The French New Wave classic chronicles the lives of two men and the dangerous object of their affections
François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim from 1962 is the love triangle that feels like it’s happening in the swinging 60s present moment, like Godard’s triple-header Bande à Part. Actually, it’s set before and after the first world war, and the three principals finally reunite by bumping into each other at a Paris cinema showing a newsreel about the Nazis’ book-burning.
Appropriately for this film’s internationalist ethos, neither male hero has a homeland-appropriate name. Oskar Werner is Jules, a diffident young Austrian living in 1912 Paris: scholar, translator and Francophile. He befriends the rather more worldly Frenchman Jim, the journalist and would-be author played by Henri Serre. They are instantly as thick as thieves, a couple of jaunty swells and elegant flâneurs, devoted to art and avowedly uninterested in money – though each,...
François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim from 1962 is the love triangle that feels like it’s happening in the swinging 60s present moment, like Godard’s triple-header Bande à Part. Actually, it’s set before and after the first world war, and the three principals finally reunite by bumping into each other at a Paris cinema showing a newsreel about the Nazis’ book-burning.
Appropriately for this film’s internationalist ethos, neither male hero has a homeland-appropriate name. Oskar Werner is Jules, a diffident young Austrian living in 1912 Paris: scholar, translator and Francophile. He befriends the rather more worldly Frenchman Jim, the journalist and would-be author played by Henri Serre. They are instantly as thick as thieves, a couple of jaunty swells and elegant flâneurs, devoted to art and avowedly uninterested in money – though each,...
- 2/2/2022
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Luchino Visconti’s handsome final feature adapts a classic Italian novel about an arrogant aristocrat whose selfish double-standard philosophy causes ruin and misery. The 19th century villas and ornate costumes dazzle, but the depressingly fated story will be tough going for sensitive audiences. This new disc encoding highlights the intoxicating atmosphere, and the intense performances of Giancarlo Giannini, Laura Antonelli and Jennifer O’Neill.
L’innocente
Blu-ray
Film Movement Classics
1976 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 129 112 min. / Street Date July 14, 2020 / 29.95
Starring: Giancarlo Giannini, Laura Antonelli, Jennifer O’Neill, Rina Morelli, Massimo Girotti, Didier Haudepin, Marie Dubois, Roberta Paladini, Claude Mann, Marc Porel.
Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis
Film Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
Original Music: Franco Mannino
Production Design: Mario Garbuglia
Costumes: Piero Tosi
Written by Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Enrico Medioli, Luchino Visconti from the novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio
Produced by Giovanni Bertolucci
Directed by Luchino Visconti
The availability of European art cinema became spotty in the 1970s,...
L’innocente
Blu-ray
Film Movement Classics
1976 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 129 112 min. / Street Date July 14, 2020 / 29.95
Starring: Giancarlo Giannini, Laura Antonelli, Jennifer O’Neill, Rina Morelli, Massimo Girotti, Didier Haudepin, Marie Dubois, Roberta Paladini, Claude Mann, Marc Porel.
Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis
Film Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
Original Music: Franco Mannino
Production Design: Mario Garbuglia
Costumes: Piero Tosi
Written by Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Enrico Medioli, Luchino Visconti from the novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio
Produced by Giovanni Bertolucci
Directed by Luchino Visconti
The availability of European art cinema became spotty in the 1970s,...
- 8/4/2020
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Every so often, usually while walking around Toronto on a busy day, I'll be struck by the vividness and accuracy of Agnès Varda's singular portrayal of a day in the life (barely two hours, really, making it even more remarkable) spent in the various layers and spaces of the urban environment. I speak, of course, of Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda's 1962 classic and the first film of hers I fell in love with. In those instances, I'll find myself returning to the moments I've cherry-picked as my favorites over the years, skipping across the linear sequence of events that follow the titular singer (Corinne Marchand) across Paris as she waits for the results from a medical examination within the film's designated timeframe (minus half an hour, as the film famously ends at the ninety minute mark). More than for any other film, engaging in these mental replays feels very much like replaying the events of a day I had once experienced myself long ago—albeit one that I’ve been able to revisit and come to know nearly by heart, complete with all of my favorite moments and details waiting in their proper places, so often have I gone back to that June 21st in Paris, 1961.Varda has even made it relatively easy for anyone who wishes to explore and investigate to their heart's content the events of that fateful first day of summer from so long ago now, not only by making such a crisp cinematic itinerary of the various locations visited in the film itself, but also by helpfully providing a map in her book Varda par Agnès complete with a color-coded legend indicating the locations of key scenes from the film, practically inviting the reader to recreate Cléo’s journey for themselves on the streets of present-day Paris. At once attentive and relaxed in its tour of the city (mainly focused in the Left Bank), Cléo is ably conducted in a number of different registers: as an uncommonly lovely essay-poem on the ebb and flow of urban life, an at-times somber meditation on the precarious balance between life and death, and a revealing and honest study of female identity and the ways it is scrutinized and distorted in the public’s relentless gaze. In a feat of remarkable economy and resourcefulness, the film was shot in chronological order across a five-week period, beginning on the date of the story’s events, synchronized as closely as possible to the times in the day Cléo experiences them, in keeping with narrative fidelity and proper quality of light for each scene. Neatly arranged into thirteen chapters, each with its duration clearly stated so we can easily keep track in real time, Cléo’s lucid odyssey through the various public and private spaces that make up her day is observational cinema at its most fertile, free, and magically attuned to its subjects, partly the result of Varda and her team’s carefully planned and executed shoot, partly that of simply being in the right places at the right times.Together, the films of the French New Wave make up one of the most valuable and immersive audiovisual documents of a specific time and place in history—namely France in the late 1950s and early 1960s—that we have. This is especially true of the Paris-situated films, which create the alluring image of an interconnected network of overlapping stories concentrated in a single city. The sharing of certain actors, cinematographers, writers, composers, and other key artists and technicians across different films by different directors especially helped make the impression of one Paris holding an eclectic anthology of New Wave tales. This perception was further reinforced by the cheeky self-referential winks and nods that so many of the New Wave directors—Jean-Luc Godard in particular—lovingly included in their films as gestures of solidarity and support with their nouvelle vague comrades. This is why the eponymous hero of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur, noted by many as a crucial New Wave precursor, gets name-checked by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard’s Breathless, why Truffaut muses Marie Dubois and Jeanne Moreau both pop up in A Woman Is a Woman, with Moreau getting asked by Belmondo how Jules and Jim is coming along, and why Anna Karina’s Nana glimpses a giant poster for the same Truffaut film as she is being driven to her fate in the final moments of Vivre sa vie.Varda got in on the fun herself in Cléo from 5 to 7 not only by casting Michel Legrand, who provided the film with its robust score, as Cléo’s musical partner Bob (a part that gives the legendary composer a substantial amount of screen time and amply shows off his incandescent charm), but also by extending the invitation to Godard, Karina, Sami Frey, Eddie Constantine, Jean-Claude Brialy, producer Georges de Beauregard, and Alan Scott, who had appeared in Jacques Demy’s Lola. They all show up in Les fiancés du pont Macdonald, the silent comedy short-within-the-film that serves triple duty as a welcome diversion for our stressed heroine, a loving cinephilic tribute to the legacy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, and an irresistible, bite-sized New Wave party. And yet I find Cléo to be perhaps the most enchanting of all the New Wave films not for the aesthetic commonalities and cleverly devised linkages that bind it to The 400 Blows, Breathless, Paris Belongs to Us, and its other cinematic brethren, but rather for the tapestry of curious details that root it in its specific time and place and entice on the power of their inherent uniqueness and beauty. “Here,” Varda seems to say as she follows Cléo across the city, “let’s have a look at these interesting people and places on this first day of summer here in Paris, and see what we can see after watching them for a while.” The film’s opening scene continues to extend this invitation as it draws us in closer. It shows us, through the sepia-hued Eastmancolor that deviates from the rest of the film’s silvery monochrome and the “God’s eye” overhead shots (long before Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson adopted the technique as their own), the cryptic spectacle of Tarot cards being shuffled, placed down, and turned over to reveal the story of Cléo’s potential fate before we’ve even gotten a chance to properly meet Cléo herself. The slightly macabre illustrations to which Varda and cinematographer Jean Rabier dedicate their tight close-ups and the elderly card reader’s accompanying explanations of their meanings lend an air of prophecy to the events to come while also fueling Cléo’s anxiety surrounding her fate (when pressed for a clearer forecast of the future through a palm reading, the reader’s evasive response is less than inspiring). This introduction effectively locks us into Cléo’s perspective, preparing us for the next hour and a half that we will spend quietly observing as, following her distraught exit from the reader’s apartment, she grapples with her fears and insecurities, contemplates and revises her appearance and the identity behind it (tellingly, we discover late in the film that Cléo's real name is Florence), and comes to terms with the ultimately fragile nature of her own mortality. In our allotted chunk of time with her, we see the pouty girl-child subtly shift and adjust her attitude, inching a little closer towards a place of earned maturity, grace, and acceptance regarding her fate, wherever it may take her.Along the way, the film seems to expand to take in as much of the people and places around Cléo as it can. Scene by scene, her Paris makes itself felt and known through key peripheral details: a pair of lovers having an argument in a café near where Cléo sits, listening in; the procession of uniformed officers on horseback heard clip-clopping through the street on the soundtrack and seen reflected in the array of mirrors placed throughout a hat shop; a spider web of shattered mirror and a cloth pressed against a bloody wound, indicating some incident that occurred just before Cléo happened along the scene of the confused aftermath. Other stimuli fill a dazzling program of serendipitous entertainments for us to take in one by one: whirlwind rides in two taxis and a bus, an intimate musical rehearsal in Cléo’s chic, kitten-filled apartment (with Legrand, no less, clearly having a great time, his nimble fingers releasing ecstatic bursts of notes and melodies from Cléo’s piano as if they were exotic birds), the aforementioned silent short, a sculpting studio (the space alive with the indescribably pleasant sound of chisels being tapped at different tempos through soft stone), a frog swallower, a burly street performer who wiggles an iron spike through his arm, and the soothing sights and sounds of the Parc de Montsouris, among a hundred other subtle and overt pleasures scattered throughout this gently orchestrated city symphony, a heap of specificities found and sorted into a chorus of universal experience.Very much in her own way, across a body of work informed by a boundless spirit of generosity, Agnès Varda has gone about carefully collecting and preserving a marvelously varied assortment of subjects throughout her busy life, shedding fresh light on some of the most unlikely (and overlooked) people and places in the world. She refers to her self-made approach to filmmaking as ciné-criture (her own version of Alexandre Astruc's caméra-stylo), which, as we’ve come to know it through Varda’s intensely personal works, is a little like cinema, a little like writing, and uses aspects of both media to make a compassionate, genuine, and wholly original film language. Just as Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller), the dreamy young man whom Cléo encounters in the Parc de Montsouris, translates the world around them into a stream of fanciful observations and flowery speech, so too does Varda, in allegiance with poetry, ditch any semblance of objectivity, going instead for presenting the world simply as she sees it, investing it with her own unmistakable blend of charm, warmth, eloquence, and empathy, all somehow executed with nary a shred of ego or preachiness.“All these stories we simply can’t understand!” randomly exclaims a café patron to her young companion at one point late in Cléo’s journey, perhaps suddenly becoming aware, as we gradually have, of the unfathomable multitude of trajectories that trace themselves across every city every day in a dense tangle of narrative strands. In picking up Cléo’s and diligently following it with her camera for an hour and a half, Varda draws our attention to all those other strands that make up the lives of other people, leading off into their own directions, fated to become entangled with others still. Wisely, deftly, one discovered strand at a time, she helps us better appreciate, again and again, the humble miracle of so many lives coursing and thriving alongside each other, each one special and strange, each rooted in its own distinct flavor of being-ness. Cléo from 5 to 7 in turn roots us in another person’s life for its short time span and ends up giving us a whole universe, casually overflowing with meaning, life, lives, and the myriad details that shape and define them. No, we can’t understand all the stories we come across in a day. But then again, sometimes we don’t really need to understand so much as simply see. See, and accept, and appreciate what is...and then move along to whatever’s next.
- 6/20/2017
- MUBI
In 1962, two filmmakers met in a room at Universal Studios to discuss (what else?) cinema. Those directors were François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock. (Providing assistance was French-language translator Helen Scott.) Together, they talked for over 50 hours, poring over every film the old master ever made. In 1967, Truffaut published what has universally come to be known as an essential text, titled Hitchcock/Truffaut, which contains rich and detailed transcripts of the extraordinary conversation.
Filmmaker Kent Jones‘ documentary about this historic meeting of the minds is now out, which inspired The Film Stage to look back at some of the forgotten, overlooked, and underrated films from these two beloved directors. The following ten titles contain all of the nuance, mystery and joy that we’ve come to expect from Hitchcock and Truffaut, with many overlapping themes and stylistic sensibilities.
Please enjoy the list, and don’t forget to suggest your own favorites in the comments.
Filmmaker Kent Jones‘ documentary about this historic meeting of the minds is now out, which inspired The Film Stage to look back at some of the forgotten, overlooked, and underrated films from these two beloved directors. The following ten titles contain all of the nuance, mystery and joy that we’ve come to expect from Hitchcock and Truffaut, with many overlapping themes and stylistic sensibilities.
Please enjoy the list, and don’t forget to suggest your own favorites in the comments.
- 12/7/2015
- by Tony Hinds
- The Film Stage
Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine' 1938: Jean Renoir's film noir (photo: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine') (See previous post: "'Cat People' 1942 Actress Simone Simon Remembered.") In the late 1930s, with her Hollywood career stalled while facing competition at 20th Century-Fox from another French import, Annabella (later Tyrone Power's wife), Simone Simon returned to France. Once there, she reestablished herself as an actress to be reckoned with in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine. An updated version of Émile Zola's 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine is enveloped in a dark, brooding atmosphere not uncommon in pre-World War II French films. Known for their "poetic realism," examples from that era include Renoir's own The Lower Depths (1936), Julien Duvivier's La Belle Équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937), and particularly Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) and Daybreak (1939).[11] This thematic and...
- 2/6/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
In today's roundup of news and views: Reverse Shot's Martin Scorsese symposium rolls on. Twin Peaks will be a book before it returns. Jonathan Rosenbaum's posted excerpts from his conversations with Jean-Luc Godard. J. Hoberman reviews two films by Fritz Lang. The Nation reviews poetry by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Criterion's Peter Becker interviews Volker Schlöndorff. João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata's A Última Vez Que Vi Macau sweeps awards in Portugal. A Marguerite Duras series opens in New York. Plus, remembering Pavel Landovsky, Marie Dubois and more. » - David Hudson...
- 10/17/2014
- Fandor: Keyframe
In today's roundup of news and views: Reverse Shot's Martin Scorsese symposium rolls on. Twin Peaks will be a book before it returns. Jonathan Rosenbaum's posted excerpts from his conversations with Jean-Luc Godard. J. Hoberman reviews two films by Fritz Lang. The Nation reviews poetry by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Criterion's Peter Becker interviews Volker Schlöndorff. João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata's A Última Vez Que Vi Macau sweeps awards in Portugal. A Marguerite Duras series opens in New York. Plus, remembering Pavel Landovsky, Marie Dubois and more. » - David Hudson...
- 10/17/2014
- Keyframe
Marie Dubois, actress in French New Wave films, dead at 77 (image: Marie Dubois in the mammoth blockbuster 'La Grande Vadrouille') Actress Marie Dubois, a popular French New Wave personality of the '60s and the leading lady in one of France's biggest box-office hits in history, died Wednesday, October 15, 2014, at a nursing home in Lescar, a suburb of the southwestern French town of Pau, not far from the Spanish border. Dubois, who had been living in the Pau area since 2010, was 77. For decades she had been battling multiple sclerosis, which later in life had her confined to a wheelchair. Born Claudine Huzé (Claudine Lucie Pauline Huzé according to some online sources) on January 12, 1937, in Paris, the blue-eyed, blonde Marie Dubois began her show business career on stage, being featured in plays such as Molière's The Misanthrope and Arthur Miller's The Crucible. François Truffaut discovery: 'Shoot the...
- 10/17/2014
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Cold Day in the Park: Garrel’s Green Monster in Black and White
Director Philippe Garrel returns to his prized black and white format for a somewhat cohesive narrative exploring the titular emotion, Jealousy. Reuniting with son Louis Garrel, the film is informed by several familial experiences, whereby the young Garrel is actually reenacting moments from his own grandfather’s life. As meta as this promises to be, as is customary with Garrel, a focus on sharply observed and seemingly banal incidents are threaded together to somewhat clinical, disconnected effect, as if to experimentally dismantle the passionate fury fueling familial and romantic relationships. The end result is a mixed bag of visually articulate highpoints amidst of sea of stagnant moments.
A teary woman, Clothilde (Rebecca Covenant), begs her spouse Louis, (Louis Garrel) not to leave as their daughter Charlotte (Olga Milshtein) watches through a key hole. It’s the end of their relationship,...
Director Philippe Garrel returns to his prized black and white format for a somewhat cohesive narrative exploring the titular emotion, Jealousy. Reuniting with son Louis Garrel, the film is informed by several familial experiences, whereby the young Garrel is actually reenacting moments from his own grandfather’s life. As meta as this promises to be, as is customary with Garrel, a focus on sharply observed and seemingly banal incidents are threaded together to somewhat clinical, disconnected effect, as if to experimentally dismantle the passionate fury fueling familial and romantic relationships. The end result is a mixed bag of visually articulate highpoints amidst of sea of stagnant moments.
A teary woman, Clothilde (Rebecca Covenant), begs her spouse Louis, (Louis Garrel) not to leave as their daughter Charlotte (Olga Milshtein) watches through a key hole. It’s the end of their relationship,...
- 8/14/2014
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
‘La Cage aux Folles’ director Edouard Molinaro, who collaborated with Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Orson Welles, dead at 85 Edouard Molinaro, best known internationally for the late ’70s box office comedy hit La Cage aux Folles, which earned him a Best Director Academy Award nomination, died of lung failure on December 7, 2013, at a Paris hospital. Molinaro was 85. Born on May 31, 1928, in Bordeaux, in southwestern France, to a middle-class family, Molinaro began his six-decade-long film and television career in the mid-’40s, directing narrative and industrial shorts such as Evasion (1946), the Death parable Un monsieur très chic ("A Very Elegant Gentleman," 1948), and Le verbe en chair / The Word in the Flesh (1950), in which a poet realizes that greed is everywhere — including his own heart. At the time, Molinaro also worked as an assistant director, collaborating with, among others, Robert Vernay (the 1954 version of The Count of Monte Cristo, starring Jean Marais) and...
- 12/8/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Jean-Pierre Cassel dies at 74
PARIS -- French actor Jean-Pierre Cassel died Thursday in Paris after a long illness. He was 74.
"I honor the memory of a man who, with a subtle and ironic sophistication, left a unique imprint on the history of cinema, theater and television," Veronique Cayla, head of French national film body the CNC, said in a statement Friday.
Cassel got his break when he was discovered by Gene Kelly, who cast him in The Happy Road in 1957, and subsequently rose to fame starring in film comedies in the 1960s.
He went on to work with such major directors as Robert Altman, Luis Bunuel, Jean Renoir, Sidney Lumet, Claude Chabrol and Richard Attenborough.
The actor starred in more than 110 movies during his career and earned the onscreen affections of Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Stephane Audran and Marie Dubois among others. Cassel, who once cited Fred Astaire as a source of inspiration, was famous for his role as the ungainly King Louis XIII in Richard Lester's pair of early 1970s films The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers.
His latest roles include Julian Schnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," In Competition at May's Festival de Cannes, in addition to the soon-to-be-released animated movie Asterix at the Olympic Games.
Cassel is survived by his three children, including son Vincent, who also has made a big name for himself stateside with roles in the recent Ocean's Twelve and Derailed.
Father and son were set to star in Jean-Francois Richet's two-film project about infamous gangster Jacques Mesrine -- Death Instinct and Public Enemy No. 1...
"I honor the memory of a man who, with a subtle and ironic sophistication, left a unique imprint on the history of cinema, theater and television," Veronique Cayla, head of French national film body the CNC, said in a statement Friday.
Cassel got his break when he was discovered by Gene Kelly, who cast him in The Happy Road in 1957, and subsequently rose to fame starring in film comedies in the 1960s.
He went on to work with such major directors as Robert Altman, Luis Bunuel, Jean Renoir, Sidney Lumet, Claude Chabrol and Richard Attenborough.
The actor starred in more than 110 movies during his career and earned the onscreen affections of Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Stephane Audran and Marie Dubois among others. Cassel, who once cited Fred Astaire as a source of inspiration, was famous for his role as the ungainly King Louis XIII in Richard Lester's pair of early 1970s films The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers.
His latest roles include Julian Schnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," In Competition at May's Festival de Cannes, in addition to the soon-to-be-released animated movie Asterix at the Olympic Games.
Cassel is survived by his three children, including son Vincent, who also has made a big name for himself stateside with roles in the recent Ocean's Twelve and Derailed.
Father and son were set to star in Jean-Francois Richet's two-film project about infamous gangster Jacques Mesrine -- Death Instinct and Public Enemy No. 1...
- 4/21/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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