensions about
religion, culture and government.
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La Pianiste
The
Piano Teacher
Germany/France/Poland/Austria | 2002 | col | 131 mins | dir.
Michael
Haneke, with Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, Benoît
Magimel,
Susanne Lothar, Udo Samel | cert. 18
Erica
Kohut is in her
late 30s, and a piano teacher at the conservatory in Vienna.
Emotionally sealed off from the rest of the world, she lives with her
tyrannical elderly mother in a love-hate relationship, which is
characterized by mutual dependence. There is no room for men. Erika's
only sex life is provided by the voyeurism and masochistic self-induced
injuries until one of her students decides to seduce her.
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Le
Cercle Rouge
France | 1960 | col | 140 mins | dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, with Alain Delon, Yves Montand
A group of gangsters carry out a daring jewel heist in this moody French noir.
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La
Cérémonie
A Judgement in Stone
France/Germany | 1995 | col | 112 mins | dir. Claude Chabrol,
with
Sandrine Bonnaire, Isabelle Huppert, Jacqueline Bisset | cert. 15
An
illiterate maid hired by a well-meaning bourgeois family forms a
dangerous relationship with a bitter postal clerk. The older woman
instils her protegée with a hatred of the bourgeoisie, and
together they slowly and unpleasantly begin to vent their frustration.
Beautifully shaped and paced, this film is a suspenseful thriller and a
bleak observation on class power play.
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La
Grande Bouffe
Blow Out
France/Italy | 1973 | col | 130 mins | dir. Marco Ferreri,
with
Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret, Ugo Tognazzi |
cert. 18
For world-weary middle-aged men
(a pilot, chef,
judge and TV personality) decide to gorge themselves to death in one
final orgiastic weekend of sex and gourmet food. Decribed by the New
York Times as 'vulgar vaudeville on an epic scale... a mordant,
chilling, hilarious dirty movie', Ferreri's blackly-comic satire of our
modern consumer society won the Critics Award at the 1973 Cannes Film
Festival.
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Van
Gogh
France | 1991 | col | 158 mins | dir. Maurice Pialat, with
Jacques Dutronc, Elsa Zylberstein, Alexandra London
Concentrating
on the last three months of the artist's life, Pialat gives us a very
different Van Gogh from the popular Hollywood version of a tormented
Kirk Douglas. Dutronc inhabits the role with quiet truthfulness and the
result is a beautiful and poignant study that avoids facile attempts to
explain or excuse the contradictions of a deeply troubled man.
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Le
Trou
The Hole
France/Italy | 1960 | b&w | 132 mins | dir. Jacques
Becker, with
Michel Constantin, Marc Michel, Jean Kéraudy, Philippe Leroy
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cert. 12
Becker's last film before his
untimely death and a
masterpiece of understatement focuses on male bonding, loyalty and
betrayal among five prisoners bent on escaping from gaol.
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Le Procès
de Jeanne d'Arc
The
Trial of Joan of Arc
France | 1962 | b&w | 65 mins | dir. Robert Bresson,
with Florence Carrez | cert. PG
With
a script taken from transcripts made at Joan's trial, Bresson's
meticulously-crafted film observes the systematic, partly sexual
humiliation of the young woman with a documentary-style detachment.
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La
Chinoise
France | 1967 | col | 100 mins | dir. Jean-Luc Godard, with
Anne
Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Michel Sémiako,
Juliet
Berto | cert. PG
Godard's brilliant
dialectical farce,
distinctly disquieting as well as gratingly funny, in which five
Parisian students, members of a Maoist cell, discuss the implications
of the Chinese cultural revolution. The film stands as a prophetic and
remarkably acute analysis of the impulse behind the events of May '68.
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Milou
en mai
France/Italy | 1989 | col | 107 mins | dir. Louis Malle, with
Michel Piccoli, Miou-Miou, Michel Duchaussoy, Dominique Blanc
Madame
de Vieuzac is the owner of a large property in the Bordeau area where
she lives with her son Milou. On her death, he calls on the rest of the
family to attend her funeral. A bitter-sweet comedy of manners about
provincial bourgeois life in May '68.
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Plein
Soleil
Purple Noon
France/Italy | 1960 | col 118 mins | dir.
René
Clément, with Alain Delon, Maurice Ronet, Marie
Laforêt |
cert. 15
In this first version of
Highsmith's The Talented
Mr Ripley, Clément's camera celebrates the dangerous beauty
of
Delon against stunning Mediterranean landscapes.
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Et
Dieu créa la femme
And God
Created Woman
France/Italy | 1956 | col | 95 mins | dir. Roger Vadim, with
Brigitte Bardot, Curd Jurgens, Jean-Louis Trintignant | cert. PG
An
18-year-old girl, shortly after her marriage, finds she is attracted to
other men. “Brigitte was the real modern revolutionary
character
for women. And Vadim, as a man, a lover and a director, felt this very
strongly. The New Wave was important because it expressed vitality,
eroticism, energy, love and passion.” (Jeanne Moreau)
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La
Grande Vadrouille
Don't Look
Now - We're Being Shot At
France/UK | 1966 | col | 132 mins | dir. Gérard
Oury, with Bourvil, Louis de Funès
France,
WW2. Three English airmen parachute to the ground in different
locations in Occupied Paris and are picked up by three Frenchmen who
then undertake to smuggle them back to the Free Zone. A boisterous
comedy starring France's greatest comedy duo.
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Monsieur
Klein
France/Italy | 1976 | col | 123 mins | dir. Joseph Losey, with
Alain Delon, Jeanne Moreau | cert. 18
A
Kafkaesque tale that gave Delon one of his finest roles as Robert
Klein, a prosperous art dealer in Occupied Paris who finds himself
mysteriously confused with a Jew of the same name.
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Diva
France | 1981 | col | 117 mins
| dir. Jean-Jacques Beineix,
with
Frédéric Andrei, Richard Bohringer, Wilhelmenia
Wiggins
Fernandez, Thury An Luu | cert. 15
A
marvellous amalgam of
sadistic thriller and fairy-tale romance, drawing on a wild diversity
of genres from film noir to Feuillade's serial. The offbeat plot has a
pair of psychopathic hoods on the trail of a young postman, turning his
obsessive dream of romance with a beautiful black opera singer into a
nightmare.
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Monsieur
Hire
France | 1989 | col | 81 mins | dir. Patrice Leconte, with
Michel Blanc, Sandrine Bonnaire | cert. 15
Leconte's
breakthrough film with the British audience is a tense reworking of the
Simenon story that formed the basis for Duvivier's Panique. Blanc is on
top form as a lonely man with voyeuristic tendencies who finds himself
the prime suspect in a murder case.
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French
Cancan
France/Italy | 1954 | col | 102 mins | dir. Jean Renoir, with
Jean Gabin, Françoise Arnoul, Michel Piccoli
The
story is a backstage musical about the founding of the Moulin Rouge and
the training of the famous cancan dancers. Henri Danglard is the
director of a night club in Montmartre. One night, in a small
guinguette, he discovers la reine blanche, a young laundress called
Nini who dances marvellously and he asks her to become the Queen of his
next show.
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