The opening scenes of La Grande Illusion provide a subtle reflection of the old European social order during the First World War, as Captain de Boieldieu (Pierre Fresnay) studies aerial surveillance maps from the safe distance of his office in order to plot out military strategy. There is an aberration in the photographs, and de […]
A lone automobile arrives at an unassuming rural inn appropriately called the Frontier Café and Hotel on a bucolic northern border town, as a cheerful and genteel businessman named Meunier (Henri Guisol) provides a cursory orientation of the couple’s proximity to the border before bidding a sincere, fond farewell to his two visibly exhausted, but […]
A meek and unassuming office clerk, Maurice Legrand (Michel Simon), declines an invitation from his goading co-workers to turn the evening’s dinner banquet festivities into a night of carousing, citing his need to be home before his wife’s preset midnight curfew. On the way home, he encounters a physical altercation between a wanton young woman […]
Revisiting the shifting perspective, stream of consciousness narrative of Providence, Alain Resnais’s Les Herbes folles is a more whimsical variation on the themes of subjective reality and causality. An early image of wild grass poking through cracks in the concrete provides a paradigm for the film’s seemingly organic tale of subverted expectation: a middle-aged man […]
There is an early survey of the interiors of a vacant Bercy apartment at the opening sequence of Cœurs that immediately evokes early Alain Resnais in the recurring theme of architectural memory, as the camera pans to the majestic domed ceiling of a converted building, artificially bisected by a superfluous wall constructed for the sole […]
On an idyllic summer day in 1933, a lone car traverses around the bend of a narrow gravel road along the side of a hill, stopping at a scenic overlook alongside the deserted coastline as three unidentified, college-aged spectators anxiously follow the course of a sparsely occupied motorboat through a pair of binoculars as it […]