White is a fascinating, dark comedy about obsession, revenge, and redemption, replete with subtle irony. It is also a disturbing portrait of the price exacted when a soul is consumed by its own destructive passions. Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is a broken Polish immigrant whose beautiful French wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy), publicly humiliates him in […]
Blue is a work of such eviscerating intensity that it is almost impossible to describe with words. For this reason, I cannot imagine anyone but Juliette Binoche playing the part of Julie Vignon de Courcy, the lone survivor in a car accident that claimed the lives of her husband, a renowned composer, and their young […]
The Wound (La Blessure) opens to an unhurried, long take, static shot of a man lying near motionless on the mattress on the floor of a cramped, dingy apartment, seemingly waiting for something to happen. The ringing of a telephone breaks the visual monotony of the frame as a man named Papi (Adama Doumbia) crosses […]
Paria opens to a Felliniesque shot of a man suspended between earth and sky: in this case, a vagrant – perhaps under the influence – swinging from pipes along the walls of a subway station tunnel. But rather than a metaphor for the struggle between the body and the soul, the suspended state in Paria […]
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 […]