Tag: french cinema

The Burglars (1971)

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Jean-Paul Belmondo was one of my favorite French actors. He made some great films including Breathless from director Jean Luc Godard, Le Doulous from Jean-Pierre Melville, and Mississippi Mermaid from Francois Truffaut (if you are keeping count those are three great films from three of the greatest French directors ever). But even when he made not-so-great films from not-so-great directors Belmondo elevated the material. He was so charming, so full of life his mere presence made a film better.

Such is the case with The Burglars. It is a fairly average heist film, but Belmondo is wonderful and that makes it worth watching. You can read my full review here.

The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (2014)

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In my review of The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears I noted that while I liked the film I was not likely to ever watch it again. And yet my review of the film makes me want to do just that.

It is a strange, almost incomprehensible film – one filled with beautiful, dark, blood-soaked images. I barely remember it. I need to rewatch it.

My full review is here.

Foreign Film February: Les 3 Boutons (2015)

les 3 boutons

Agnes Varda was a titan of French cinema. She was a member of the French New Wave and a pioneer of using location shooting and non-professional actors. She made narrative films and documentaries. I’ve only previously seen Cleon From 5 to 7 but it is a masterpiece. My wife adores The Gleaners and I.

I keep telling myself I need to watch more foreign language films this month, and I keep finding other things to watch, but before February comes to a close, I wanted to watch something. Something short. Because it has been a long day and I’m tired.

Luckily the Criterion Channel has a bunch of short films and they even categorize them by their time frames – Under 60 minutes, Under 30 minutes, Under 15 minutes…

Les 3 Boutons (The Three Buttons) is an eleven-minute film from Agnes Varda. It was commissioned by the fashion house Miu Miu. It stars Jasmine Thiré as a young goat farmer who goes on a magical journey.

A postman brings her a package. Inside the package is a large red-looking tarp. When she unfolds it the tarp becomes an enormous red dress. The girl walks inside the dress and finds herself in a cave. When she spies some school girls walking down a lane her own clothes turn into the same dresses they are wearing. Suddenly, she’s on a city street. When she spies some kids having ice cream she reaches inside her pocket and finds her own cone. It is a stream-of-consciousness fable.

Varda infuses this very simple story with a playfulness and joy that is a delight to behold. There isn’t much to it, and so I don’t have a lot to say about it. But if you have the Criterion Channel (or Mubi) and you have 11 minutes to spare I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Foreign Film February: The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

young girls of rochefort poster

Jaques Demy was one of the great French directors. He was an instrumental part of the French New Wave. Early in his career, he wrote and directed two back-to-back musicals, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). They are considered essential classics. Some many months ago my wife wanted to watch The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and so we did.

I didn’t love it.

I like musicals, more or less, but they aren’t my favorite. That’s not a genre I turn to all that often. I once tried to make musicals my theme of the month and I only watched about three of them.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a type of musical that has very little dialogue. Almost everything is sung. I’m not a lyrics guy so musicals are always a little problematic in that I tend to miss plot points when they are sung. When everything is sung I get lost pretty quickly. That’s apparently even true when they sing in French and there are subtitles.

But also there weren’t any showstoppers. The music was nice but there wasn’t a single song that left me humming after it was over. There was no “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin'” or “Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat” or whatever.

It was a perfectly fine film, but I’m not sure what all the fuss is about.

When my wife wanted to watch The Young Girls of Rochefort I was none too excited, but I relented because I love her and I enjoy watching films with her.

I liked this one a lot better. There is quite a bit of actual dialogue which allowed me to follow the story more closely. The story itself is more interesting to me. It is light and frothy and a delight. It follows two sisters (real-life siblings Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac) as they look for love in the titular coastal town of France. Little do they know their true love is closer than they think.

Much like Umbrellas, The Young Girls of Rochefort is full of bright, pastel colors, and the costumes are very 1960s and very beautiful. It feels like this one is full of real songs too. Songs you’ll leave the theater singing. It also has Gene Kelly who is always a delight.

Loads of people love The Umbrellas of Cherbourg so I probably need to revisit it at some point. I suspect knowing what I’m getting into will help me enjoy its charms more. But for now I tip my hat to The Young Girls of Rochefort and delight in it fully.

Foreign Film February: Welcome to the Sticks (2008)

welcome to the sticks

I’ve been a bit slack in my foreign language movie-watching over the last week, but I wanted to end the month with something fun. Welcome to the Sticks was written, directed and stars Danny Boon, but he’s not the lead.

That role goes to Kad Merad who plays a postal worker who is desperate to get transferred somewhere on the southern coast of France. Instead, he is transferred to a small town in the far north of the country.

The north of France is to the French like the deep south is to many Americans. He fears that it will be incredibly cold, that the people will speak with terrible accents and everyone will be rude and backward and rather stupid.

It turns out that the climate is pleasant and the people are quite nice. The trouble is he left his wife and young son back in the south. When he visits them on the weekend she is so ready for him to be miserable up there he doesn’t know how to tell her he likes it. This causes a lot of sitcom or romantic comedy-style shenanigans.

There is also some business over Danny Boon’s characters’ love life and a lot of other very silly stuff. It is very breezy and very goofy and it makes me laugh. A lot. I’ve seen it before, we own it on DVD actually. I’ll no doubt see it again.

It probably won’t work for everyone and there is a lot that gets lost in translation. A lot of the gags have to do with the difference in language. In the north, they speak a dialect of French and there are a lot of jokes about the Southerner not understanding anyone or misunderstanding certain words.

I speak a little French but not enough to watch a French film without subtitles. Jokes about how two completely different words sound a lot alike are difficult to translate so I expect a lot of the humor here doesn’t work that well for non-French speakers. I was helped out by the fact that my wife is a French speaker and she helped get the jokes across. Also, her laugh is infectious.

But there are also loads of other jokes that don’t need translating. I’m surprised an American studio hasn’t adapted it for the USA. It would work well with someone from the coast of some New England state moving to Alabama.

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

eyes without a face

I think I’ve mentioned before that my wife is a Francophile. That means we watch a lot of French movies together. I watch a lot of French movies without her too. I watch a lot of movies. Some of them are French. Some of them are with my wife. I think we watched this one together. It is a classic. It is also a freaky horror movie.

You can read my review here.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Titane (2021)

titane poster

I watch a lot of movies and it is very rare that a movie genuinely surprises me. When you watch movies like I do you get used to the way most films work, the way they hit certain beats and behave in certain ways. That’s not a bad thing necessarily, sometimes it is comforting. But when a movie does come along and does something completely different it makes it all that more rewarding.

Titane completely knocked me out. It is completely and utterly surprising. I genuinely had no idea where it was going to go next. I’m not sure I loved where it always went. I’m not sure I didn’t, either. It is a film I’ll be thinking about for a few days to figure out what exactly I thought of it. But I loved not knowing what was coming next.

It is a film worth coming into not knowing anything about, so I won’t say much. It involves a girl who gets into an accident as a child and has a metal plate inserted into her skull. As an adult, she works as a dancer and after a rough night she goes on a long journey that takes her places you cannot believe.

It has been compared to a David Cronenberg film and that’s apt, but it is also very much its own thing. I watched Cronenberg’s recent Crimes of the Future directly before watching Titane and let me tell you they make for one freaky double feature.

Agathe Rousselle gives an absolutely astonishing, brave, bravura performance in the lead and Vincent Lindon is quite spectacular as well. He plays, well I’d get into spoiler territory if I said who he plays, but he’s really good.

It is a film that is exciting and repulsive – sometimes I couldn’t turn and other times I had to close my eyes. This is something I don’t want every film to do to me, but it sure is exciting when they do.

Foreign Film February: Micmacs (2009)

micmacs

While working at a video store, Bazil (Danny Boon) is hit in the head by a stray bullet. The surgeons decide to leave it inside his skull for removing it might cause brain damage. Leaving it in may eventually cause it to lodge deeper into his brain, killing him, but it is worth the risk. As a boy, Bazil’s father was killed by a land mine.

Once released from the hospital, Danny finds that the video store has replaced him. Homeless, he wanders the streets of Paris until, one day, he is greeted by Slammer (Jean-Pierre Marielle) who takes him to his clubhouse located in the bowels of a junkyard. There he introduces him to a group of misfits who scavenge the city for their livelihoods.

One day Bazil realizes that the company that made the bullet that is still lodged in his head sits across the street from the company that made the land mines that killed his father. A plan is hatched to have his revenge on the owners of both companies.

Micmacs was directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and it has all of his hallmarks as a filmmaker – it blends fantastic elements into an otherwise normal story, its characters are full of odd-ball quirks, it is adventurous, funny, and romantic. His visual style is all over it as well.

Like a lot of non-French speakers, I suppose, I first came to Jeanuet’s films through Amelie, his beautiful and charming 2001 film starring Audrey Tautou and Mathieu Kassovitz. I immediately fell in love. I then went back and watched his earlier, darker films Delicatessen and City of Lost Children. Loved them and became a big fan. But because he is French and the films he’s made since Amelie have not been as popular his films have become increasingly difficult to find and watch over here. They’ve also not been as good.

Micmacs is a good example of what I mean. It has most of the ingredients that usually make for a good Jeanuet film. It is filled with quirky characters and humorous incidents, there is a little action and a little romance, but it never quite gels. The biggest problem comes from how the characters feel like their quirks and not actual people. They are even named after their quirks – Elastic Girl, Calculator, Buster, and so on. They are all interesting and performed well but we don’t get to know them. Jeanuet films are always filled with these types of characters and quirks and after a while, that cuteness wears a little thing.

There is a lot to like about the film. Bazil’s attempts to get revenge are ridiculous in their complexity and wonderfully fun in the way the film pulls them off. The characters might not be fully realized but they are enjoyable to watch. Etc.

If you’ve never seen a Jeunet film then I’d start with Amelie (or Delicatessen if you are not romantic at heart). Then I’d move to the films surrounding Amelie and once those are exhausted, and if you decide you are a fan, I’d move to Micmacs and his later works.

Band of Outsiders (1964)

band of outsiders criterion

Jean Luc Godard was one of the pioneers of the French New Wave. His films have been hailed as some of the greatest movies of all time, but he also has a reputation for being difficult, for making challenging, even obtuse films. So, I’m always surprised when I watch one of his movies and find them to be utterly delightful. Band of Outsiders is one of my favorites of his films (at least from what I’ve seen) and Criterion released an excellent Blu-ray of it awhile back. I wrote a review and you can read it here.