Tag Archives: French Cinema
Le Souffle au Coeur (Murmur of the Heart)
If you’re a teenage boy in a post-war bourgeois family, struggling with a cold father, a Catholic education and two mischievous older brothers, there are three pleasures in life: a mother’s love, Jazz music, and the slow, self-conscious introduction to … Continue reading
Charlotte et Son Steak
The simple preparation of a steak by a woman intellectually resistant to the dry charm of an intense man (played by Jean-Luc Godard) comprises this neat 10-minute short, directed and written by Eric Rohmer at the very beginning of his … Continue reading
Grenouille d’Hiver (Winter Frog)
Gérard Depardieu is a grey, sad viticulturist, and Eriko Takeda disturbs the tombs in his eyes … Continue reading
21 Nuits avec Pattie (21 Nights with Pattie)
Like a grown-up Alice stepping into Wonderland, Parisian fortysomething (‘Caroline’ played by Isabelle Carré) arrives at her recently deceased mother’s country house in southern France to organise her funeral. She finds her mother’s corpse, resembling a man in drag, in … Continue reading
Les Amants (The Lovers)
Louis Malle turns the table on femininity and ennui by placing Jeanne (Jeanne Moreau), a bourgeois late-fifties housewife, at the centre of a masterful triad of Polo, the driving car and a soundtrack by Brahms. They narrate her journey from … Continue reading
Merci Pour Le Chocolat
‘I have a knack for doing wrong,’ confesses Swiss-Chocolate factory owner Mika Muller (Isabelle Huppert), the praline beauty in Claude Chabrol’s detective-style thriller. Chabrol wanted to make a film about ‘Evil’, chose Huppert as its purveyor, and from the opening … Continue reading
La French (The Connection)
Jean Dujardin and Gilles Lellouche latest on-screen collaboration places them on the opposite sides of a heady 70s Marseille landscape. Based on real-events at the time, La French sees magistrate Pierre Michel’s (Dujardin) attempts to break-up Marseille’s roaring heroin trade and … Continue reading
Timbuktu
An elegiac, much-lauded film, in which love, family, music, faith and football (plus a little eccentricity) bind the town of Timbuktu, despite the controlling, uncompromising presence of the Jihadists. Abderrahmane Sissako directs and writes with a poet’s sensibility, seeking emotional … Continue reading
Elle L’Adore (She Worships Him)
An obsessive fertile imagination is vital to securing freedom for divorced Parisian beautician, Muriel (Sandrine Kiberlain) in this Claude Chabrol-style thriller. When rock star Vincent Lacroix (Laurent Lafitte) accidentally kills his girlfriend during a lover’s tiff, he approaches Muriel, his … Continue reading
