Droll, charming, and picaresque, Jean Eustache’s Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes chronicles the empty hours, petty capers, and amorous misadventures of Daniel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), an unmotivated (and consequently fired) erstwhile bricklayer and modern day dandy who, rather than admit to his blue collar roots, has concocted an elaborate tale of paternal conspiracy and social consciousness […]
Something of a germinal template for Raymond Depardon’s Profils Paysans films on a dying way of life in rural (and largely forgotten) France, Jean Eustache and Jean-Michel Barjol’s reverent, vital, and painstakingly observed ethnographic documentary Le Cochon chronicles a day in the life of peasant farmers in the mountainous region of the Massif Central. In […]
Eyes Without a Face opens to the sound of a jaunty and strangely carnivalesque music as an apprehensive and distracted woman named Louise (Alida Valli) hurriedly navigates through a dark and empty stretch of highway, momentarily veering off course to the side of the road by the ominous sight of a speeding vehicle quickly approaching […]
From the casual and personably familiar (and inferentially self-confident) running commentary of the film’s introductory behind-the-scenes footage of the cast and crew, Sacha Guitry sets the infectiously picaresque and disarming tone of The Story of a Cheat. An interstitial silhouette of Guitry’s profile provides the clever transition from real-life auteur to fictional character as the […]
In an early episode in Robert Guédiguian’s The Last Mitterrand (Le Promeneur du champ de Mars), the ailing president (Michel Bouquet) visits the royal catacombs of Saint Denis Basilica with his personally selected ghostwriter for his memoirs, a young writer named Antoine Moreau (Jalil Lespert), and regards the extraordinary realism of a sculpture, glistening from […]
Recalling Robert Bresson (in particular, Une Femme deuce) in its muted gesturality and Manoel de Oliveira in its saturated formalism, and infused with a dose of Raoul Ruiz’s puckish, tongue-in-cheek cerebral humor, the prevailing theme of Le Pont des Arts is perhaps best defined by a conversation that occurs early in the film between a […]