Tag: films

Seventies French actress Marlène Jobert

Marlène Jobert, French actress and Eva Green‘s mother, in the 1970s

We can’t wait for “France” starring Léa Seydoux

France is one of five (five!) Léa Seydoux movies hitting theaters this year. Here’s what you need to know.

Just call 2021 the Year of Léa Seydoux. Thanks to a combination of a consistently busy schedule and a confluence of timing factors, the French actor has no less than five movies releasing this year between “Deception,” “The Story of My Wife,” “No Time to Die” (which was famously stuck in a series of pandemic delays), the recently-released “The French Dispatch,” and now “France.” Her latest film puts Seydoux front-and-center of the action as the eponymous France de Meurs, a famous journalist who finds her life turned completely on its head after a reckless accident. As opposed to her more immediately recognizable movies this year, “France” appears to give the actor much more dynamic material to chew on. Read on for everything there is to know about “France.”

“France” comes to American theaters on December 10, 2021. The film held its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in July of 2021, followed by its domestic release in France on August 25.

What Is France?

“France” is billed as a “tragicomedy” about a famous TV journalist, starting off as a news satire before shifting tones completely to something much heavier and more serious. Much of the inspiration for the film came from how saturated our modern world has become through our collective obsession with all things digital. Accordingly, the story attempts to find the line between reality and fiction and a journalist’s role amid all the chaos. In short: this movie sounds like a lot, which only makes me even more eager to see it for myself.

In FRANCE, a satirical drama set in contemporary Paris, Léa Seydoux stars as France de Meurs, a seemingly unflappable superstar TV journalist whose career, home life, and psychological stability are turned upside down after she carelessly drives into a young delivery man on a busy street. This unexpected eruption of reality triggers a series of self-reckonings as well as a strange romance that proves impossible to shake. As France attempts to slow down and retreat into a simpler, anonymous life, her fame continues to pursue her. Starting out as a tragicomic satire of the news media, writer-director Bruno Dumont’s provocative new film spirals out into something darker as it examines the difficulty of maintaining one’s sense of self in a corrosive culture

 

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Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne: A Portrait of 2020’s Lumiere Awardees

When Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne gained the Palme d’Or for “Rosetta” in 1999 — upending such hotly fancied contenders as Pedro Almodovar’s “All About My Mom” — it wasn’t precisely an out-of-nowhere arrival. The Belgian brothers have been already of their mid-forties, having begun their profession in documentary filmmaking 20 years earlier than, and had already loved a fiction breakthrough with 1996’s award-winning “La Promesse.”

However it felt like an invigorating new wave all the identical. Towards the tip of a decade marked by auteurist flash and swagger, the empathetic, unvarnished realism of their working-class survival story gave world cinema a clean-scrubbed human face: intent on making audiences focus extra on the lives being introduced than the administrators’ fashion of presentation.

In a career-making efficiency, the 18-year-old Emelie Dequenne performed a teen struggling to help herself and her alcoholic mom with fleeting, fragile jobs: Although by the way a damning examine of Belgian labour legislation and social welfare, the movie was no political screed. With the sort of grainy on a regular basis element that solely comes by way of acute human curiosity and statement — all the way down to its wince-inducing depiction of interval ache amid poverty — the brothers plainly distinguished themselves from the filmmakers to whom they drew instant crucial comparisons, together with Ken Loach and Robert Bresson. Continue reading “Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne: A Portrait of 2020’s Lumiere Awardees” →

38 Movies That Will Transport You to Paris

Musicals, mysteries, and a whole lot of Audrey Hepburn.

Paris has inspired every type of artist over the years, from Impressionist painters to literary giants. But the city perhaps shines the brightest on the big screen, serving as the backdrop to countless movies over the past century. Even before French directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut launched a cinematic movement in the 1960s, Hollywood showcased the beauty of Paris in breezy musicals and romances. And since then, we’ve seen the city shine in animated films, white-knuckle thrillers, gritty biopics, and more. Regardless of the genre, one thing’s for sure: The City of Light sure knows how to steal a scene. From Amélie to Ratatouille, here are 35 movies that will transport you to Paris—no plane ticket required

Amélie (2001)

When I think of Paris on film, I think of scenes from Amélie. The quirky 2001 romantic comedy follows the titular character, played by Audrey Tautou, as she flits around her hometown of Paris, observing strangers around her. Though she’s struggling with her own loneliness, she becomes fixated on improving the lives of others, often from afar and with no recognition. The feel-good film was supposedly filmed in over 80 locations throughout the city, so it alone is a whimsical trip through the City of Light. —Megan Spurrell, associate editor

Watch now: Buy from $16, amazon.com

Alphaville (1965)

The genius of Jean-Luc Godard’s hard-boiled dystopian sci-fi flick from 1965 is that it uses the Paris of its day to create a world that feels utterly unlike the place we think of as Paris, then and now. Shooting at night, Godard used the glassy Modernist high-rises of La Défense and other then-new developments on the outskirts of the city to depict the cold, computer-run autocracy of Alphaville, a Brave New World sort of place into which a Humphrey Bogart-ish American detective (played by Eddie Constantine) must go to seek the people’s freedom. The marriage between noir and science fiction that Godard achieved here is one that numerous other filmmakers would seek to replicate, with Ridley Scott in Blade Runner being perhaps the greatest example. —Jesse Ashlock, U.S. editor

Watch now: Rent from $4, amazon.com

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“Drôle de drame” un film de Marcel Carné

More than 80 years after its theatrical release, rediscover “Drôle de drama”, the unusual classic by Marcel Carné, on December 18 at the cinema

One of the most jubilant, delusional, absurd, “bizarre” films in French cinema!

Weird, yes, we said weird… An adaptation of Jacques Prévert (script and dialogues), from the novel His First Offence by the British author Joseph Storer Clouston.

Synopsis 

London 1900. The very serious professor of botany Irwin Molyneux is none other than Felix Chapel, author of detective novels. The Bishop of Bedford, Irwin’s cousin, does not like this kind of literature and declares it very loudly during a supper where he is invited to the Molyneux. The absence of Margaret, Molyneux’s wife, at this supper, will trigger a series of very amusing misunderstandings.   

“Drôle de Drama” The cult film by Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert, finally back to the cinema on December 18 in a restored version at the cinema.    

Plus de 80 ans après sa sortie en salle, redécouvrez “Drôle de drame”, le classique insolite de Marcel Carné, le 18 décembre au cinéma.

Source: “Drôle de drame” un film de Marcel Carné / France Culture