Au Revoir les enfants is a touching and nostalgic film about the loss of innocence. Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse) is an awkward, fanciful adolescent who is sent by his doting mother to a provincial Catholic boarding school. Set in 1940s war-torn France, there is an underlying sense of hardship and uncertainty in this idyllic countryside: […]
Alain (Maurice Ronet) silently observes his lover Lydia (Léna Skerla), struggling to decipher the elusive meaning beneath the wistful, attentive eyes, lingering beyond the point of reassuring tenderness to where the potentiality of the moment of connection has irretrievably slipped away, and all that is left is the inscrutable, opaque gaze. Confronting the awkward silence, […]
If there is a kindred spirit to Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget a stark and brooding portrait of aging, mortality, and loneliness, it is probably Ventura Pons’s contemporary film, Barcelona (A Map), a rumination on architecture and empty spaces as a reflection of internalized, decaying emotional landscapes. This internal struggle is uncompromisingly laid bare in […]
Under the Sun of Satan opens to an inherently solemn ritual as a senior priest, Canon Menou-Segrais (Mauric Pialat) shaves a spot on the top of the head of a pensive young priest named Father Donissan (Gérard Depardieu) who, in turn, uses the occasion to express his feelings of profound estrangement and inutility from the […]
Part autofiction in its reflexive tale of emotional abandonment and part social realism in its clinical illustration of the nation’s overtaxed foster care system, Maurice Pialat’s L’Enfance nue finds greater kinship with Jean Eustache’s studies on hybrid modes of representation than with a deconstructed cinéma du papa that François Truffaut’s involvement as the film’s co-producer […]
The sound of a rattling, mechanical alarm bell seemingly ushers a silent wave of anonymous, early morning commuters heading towards metropolitan Paris at the crack of dawn as they follow the ritualistic procession of informal queues leading to the subway station, pack into crowded, unconditioned trains, transfer through a coordinated maze of mass transportation, traverse […]