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Lou Doillon
In Lou Doillon’s face is writ the whole mad glorious complex of transgression and art, attraction and repulsion, intelligence and sex that entails the allure of her clan. Even the features of her half-sister Charlotte Gainsbourg’s father are uncannily there, but, then again, so is the face of her own, the filmmaker Jacques Doillon. Jane…
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Thérèse Raquin
The whites, greys and blacks of the Roundabout’s THÉRÈSE RAQUIN are so muted that, when a brown-hued backdrop appears, it is like a flash of color, and so, later on, is a sparse scattering of autumn leaves, dropped and faded. The interiors, when they appear, are dim and woody, the windows opening, at best, on…
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Young and Beautiful
You could sum up much of the French director François Ozon’s work as being about young people discovering sex and portraying it frankly. So it is not surprising if a capsule description of an Ozon film makes it sound titillating and exploitive. Swimming Pool, his most seen work in the U.S., told the story of…
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Blue is the Warmest Color
The very first thing I noticed about BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR was that blue was the commonest color in shot, after shot, after shot. Articles of clothing, pieces of furniture, spots of paint on the wall, things on the street, park benches, blue in the background, blue in the foreground, blue somewhere in the…
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Amour
The critic Stanley Kauffmann once listed what he saw as the key differences between theatre and film. His most interesting and yet least developed point was that what he calls “the effects of death” are at their most powerful on film. He meant that, since the screen actor’s work, in all of its lifelike detail,…
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Holy Motors
In HOLY MOTORS Denis Lavant plays Oscar, a gnarly and dissipated man who is driven around Paris in a limousine to keep “appointments” for which he dons costume and makeup and performs violent or otherwise transgressive acts. It is a sort of invisible theater for clueless onlookers the purpose of which is, at least initially,…
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Café de Flore
Antoine is happy, the narrator of CAFÉ DE FLORE informs us, in the presence of the blond mistress for whom he has left his wife as a result of a shared glance at a Quebec nightclub It was an instantaneous connection, not unlike that which he and his wife experienced in childhood, or, oddly enough,…
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Little White Lies
I do not have a great deal to say about Guillaume Canet‘s two-and-a-half-hour LITTLE WHITE LIES. It was, undeniably, adroit. I was mildly impatient with it before it won me over through sheer psychological manipulation. This film about a group of vacationing friends, one of whose number has landed in the hospital with life threatening injuries…
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Beloved
In the early frames of BELOVED the ’60s Parisian shopgirl played by the resplendent Ludivine Sagnier lifts a pair of Dior pumps at closing time. She puts them on outside and thus begins her chance career as a streetwalker, through which she meets her Czech lover and the father of her child, whom decades later…
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The Things of Life
I was attracted to the THE THINGS OF LIFE, the Claude Sautet series at The Film Society of Lincoln Center, as he is one of those directors whose work I do not know well but which is of evident quality and importance. A contemporary of Nouvelle Vague figures like Godard, Rohmer, Varda and Truffaut, he…