Somewhere between the idealism of youth and the nostalgia of old age lies regret, and it is at this life’s juncture that we find three lifelong friends in Claude Sautet’s poignant film, Vincent, François, Paul and the Others. Every Sunday, friends and family congregate at Paul (Serge Reggiani) and Julia’s (Antonella Lualdi) house in the […]
An early episode in Les choses de la vie shows a young man, Bertrand Bérard (Gérard Lartigau), politely demonstrating to his attentive father Pierre (Michel Piccoli) his latest novelty invention: an electronic bird call sound synthesizer that is programmable to a variety of frequency settings. Pierre appears skeptical of the potential market for such an […]
The woods surrounding the Palace of Versailles serves as a real-life metaphor for the stark disparity between wealth and poverty, privilege and exclusion in Pierre Schöller’s sobering and unsentimental tale of two cities, Versailles. At the heart of Schöller’s social interrogation is the plight of a young homeless boy, Enzo (Max Baissette de Malglaive) who, […]
André Téchiné’s films exist in a rarefied atmosphere between idyllic nostalgia and haunting memory. Ma Saison Préferée is the bittersweet story of Emilie (Catherine Deneuve), a successful, repressed, middle aged business woman, sensitively told through the banality of everyday life: a pervasive, uncomfortable silence during family dinner; a vague conversation with her degeneratively ill mother […]
From the opening images of Change of Plans, Danièle Thompson illustrates the intersection between personal and public spaces, initially, in the title sequence shot of a flamenco class in which a distracted, rhythm-challenged attorney, Marie-Laurence (Karin Viard) tries to keep up with – and out of the way of – other people, and subsequently, a […]
François Truffaut’s The Woman Next Door is a somber, subtly disturbing film about the beauty and destructive toll of passion. It is a tragic story chronicled through the dispassionate, reverent gaze of Madame Odile Jouve (Veronique Silver), the kind and enigmatic proprietor of a tennis club, who was crippled from a suicide attempt after a […]