The Endless Picture-Show

The Endless Picture-Show

Tag Archives: France

The Bakery Girl of Monceau

02 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by Charulata in 1963

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1960s, 1963, France, Rohmer

One represented truth, and the other a mistake

Oh my. I blind bought the Moral Tales box set during the last B&N sale mostly thanks to my friends trip, fisticuffs and Sean – all pushing me to watch more Rohmer and I wanted to start 2013 off by opening the same. Turned out to be such a good decision because this is just such a perfect little film. It’s bittersweet tone encapsulates exactly what I crave from films. In <30 minutes, Rohmer captures all our little caprices and game-playing and silliness when it comes to relationships. The gliding camera, the voiceover that plunges us into the film, the way Rohmer plays with sound.. there’s so much to love here.

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Cold Water

18 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by Charulata in 1994, Reviews

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1990s, 1994, France, Olivier Assayas

This one’s more polished and assured than Disorder but feels no less personal or exploratory even. This one again starts off with a robbery but this time around, it’s an even younger teenage couple stealing records seemingly in an act of banal teenage rebellion. Unfortunately the girl is caught and the film mutates into something darker as sadder as it exposes the inevitable chasm between the kids and their parents’ generations.

The first half is perhaps not as dynamic as the second half, but it still has one of the most revealing scenes of the unbridgeable gap that can sometimes exists between parents and kids. The young boy, Giles, and his father are having a civil, polite conversation that could so easily be a warm tender moment. The father is sharing his very emotional response to Caravaggio’s “Death of the Virgin”. We soon realize that the discussion on art was but a gateway for the father to bring up the boy’s performance at school and instantly, the moment of potential tenderness and connection is ruptured. It’s a film in which almost no one seems to be really listening to the other person except for the brief moments of connection between Giles and Christine and even they are not always honest with each other.

The second half of the film is just an utter delight. Assayas pretty much abandons dialogue altogether and situates the rest of film in a kind of idyllic youth island where a group of teenagers are having a party. They dance, smoke pot, make out and eventually start a rather big bonfire as CCR, Janis Joplin, Alice Cooper, Donovan and Guns N Roses play in the background. The diversity in music picks just adds to the authenticity of the scene.. as if different people are walking towards the record player and switching out records in between. It’s a really great scene but the highlight for me was the two young lovers hiding away as Nico’s “Janitor of Lunacy” plays hauntingly in the background while the adults come looking for the runaways and we hear the sound of gunshots and shattered glass over the music.

The most poignant thing about the film is the realization that the kids are trying to run away not just from the specific adults and authority figures in their life but from adulthood itself. In one single scene between Christina’s mother and Giles, it’s easy to see why Christina is willing to stake everything to avoid end up bitter and resentful like her mother. Electricity and running water seems like a small sacrifice in that scheme of things.

LOOOOOVED it.

Disorder

18 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by Charulata in 1986

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1980s, 1986, France, Olivier Assayas

This feels like such a deeply personal debut feature and is all the better for it really. The film is ostensibly about a burglary gone wrong as 3 members of a struggling post-punk band attempt to rob instruments from a music store and the crime escalates to murder. But gradually the film morphs into something more. It continues throughout to play with Dostoevsky-esque ideas of guilt and how people respond to. But it also ends up becoming a coming-of-age tale of sorts as these young characters are forced to confront adulthood and we see the band-members gradually drift away from one another and even actively turn their backs on success and recognition.

Assayas plays around with a lot of things visually here and while it could easily seem showy or at least self-conscious, I loved how the whole thing has this dynamism that works perfectly with the post-punk music that’s used in the film. The entire thing is shot in the darkest hues possible and him and his cinematographer apparently used a silver-retention process to drain even more color off the images. Already, one can see the emergence of the tracking shots (as he flits across characters in a room) that are so beautifully used in Summer Hours.

I was also surprised to see that his interest in viewing the world as a smaller, connected place is already visible at this stage. The short I watched prior to this (Laissé inachevé à Tokyo) was shot in Japan and here again, the characters travel from Paris to London and finally to NY. I was less surprised by how much the film seems influenced by music. Seems natural for a young filmmaker. The whole film has Ian Curtis looming over it.

Really looking forward to more.

Laissé inachevé à Tokyo

16 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by Charulata in 1982

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1980s, 1982, France, Olivier Assayas, Short




Innocents with Dirty Hands

29 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by Charulata in 1975

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1970s, 1975, Claude Chabrol, France








This one’s absurdly convoluted and plotty even by Chabrol standards, so much so that I had a pretty hard time keeping track of the proceedings. But luckily, none of that REALLY matters. Suffice to say, the film explores every possible betrayal and plot reversal possible and lets them all play out while still maintaining character consistency. But plot stuff aside, what is really interesting is all the gender politics in the film. I love how the film is filled entirely with men to the exclusion of Romy Schneider. We don’t even see women in the background of scenes. And Chabrol really uses Schneider’s hotness to play with our perception of her. She starts off as the seductress, the femme fatale who isn’t terribly sympathetic but the film ends up making her a much more complex character than that. Her good looks which initially seem like a weapon that she wields to manipulate the men around her ultimately ends up being the very thing that turns every single man she encounters against her. Dark as hell, y’all. And fun.

The Man Who Sleeps

28 Monday May 2012

Posted by Charulata in 1974

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1970s, 1974, Bernard Queysanne, France, Georges Perec










Brigitte et Brigitte

18 Friday May 2012

Posted by Charulata in 1966

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1960s, 1966, France, Luc Moullet

Juste avant la nuit

03 Thursday May 2012

Posted by Charulata in 1971, Reviews

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1970s, 1971, Claude Chabrol, France

Les Cousins

02 Wednesday May 2012

Posted by Charulata in 1959

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1950s, 1959, Claude Chabrol, France

La Cérémonie

17 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by Charulata in Uncategorized

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1990s, 1995, Claude Chabrol, France

This might be the funniest of the Chabrol films I’ve watched so far. I’m starting to observe a lot of sly humor in these movies even beyond the writing and the always hilarious family dinners. For instance, I love how the little kid (who plays Jean Yanne’s son) in Que la Bête Meure bears a much more striking resemblance to Duchaussoy and here again, Bonnaire and Huppert look so much like each other that even in the early parts of the film, before Huppert really appears on screen (and the narrative pushes us towards this comparison), I found myself noticing just how much Bonnaire looks like her.

The more typical Chabrol humor I’ve now gotten accustomed to is present too with the bourgeois family getting all dressed up just to watch opera on the television! And the shot where the camera pans up to the two women standing on the stairs looking down at the family is just glorious. Wicked movie.

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