In the spring of 1999, a distraught and incoherent middle-aged man, Kim Yong-ho (Sol Kyung-gu), dressed in a tailored business suit, lies along the side of a railroad bridge that overlooks an open field by a lake. Nearby, a loose knit group of friends called the Bong-woo Club, formed 20 years earlier at the same […]
Adele (Vanessa Paradis) recounts with resigned acceptance to a clinical psychologist her history of failed, impulsive relationships and run of bad luck. She is uncertain about the future, waiting for the elusive something to happen, and her instinctive response is to escape the absurdity of her situation. One evening, she stands on a bridge, mustering […]
The brooding and achingly sensual Monsieur Hire was my first exposure to Patrice Leconte’s films, and to a great extent, it was this initial encounter with haunted obsession and sad-eyed romanticism that propelled me to continue to seek out his body of work, trying to recapture in some way the searing melancholia and bittersweet intoxication […]
Patrice Leconte’s Monsieur Hire is a deeply affecting portrait of the dark side of obsession. Monsieur Hire (Michel Blanc) is a lonely, middle-aged tailor who has taken up the rather depraved pastime of watching his beautiful neighbor, Alice (Sandrine Bonnaire). Observing his demeanor, one can hardly call him a voyeur. It is as if he […]
Alberto Lattuada irreverently – and uproariously – explores the nurtured regionalisms, preconceptions, and ethnic stereotypes between the more progressive, industrialized north and more conservative, old world traditions of southern Italy – and in particular, Sicily – that continue to pervade and shape the social attitudes between the two divergent cultures of contemporary Italian society in […]
In an early sequence in Alberto Lattuada’s The Overcoat, the mayor (Giulio Stival) relishes the idea of history having to be rewritten as a result of an archaeologist’s discovery of ancient artifacts that had been unearthed during the groundbreaking of his commissioned, large-scale urbanization project. Designed to transform the landscape of the town’s main square […]