An early episode in Nenette and Boni shows a teenaged girl named Antoinette (Alice Houri), wearing an oversized shirt as she blissfully floats in a school gymnasium swimming pool before being summoned out of the water for improper swimming attire by an impatient instructor. Later in the evening, she bids an affectionate farewell to her […]
Tag: French Cinema
I Can’t Sleep, 1994
On her way to Paris, an attractive, young Lithuanian woman named Daiga (Yekaterina Golubeva) scans through the local radio stations in search of ambient driving music, distractedly tuning in on a trivialized, inappropriately jovial news broadcast of the latest victim of the elusive “granny killer”, before resuming the station’s youthful, upbeat music programming. The film […]
No Fear, No Die, 1990
On desolate road near the Spanish-French border, a pensive African immigrant from Benin, Dah (Isaach De BankolĂ©), waits in the darkness for a poultry truck to arrive for an appointed evening rendezvous. Aboard is an old friend, Jocelyn (Alex Descas) who has recruited him to act as an intermediary and handle the business affairs of […]
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is Jacques Demy’s experimental film about love and loss. It is a visually stunning musical tale told in three acts: Departure, Absence, and Return. Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve) is the daughter of an umbrella shop owner who falls in love with Guy (Nuno Castelnuovo), a garage mechanic. Despite her mother’s (Anne Vernon) […]
Bay of Angels, 1963
A mild-mannered and unassuming clerk named Jean Fournier (Claude Mann) accepts a ride from his co-worker Caron (Paul Guers) who, much to the financially struggling young man’s puzzlement, was able to afford a new car despite earning a similar limited salary at the local bank. Caron appears evasive, but eager to reveal the source of […]
On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, 1959
The panning shot of an anonymous city street establishes the tensile, yet integral relationship between citizen and environment in Guy Debord’s dense and minimalist essay On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, describing the rows of generic apartment buildings as places of refuge from the constant social immersion […]