Crafted as a cine-reportage restaging of the circumstances surrounding the 1965 abduction – and presumed assassination – of mathematics professor and exiled Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka (Simon Abkarian) on a Paris street, I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed is told from the point-of-view of petty criminal turned informant Georges Figon (Charles Berling) who, […]
Deep in the Woods (Benoît Jacquot) Having been going through something of film burnout that began midway through the New York Film Festival last year, I had planned to attend only a few screenings from this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema as a way of working through the inertia. The film that finally succeeded in […]
Resnais continues in the direction of his affectionate re-adaptation of early twentieth century French burlesque comedies (most notably, Mélo) in Not on the Lips, a faithful (which unfortunately, includes all the stereotypical and derogatory gibes at Americans), accessibly entertaining, technically accomplished, but hollow musical adaptation of the 1925 operetta by André Barde and Maurice Yvain. […]
Divorced single parent, successful attorney, sans-papiers advocate, and not-so-obscure object of desire Chantal Letellier (Carole Bouquet) has led a fairly manageable life of controlled chaos in her comfortable, if occasionally unhinged flat until one day when she seizes the opportunity of a vacated sublet upstairs maid’s room to open up their living space and convert […]
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, […]
Adapted from a play by Jean-Marie Besset, Grande école auspiciously opens to a lavish party and fireworks display in commemoration of Bastille Day, an overt metaphor for the young men and women in the film who have completed their baccalaureate degrees and are about to shed their insular home lives for shared student dormitories and […]