There is an understatedly crystalline moment in Le Lit de la vierge (The Virgin’s Bed) when the scarlet woman, Marie Magdalène (Zouzou), having encountered the fragile and aimless Jesus (Pierre Clémenti) for the first time, cryptically explains that the men of the village pay for her company through the archaic currency of stones – and […]
One of the experimental works created from the cadre of radical, emerging artists financed under the rubric of Zanzibar films that captured the spirit of May 68 and the counter culture revolution, Philippe Garrel’s silent film Le Révélateur is a fractured and elliptical, but instinctive, elemental, and haunting rumination on the process of awakening, maturation, […]
A somber and young man Pierre (Louis Garrel) sits inside a car listening impassively as his barely coherent, self-absorbed father (Philippe Duclos) coldly reveals his resigned resentment towards him as an accident of birth who had caused a premature end to his bohemian lifestyle and sexual experimentation with his wife Hélène (Isabelle Huppert). Brought to […]
Olivier, Olivier is a hauntingly elliptical, visually mesmerizing revelation of a puzzling mystery. The story is set on the sweeping French countryside where Serge Duval (Francois Cluzet), a veterinarian, lives with his wife, Elisabeth (Brigitte Rouan) and their two young children. One day, while on an errand to deliver food to his ailing grandmother, the […]
In the book Alain Resnais, author James Monaco cites a comment by the filmmaker on Last Year at Marienbad that his idea for the film was to “renew a certain style of the silent cinema”, for which Monaco expounds that this overarching vision contributed to the film’s multifaceted syntax that “any particular shot can be […]
In an age of a borderless, new European economy, the volatile encounter of four people on an anonymous Parisian street underscores the underlying social disparity inherent in any increasingly multicultural, contemporary urban society. A brash, impatient young man named Jean (Alexandre Hamidi) accosts his older brother’s girlfriend, an actress named Anne (Juliette Binoche), on the […]