In the opening remarks for the film, Bruno Dumont described Twentynine Palms as experimental film in articulating sensation without narrative through abstract, dissociated forms, teasingly remarking that “a Manet without figures is a Rothko”. An American photographer named David (David Wissak) and his French-speaking, Eastern European lover Katia (Yekaterina Golubeva) set off from Los Angeles […]
Tag: Rendez-vous with French Cinema
The Page Turner, 2006
Favorably evoking Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie in its taut, slow brewing, and unnerving portrait of dysfunctional class relations, Denis Dercourt’s The Page Turner is a distilled, understated, and elegantly realized psychological tale of fragility, revenge, and manipulation. At the heart of Dercourt’s dark allegory is a polite, attractive, and meticulous young woman named Mélanie Prouvost […]
L’Intrus, 2004
L’Intrus opens to a shot of the Franco-Swiss border as a border guard performs a customs check and inspection of a random vehicle with the aid of a contraband-sniffing dog. The seemingly mundane image of frontier, wilderness, and deception provides a curiously appropriate introduction into the Claire Denis’ impenetrably fractured, enigmatically allusive, otherworldy, and indelible […]
Ain’t Scared (Regarde-moi), 2007
During the Q&A for Ain’t Scared (Regarde-moi), Audrey Estrougo remarked that one of her motivations for making the film was to create a more authentic portrait of les cités – the low income housing neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city – that had become an all too convenient political target for all the social […]
The Girl from Monaco, 2008
The prevailing stereotype of Monaco as exotic, laid back resort destination and land of fairytale – perpetuated in part by the public’s enduring affection for the principality’s most famous transplant, Grace Kelly – provides the surreal atmosphere for conscientious, Parisian attorney and self-styled ladies man, Bertrand’s (Fabrice Luchini) inopportune case of tropical fever in Anne […]
Gentille, 2005
The whimsical and offbeat opening sequence of subverted expectation and role reversal provides a tongue-in-cheek glimpse into the eccentric humor and understatedly irony of screenwriter turned filmmaker Sophie Fillières latest film, Gentille, as an anxious Fontaine Leglou (Emmanuelle Devos), an anesthesiologist working the evening shift at a private psychiatric hospital, accosts an unwitting man on […]