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Presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Unifrance Film,
The French Film Office/Unifrance Film USA, together with the French Cultural Services and with the support of Patsy and Jeff Tarr and Twice Magazine. Additional support by Air France and L.V.T. (Laser Video Titles).
March is the month passionate Francophiles and lovers of French film make their way to the Walter Reade Theater to enjoy our annual selection of the best recent movies from a country that has always been home to groundbreaking filmmaking. Featuring works by past masters and youthful auteurs alike, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Today keeps New York audiences abreast of new talent and trends in one of the richest of national film traditions. This year's program includes movies by Bertrand Tavernier, Benoît Jacquot, Catherine Breillat, Jacques Doillon, Claire Denis, and Cédric Klapisch.
The following directors have confirmed to attend the festival: Bertrand Tavernier, Pascal Bonitzer, Gérard Jugnot, Benoît Jacquot, Catherine Breillat, Gabriel Aghion, Lucas Belvaux, Pascale Ferran, Agnès Jaoui (actress and co-author), and Albert Dupontel.
Thanks to Catherine Verret-Vimont, Antoine Khalife, Maria Manthoulis and
the French Cultural Services for making this program possible.
Note: All films are subtitled in English.
PONETTE
Jacques Doillon, 1996; 97 minutes
At the age of four, Ponette (Victoire Thivisol, Best Actress, Venice Film Festival) loses her mother in an awful car accident. Doillon's heartbreaking yet wholly unsentimental film chronicles this stubbornly hopeful child's refusal to come to terms with the terrible void left by her lost mother. The director tells the story through the clear, innocent eyes of the little girl. Piers Handling of the Toronto Film Festival writes that "PONETTE will leave no one unmoved. It is a deeply touching and extremely powerful experience. Nothing in Jacques Doillon's oeuvre quite prepares one for the care, craft and insight he has bestowed on this film, the pinnacle of his distinguished career.... Where Doillon takes [Ponette] in the final moments of this beautiful film makes it simply transcendent. If cinema is capable of producing epiphanies, this is one that will." Arrow Releasing.
Friday, March 14: 2 and 6:30 pm
Thursday, March 20: 8:30 pm
UN AIR DE FAMILLE
Cédric Klapisch, 1996; 110 minutes
"A family is like a gift: once it's been given to you, you are pretty much obliged to keep it."
Every other Friday night the Ménard clan gets together for dinner at the family bar-cum-restaurant. The diners are comprised of a domineering mother, two adult sons--one favored over the other; an independent, unmarried daughter verging on middle age, and two daughters-in-law. One of the latter is celebrating her largely ignored birthday, and the other has left town for a week to take stock of her life. Her action becomes the catalyst for a familial encounter session and slugfest in which all of the repressed baggage accumulated by any dysfunctional family comes spilling out. An important new talent, director Klapisch guides everyone--including his audience--through this exorcism with good humor and a light hand. With Jean-Pierre Bacri and Agnès Jaoui.
Friday, March 14: 4 and 8:45 pm
Saturday, March 15: 6:45 pm
CAPITAINE CONAN
Bertrand Tavernier, 1996; 130 minutes
Based on actual events, Tavernier's epic commemorates the terribly dangerous moment that lies between war and peace, bloodshed and armistice. Somewhere in the Balkans, Conan and his 50 unlikely heroes--mostly parolees from military prisons--have captured Mount Sokol, oblivious to the fact that the armistice has been signed. Now that the war is over, is it possible to disarm these necessary killers and make them forget their memories of pillaging, murder and assassination? An unsettling meditation on the shaping of contemporary Europe, with Philippe Torreton, Samuel le Bihan, Bernard le Coq, and Claude Rich.
Saturday, March 15: 4 pm
Sunday, March 16: 8:45 pm
MARIANNE
Benoît Jacquot, 1996; 90 minutes
A romance of 18th-century Paris: Virginie Ledoyen plays a lovely and graceful orphan, apprenticed as a linen maid in the house of Madame Dutour. Marianne carries herself as a natural aristocrat, as she believes her unknown parents were nobly born. Naturally, the style and beauty of the apprentice/aristocrat fascinates Monsieur de Climal, who determines to take the young woman under his protection. When Marianne discovers that his intentions are not entirely pure, she breaks off with him. Along comes a handsome young nobleman who falls madly in love with her; thus begins a complicated, dangerous game of passion and faithlessness.... This a brilliant adaptation of Marivaux's unfinished novel, La Vie de Marianne by director Jacquot and actress Ledoyen, who previously collaborated on La fille seule / A Single Girl.
Saturday, March 15: 9:15 pm
Tuesday, March 18: 6:15 pm
Tuesday, March 25: 2 pm
ENCORE
Pascal Bonitzer, 1996; 96 minutes
In this joyously absurdist drama, Vichac, a well-known scholar, author and philosophy professor at the University of Paris (Jackie Berroyer) meets a lovely student named Aurore (Hélène Fillières) in a cafe. Aurore claims that, months ago, she had written a critical article about his latest book and mailed it off to him--but never heard from him. A few days later, the professor finds the essay and goes off to Aurore's apartment, in the first of a number of ill-advised moves that lead this Clouseau-like character into a quagmire of amorous contretemps and dangerous mistakes. Vichac's wife Aliette is played by Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi. (ENCORE is Bonitzer's directorial debut; he is best known as a former Cahiers du Cinema critic and the screenwriter of films such as My Favorite Season, Thieves, and La belle noiseuse.)
Sunday, March 16: 4 pm
Tuesday, March 18: 4 and 8:30 pm
L'AGE DES POSSIBLES /
THE AGE OF POSSIBILITIES
Pascale Ferran, 1995; 105 minutes
Ten young people in Strasbourg confront their "age of possibilities." They are students, employed or not, who now face a turning point in their lives--the moment when existence evolves out of the freedom of "playing" at life and work into "real" choices and commitments. These friends, acquaintances and lovers have many options open to them, but the paths they take will be weighted with the idea of "what might have been." The director of Petits arrangements avec les morts (winner of Best First Film prize at Cannes in 1995), Ferran calls L'AGE a "comédie-depressive." With Annie Cantineau, Christele Tual, and Anne Caillere.
Sunday, March 16: 6:30 pm
Tuesday, March 18: 2 pm
Thursday, March 20: 6:15 pm
POUR RIRE / JUST FOR LAUGHS
Lucas Belvaux, 1996; 100 minutes
Paris in the spring: The days lengthen, tourists drift up and down the Seine in glass-topped bateaux-mouches, and boys and girls fall in love. A tough lawyer, Alice lives with Nicholas, an out-of-work house husband (Jean-Pierre Léaud), but it's the sports photographer Gaspard (Antoine Chapey) who turns Alice the legal shark into Alice a soft-eyed girl. When Nicholas discovers he's being cuckolded, things turn more than a little unpredictable! Léaud is superb, his expert comic timing and grace evoking Chaplin at his best. POUR RIRE is a cornucopia of romance, with the bells of Notre-Dame, the river Seine flowing under the bridges of Paris, chases, tears, lies, surprises, dramatic endings, unhappy love affairs, all-night conversations and magical moments at dawn....
Thursday, March 20:
4 pm
Saturday, March 22:
6:15 pm
Tuesday, March 25:
4:15 pm
PORTRAITS CHINOIS / SHADOW PLAY
Martine Dugowson, 1996; 116 minutes
"Take a dash of Woody Allen, add a soupçon of Steven Soderbergh and you end up with France's version of The Big Chill. Taking a poignant look at contemporary life in Paris, PORTRAITS CHINOIS tracks the paths of nine friends as they intersect and collide over the course of two years of work, love and quarreling. Most of all, though, these young people lie--to themselves and each other. Indeed, the falsehoods they tell and the truths they conceal may well be the glue that holds their friendships together. As they dine and party together the pain hidden beneath the surface of their banter slowly surfaces...exposing comedy and pathos. With Helena Bonham Carter, Romane Bohringer, Elsa Zylberstein, Jean-Claude Brialy, and Marie Trintignant." -- 1996 Toronto International Film Festival program
Thursday, March 20: 8:30 pm
Sunday, March 23:
9 pm
Thursday, March 27: 4:15 and 9 pm
PARFAIT AMOUR! / PERFECT LOVE!
Catherine Breillat, 1996; 110 minutes
Breillat's tough, uncompromising talent first surfaced with 36 Fillette, a film about an unflappable 14-year-old bent on sexual experimentation. Her no-holds-barred, erotic drama Dirty Like an Angel was the highpoint of a previous WRT program of French films. In PARFAIT Breillat traces the arc of a passionate love affair between 37-year-old Frédérique (Isabelle Renauld) and 28-year-old Christophe (Francis Renaud), an arrested adolescent given to self-destructive and selfish behavior. Well-off and the divorced mother of two, Frédérique suffers from her own brand of self-absorption. The two lovers cannot escape this doomed emotional itinerary, and eventually they must crash and burn. Variety's Lisa Nesselson describes PARFAIT AMOUR! : "As authentic and unsettling a portrait of an untenable relationship as French cinema is ever likely to produce.... This emotional seesaw [is a] rigorous anatomy of the circumstances leading to a crime of passion."
Friday, March 21: 2 and 6:30 pm
Sunday, March 23: 4 pm
FALLAIT PAS!
Gérard Jugnot, 1996; 95 minutes
An executive no one would ever describe as dynamic, shy, wimpy Bernard Leroy (played by Jugnot, one of France's top comics) should never have agreed to his company's sending him to commando training in the mountains. Now, the engine of his car exploded, he's stranded on a snowbound road in the middle of nowhere. What choice does he have but to ask for help at that isolated chalet? The press kit of FALLAIT PAS! says it all: "Bad move to knock at the door of that mountain cabin. Bad move to swipe the dough. Bad move to take off with a mystical, manic-depressive, suicidal drifter...." The incomparable Micheline Presle delivers a truly delightful comedic performance. With Gérard Jugnot, Michèle Laroque, and Jean Yann.
Friday, March 21: 4:30 and 9 pm
Saturday, March 22:
4 pm
PEDALE DOUCE
Gabriel Aghion, 1996; 100 minutes
"Before shooting What a Drag!, I felt the time had come for a movie about the nocturnal world, and therefore about homosexuality, that wouldn't fall into the trap of predictable caricature but instead reveal the lightness and fantasy of 'gay' humor. Like the main character in this movie (Adrien, played by Patrick Timsit), many people lead a double life. Since comedy is often the result of opposition, I found that this opposition, business man by day, liberated 'gay' by night, was exhilarating. Since comedy is also the result of the collision of two worlds, it so happens that here, naturally, day meets night and finance meets festivity."
--Gabriel Aghion.
Aghion's comedy stars the glowing Fanny Ardant (Ridicule) as a queen of the night adored by a joyous crew of homosexuals and heterosexuals. PEDALE DOUCE was the #1 French film at the box office in 1996. With Patrick Timsit, Richard Berry, Michèle Laroque, and Fanny Ardant.
Saturday, March 22: 8:30 pm
Wednesday, March 26:
2 and 6:15 pm
BERNIE
Albert Dupontel, 1996; 87 minutes
Bernie is a young man of colossal naiveté. A foundling, he has spent the last 25 years in an orphanage, where he now works as an electrician. This innocent is obsessed with the notion that his parents abandoned him to save him from an international conspiracy. Now, he is leaving the orphanage at last--determined to find his long-lost mother and father! A directorial debut by comic Dupontel (who plays the questing orphan), BERNIE is currently a major success in France.
Sunday, March 23: 6:45 pm
Wednesday, March 26: 4 and 8:30 pm
NÉNETTE ET BONI
Claire Denis, 1996; 103 minutes
Nénette and Boni are shell-shocked survivors of their parents' failed marriage, a mother's early demise, and--possibly, on Nénette's part--a father's abuse. Boni dreams through slacker days and nights, lusting sweetly, single-mindedly, after a baker's blonde wife and cherishing the little white rabbit who lives in his kitchen. Fifteen-year-old Nénette must cope with more adult problems. These two bright, attractive kids, tough before their time, find temporary shelter in each other's affections. Grégoire Colin's Boni is irresistible, a darkly Gallic Noah Wyle, but Alice Houri projects her sadder and wiser Nénette with authentic complexity. Few filmmakers possess as sensual an appreciation of young people in their flesh as does Denis, and fewer still can paint the colors (especially her trademark blues), textures, and architecture of isolating urban environments with such deft strokes. Denis' family reunion is transient and fragile, but this engaging film glows with moments of sheerly life-affirming good humor.
Thursday, March 27:
2 and 6:45 pm
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