At 22, the young actress is an international star thanks to her role in “Adèle H” by François Truffaut and has just shot her first film in the United States, “The Driver”.
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A 22 ans, la jeune actrice est une star internationale grâce à son rôle dans “Adèle H” de François Truffaut et vient de tourner son premier film aux Etats-Unis, “The Driver”. Avec maturité, éloquence, et naturel, Isabelle Adjani se confie à Christian Defaye sur ses débuts dans “Le petit bougnat”, son passage à la Comédie-Française, les rôles qui l’ont marquée, son travail de comédienne. Cet entretien événement fut exceptionnellement diffusé à 20h20, avant le film de la soirée, le 13 décembre 1977 dans Spécial Cinéma.
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”→
“The Nest” by director Sean Durkin scooped the top prize at the Deauville American Film Festival on Saturday, September 12, and claimed two other awards with jury president Vanessa Paradis praising the direction and the acting of its leads Jude Law and Carrie Coon.
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A trawl through the history of the Palme d’Or yields streaming gems from Brief Encounter to Blow-Up, The Leopard to The Square
Bring out your tiniest violins: in a normal year I’d be writing this column from the balmy French Riviera, with a glass of rosé at my side, amid the annual Cannes film festival. That, of course, has all been called off. For the first time since the second world war – not counting the time things shut down halfway through amid the May ’68 movement – the festival has admitted no Cannes do.
A year without Cannes leaves the arthouse release schedule a bit disoriented: traditionally, UK distributors pick over the festival’s highlights for the next year and beyond. (At Curzon Home Cinema, for example, you can currently stream Portrait of a Lady on Fire and The Whistlers, both plucked from last year’s Cannes competition.) Through the miracle of streaming, however, you can curate your own festival of past Palmes d’Or to treasure. Continue reading “Curate your own Cannes film festival”→
Three memories of my youth by Arnaud Desplechin (2015)
As Paul Dédalus leaves Tajikistan to return to Paris, memories of his childhood in Roubaix, of his trip to the USSR when he was a teenager and, above all, of his love for Esther, come back. Paul, whom we follow as a little boy, teenager and adult, never ceases in Three memories of my youth to remember his past, his three bodies – and the story – then becoming one.
His adventures, which oscillate from humor to tragedy, thrill the viewer, constantly brought back, by a game of mirror, to his own previous life. Rewarded at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes in 2015 as well as at the César the following year, Desplechin takes us through his art of dialogues and his staging, transfiguring our own memories to make it a labyrinth, between fascination and destruction.
Un amour de jeunesse by Mia Hansen-Løve (2011) and Eden (2014)
Still on the theme of torments of youth, Netflix offers two films by director Mia Hansen-Løve: Eden and Un amour de jeunesse . The second succeeds, through its delicacy and restraint, in telling a love affair, from adolescence to the edge of adulthood, all without ever falling into pompous emotional scenes. Eden , him, signs the virtuoso portrait of a DJ brought to the summit of success in the middle of the French Touch period, a musical movement which, for him, will only be fleeting.
Considered a “masterpiece” by the Inrocks , L’inconnu du lac by Alain Guiraudie is an open-air camera, surrounded by love, sex and death. It is therefore impossible to miss this jewel of French auteur cinema, which, beyond its brilliant staging, explores all possible themes, registers and metaphors.
The recipe is clear and modest: “A lake, a beach, groves, parking, an R25, a few nudist men and three characters” (including Pierre Deladonchamps, wonderful). And if that still does not seem convincing to you, here is the trailer below.
Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival in 2013, La vie d’Adèle , adapted from the comic strip Blue is a warm color by Julie Maroh. At 15, Adèle is a serious student who questions her sexuality when she first meets the eyes of Emma, a mysterious young woman with blue hair. A great work of the seventh art, bringing to life the idea that literature can lead to self-acceptance, La Vie d’Adèle , a sensual film which borrows all the codes of the learning novel, is part of it ( despite the controversies surrounding its shooting ) of the most beautiful films of French author cinema of the decade.
Pas De Merde 