- 11-24 Oct -

From the Cinematheque members email:

Cinema was invented in France, and during the twelve decades since then, no other country has shown as much respect for film as an art form.

No Cinémathèque season would be complete without a bow to French cinema, so for the next two weeks we’ll screen a wide range of French movies  -  from classic masterpieces (the exquisite CHILDREN OF PARADISE) to contemporary independents (the daring BEFORE I FORGET).  We also include some outstanding French films directed by non-French directors, including Max Ophuls, Bernardo Bertolucci, Michael Haneke, the Coen brothers, and others.

OCTOBER

11    Saturday
19:00    THE RED BALLOON
+ FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON

12    Sunday
15:00    THE RED BALLOON
+ WHITE MANE
19:00    THE RED BALLOON
+ FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON

13    Monday
19:00    THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE
21:00    LA HAINE

14    Tuesday
Reserved for Friends of Vietnam Heritage

15    Wednesday
19:00    THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE
21:00    BEFORE I FORGET

16    Thursday
19:00    THE DREAMERS
21:00    TO EACH HIS OWN CINEMA

17    Friday
19:00   CHILDREN OF PARADISE

18    Saturday
15:00    LES CHORISTES
19:00   MONSIEUR IBRAHIM
21:00    HEADING SOUTH

19    Sunday
19:00    THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED

20    Monday
19:00    THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED
21:00    PARIS, JE T’AIME

21    Tuesday
19:00    LADY CHATTERLY

22    Wednesday
19:00    THE DREAMERS
21:00    TO EACH HIS OWN CINEMA

23    Thursday
19:00    PARIS, JE T’AIME
21:00    MURMUR OF THE HEART

24    Friday
19:00    MURMUR OF THE HEART
21:00    CACHÉ

FILM NOTES

THE RED BALLOON (Le ballon rouge)
1956     Directed by Albert Lamorisse     34 minutes

Albert Lamorisse’s THE RED BALLOON is perhaps the most acclaimed short films of all time. In this deceptively simple, nearly wordless tale, a young boy discovers a stray balloon that seems to have a mind of its own. Wandering through the streets of Paris, the two become inseparable, until the world’s harsh realities finally interfere. the film is both sophisticated and naive, childlike and artistically mature.

THE RED BALLOON won the Palme d’Or at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, and the 1956 Academy Award for Best Screenplay (making it the only short film ever to win an Oscar in a feature film category!.

FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON
2007     Directed by Hou Hsiao Hsien     115 minutes
French with English subtitles.  No Vietnamese translation.

A highlight at the 2007 Cannes, Toronto and New York film festivals, FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON is the latest masterpiece from Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao Hsien. Inspired by Albert Lamorisse’s Academy Award Winning classic, THE RED BALLOON, Hou expands on its key elements - a young boy, a red balloon and Paris - to weave an achingly beautiful tale on the mysteries of familial bonds and the lingering effects the past has on us all.

A precious young boy, Simon must deal with the increasing fragility of his mother, the loving yet preoccupied Suzanne (Juliette Binoche). Completely immersed in her own tribulations, Suzanne hires Song, a Taiwanese film student, to help care for Simon. Together with Song, a unique extended family is formed, utterly interdependent yet lost in separate thoughts and dreams mirrored by a delicate, shiny red balloon.

“A quiet, unassuming and flawless tribute to Paris, to the spirit of childhood and to the ability of art to compensate for some of the painful imperfections of life.”
– A.O. Scott, New York Times

Review by STUART KLAWANS, The Nation:

“Of the main figures in Hou Hsiao Hsien’s FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON — a single mother in Paris, her 7-year-old son, the young Chinese woman who works as the boy’s nanny — I suspect it’s the title character with whom Hou identifies. In memory of Albert Lamorisse’s THE RED BALLOON, Hou has set loose one of his own in the city; and the toy’s way of weaving in and around the story seems much like the movement of his attention, as it bobs inquisitively close to people or wafts out of their reach, descends toward the paving stones or rises high over the roofs.

Granted, there are differences between the floater and the filmmaker. Although the red balloon that starred in the Lamorisse film is famously native to Paris, Hou is a stranger here, having built his great career almost entirely in Taiwan. If not for the suggestion (or whim) of a French producer, he might never have made the movie, which has him working in a European location for the first time. But perhaps for that reason, Hou the outsider has adopted a teasing, playful, deliberately ungrounded viewpoint in FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON. He comes and goes so freely that you may be surprised, near the end, to realize how deeply he’s drawn you into a down-to-earth story. A woman has stood up for herself and is stronger for it, if also a bit lonelier and a little more disillusioned.

For narrative purposes, this woman has been called Suzanne; but she’s really Juliette Binoche, who has turned herself into a shaggy blonde for the occasion and dressed in a disarray of bosom-exposing sweaters. From this get-up, you may read the hectic daily improvisation of Suzanne’s life, as well as her sexual self-assertion in the face of mounting challenges: abandonment, middle age, a habit of snacking at all hours. Suzanne’s supposed partner, the father of little Simon (Simon Iteanu), is never seen, having run off to Montreal to write a book on a suspiciously prolonged deadline. Her previous lover has vanished entirely, leaving nothing behind except a teenage daughter, who lives in Brussels and is absent for most of the year. Suzanne’s life has become an anxious round of rushing to and from work, caring as best she can for Simon, fighting with the deadbeat tenants downstairs (who maddeningly pretend to be her friends) and muttering furiously about the condition of her apartment. Imagine a tunnel-like storage closet fitted with two rickety lofts where you can sleep, or break your neck trying.

Change the language, and you’ve got a situation Hou could have dramatized in Taipei, where he probably would have tucked his characters just as snugly into their unglamorous quarters. You might call his movies pre-inhabited; he often says that he can’t begin filming them until he knows the precise location of each room and piece of furniture in his setting, along with the exact routine of the people using the space. Just so, even though Suzanne and Simon reside in Paris, you feel they must have lived for years in this fictitious apartment before Hou showed up with his camera. The poster tacked on the front door has the look of a decoration that long ago became invisible. The old wooden table, used for meals and work alike, is flanked by three matching chairs, plus an odd fourth that settled in years ago with its own mute history. I’d guess about a third of the film passes inside this neo-Taiwanese residence, where Hou never yields to the allure of the movies’ mythical Paris except to stage infrequent visits from the red balloon. It hovers over the skylight of Simon’s sleeping loft or drifts, unseen, past the courtyard window.

Why is it there? I suppose there are three answers, the most sensible of which is also the least satisfying.

A rationalist would interpret the red balloon as the fantasy of a lonely kid, suggested to him by his new nanny. She is a film student from Beijing named Song Fang (played by Song Fang, a real film student from Beijing); and like a low-tech young female version of Hou, she is shooting a project based on the Lamorisse movie. As she goes around Paris, Song seeks out surviving traces of THE RED BALLOON and explains them to Simon, who hadn’t known the story. So when you see the red balloon trail Simon through the city and keep him company from a distance, you might be looking at the boy’s imaginative projection. The problem with this interpretation is that Simon is a quiet and adaptable child–rather too quiet and adaptable to make a good movie character–who doesn’t seem to need a fantasy object, so long as he has his pinball machines and video games. I’d say the red balloon is fascinated with him, rather than the other way around.

A better explanation of the balloon might come from the great world of film financing. FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON was initiated by the Musée d’Orsay, which chose to celebrate its twentieth anniversary by offering production deals to four directors with impeccably profit-free credentials: Hou, Olivier Assayas, Raoul Ruiz and Jim Jarmusch. The only condition was that at least one scene in each film had to be shot in the Orsay. Hou could have invented any story he liked and then run his characters, just once, through the galleries; but having a mind too elegant for pretense, he searched instead for something that would make the museum seem like a point of origin rather than an excuse. He found it in Félix Vallotton’s painting Le Ballon: an image of a solitary child in a park, chasing a red ball. When Hou at last brings Simon together with this picture, late in the film, you feel you’ve witnessed a happy secret being shared, as the boy looks at the red balloon fixed in the painti!
ng and then glances up at the skylight to see it floating simultaneously over the Orsay. As if playing a serenely refined game, Hou transforms constraint into freedom–which feels more to the point than any plotbound interpretation.

But that’s not exactly right, either; and so for the third explanation I come back to Suzanne, who neither sees the red balloon nor thinks about it.

She’s kept busy instead fighting off a swarm of cares; but outside the trap of her apartment, Suzanne is far from hopeless, thanks to her work. A scholar-practitioner of puppeteering who especially loves her art’s Chinese traditions, she is currently in rehearsals for a French-language version of a Yuan dynasty play, in which she performs all the voices. For Binoche, this is an opportunity to show off a very impressive new virtuosity in Chinese-style vocal acrobatics–warbling, crooning, sighing, caterwauling–as she acts out the legend of a love even deeper and more enduring than the ocean.

You have the stylization of Binoche’s puppet voices versus her fiercely naturalistic portrayal of Suzanne; the great romantic trials of her play’s characters versus the daily frustrations of her life. Transpose these oppositions to another key, and you’ve got the magic of the red balloon (elusive visitor from the world of art) versus the mundane realities of the present-day city. The glory of FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON is that it contrasts these two experiences but is too wise to separate them. After all, Suzanne herself plays with toys.

If you’ve seen Hou’s THE PUPPETMASTER–for my money, as good a movie as has ever been made–you will know that he can combine a moving, closely observed story with amused commentary and the artifice of playacting, in scenes that develop so unaffectedly that they seem neither more nor less goal-oriented than breathing. So, although FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON is a little tricky to explain, what you need to know about it is simple. The season is early autumn, when school has begun and people wear jackets but the trees are still in leaf. Windows everywhere reflect passers-by back at themselves and complicate the view of the city, while the sunlight, though soft, casts a crisp shadow on the pavement from a passing balloon. With his thoroughly untouristic sensibility, Hou is more likely to show you railroad tracks than landmarks when he ventures out of Suzanne’s apartment. But there’s Notre Dame, off in the distance; and here for the finale is a splendid view of the Sacré-Coeur.”

WHITE MANE (Crin Blanc: Le cheval sauvage)
1953    Directed by Albert Lamorisse     40 min
French with English subtitles (minimal dialog)

Winner of the Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix for Short Film.

“One of the most beautiful films ever made!”
-  Pauline Kael

In the south of France is a near-desert region called La Camargue.  There lives White Mane, a magnificent stallion and the leader of a herd of wild horses too proud to let themselves be broken in by humans. Only Folco, a young fisherman, manages to tame him. A strong friendship grows between the boy and the horse, but they must elude the wrangler and his herdsmen to live freely. But if they succeed, where can they go? WHITE MANE features dazzling black and white photography, hair-raising stunts and action, leading to a mythic/tragic climax.

THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE (Madame De)
1953     Directed by Max Ophuls      105 minutes
French with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation

Famous American film critics Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris didn’t agree on much, but they did find common ground when it came to The Earrings of Madame. Writing in a small literary magazine in 1961, Kael used the word “perfection” to characterize Ophuls’s refined sensibility. And, some 15 years later, Sarris called MADAME DE his candidate for “the greatest film of all time.” The greatness of Ophuls’ official masterpiece is that one can appreciate these sentiments even if one doesn’t necessarily share them.

From review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times:

“Max Ophuls (1902-1957) was a German who made films in Germany, Hollywood and France. His career was used by the critic Andrew Sarris as a foundation-stone of his auteur theory. Sarris famously advised moviegoers to value the how of a movie more than the what. The story and message are not as important, he said, as the style and art.

THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE is one of the most mannered and contrived love movies ever filmed. It glitters and dazzles, and beneath the artifice it creates a heart, and breaks it. The film is famous for its elaborate camera movements, its graceful style, its sets, its costumes and of course its jewelry. It stars Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer and Vittorio De Sica, who effortlessly embody elegance. It could have been a mannered trifle. We sit in admiration of Ophuls’ visual display, so fluid and intricate. Then to our surprise we find ourselves caring.”

LA HAINE (Hate)
1995    Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz           94 minutes
French with English subtitles.  No Vietnamese translation

A critically acclaimed hit, winning the 1995 Best Director prize at Cannes, LA HAINE is a tale based on the real life ghetto riots in urban France. The film follows three teenagers, Vince (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Kounde) and Said (Said Taghmaoui), all living in the ghettos, all petty criminals dealing drugs, full of angst and rage; all wanting a better life but unable to see a way out.

A friend is beaten up in police custody, and this sparks off a series of events that begins a journey down a path of destruction. Vince gets a gun and in his bitter rage becomes a human time bomb, counting down and awaiting detonation. Director Mathieu Kassovitz delivers a powerfully emotional comment on the state of society and the decay and destruction caused by urban deprivation. His message is clear: This is how it is, what are you going to do about it? Intercut documentary footage of real inner city riots remind you that this is not too far from reality. The political correctness of having the three main characters represent the ethnic diversity of inner city life (Vince the White, Hubert the Black, and Said the Arab) is perhaps a little too neat, but the acting is second to none. Vincent Cassel  is especially terrifying. Social commentary and thought provoking statements aside, LA HAINE is, at the end of the day, a brilliant piece of filmmaking.

Review by  Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle:

“In Paris, the most idealized city in the world, African and Middle Eastern immigrants are marginalized, stuck into housing projects and harassed by cops. One night, the pot boils over as dozens riot to protest an epidemic of police brutality.

So begins HATE (La Haine), a terrific jolt of a film, opening today at the Lumiere, that looks at urban unrest across the Atlantic with alarming images of disaffected youth. Forget the perfumed notions of the City of Light and its tree-shaded boulevards — “Hate” mocks those postcard ideals, scraping them with sharp, angry claws.

Written and directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, the 28-year-old French film maker, HATE is an in-your- face shriek against racism, apathy and police autocracy.

Shot in black and white and told in a 24-hour period, HATE follows a trio of disaffected homeboys — Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Kounde) and Said (Said Taghmaoui) — the day after their buddy Abdel has been hospitalized because of a police beating.

Vinz, a Jew, is a walking time bomb who dreams of “smoking” a cop and likes to look in his mirror and pretend he’s Travis Bickle, the wannabe assassin from TAXI DRIVER (”You talkin’ to me?”). Said is an Arab who plays tagalong, and Hubert is an African boxer who tries, mostly in vain, to temper Vinz’s wild outbursts.

The world they inhabit on the fringes of Paris is a bleak minefield of potential tragedy. A billboard depicting Planet Earth says La Monde a Nous (”the world is ours”), and the irony of that statement is unmistakable.

Deprived of work, respect and a healthy community, the buddies form an alternative family among themselves, bonded by a free-floating rage. In one scene, Said and Hubert get picked up by a cop who stuffs them into an interrogation room, mostly because he wants to demonstrate the art of humiliation and intimidation — choke holds, racial epithets, sexual slurs — to his rookie partner.

Earlier, when the homeboys go to visit their injured friend at the hospital, the cops bar them and say, “We’re here to protect you.” Right, says Hubert. “But who’s going to protect us from you?”

Unlike the spate of American ” ‘hood movies” we’ve seen in the past five years, which romanticize their gangsta protagonists at the same time that they deplore them, HATE has a plaintive, sympathetic chord that runs beneath the anger. It cuts deeper and shows us the foolishness of its characters as it mourns their inevitable tragedy.

One night, as the guys sit and look at the Paris cityscape and the Eiffel Tower, which symbolizes all the prosperity, romance and comfort they can never experience, Hubert tells a story he heard from a rabbi, about a man who fell off a skyscraper.

“On the way down,” Hubert says, “he says to himself, `So far, so good.’ Like us in the projects: So far, so good. But how will we land?”

HATE is Kassovitz’s urgent alarm to the French and the world. As long as we avoid facing up to the problems of race, corruption and economic division, he insists, we’re bound for tragedy.

“It’s not how you fall,” he reminds us in a chilling coda. “It’s how you land.”

BEFORE I FORGET (Avant Que J’oublie)
2008   Directed by Jacques Nolot     108 minutes
French with English subtitles.  No Vietnamese translation.

A revealing movie about a 60ish former rent-boy, HIV-positive gay French man, written, directed and starring the 60ish former rent-boy, HIV-positive gay French filmmaker, Jacques Nolot.

Advisory:  This film contains scenes of simulated homosexual activity.  Please do not attend if you might find such scenes offensive.

Review by David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle:

“BEFORE I FORGET is not a film to everyone’s taste. Well, of course, what film is? But in this case, BEFORE I FORGET is still a film one can admire. It is not “likable,” per se, nor does its director wish it to be.

Jacques Nolot wrote and directed the film. He also stars as Pierre, an aging gay hustler facing a loss of income when his richest client dies after a 30-year arrangement. The client has left him a sizable inheritance, but the man’s family is challenging the bequest. If poverty doesn’t get him first, mortality will: He’s not a well man. Worst of all, perhaps, he is an old man in a business that is not kind to the aging process.

Old habits die hard, but some old habits wear better in youth than they do in old age. Smoking, drugs, alcohol, imported hustlers whose skills fail to arouse - Pierre seems to think he’s still a young gay boulevardier. But every ache and pain, every sagging fold on his HIV-positive body tells us, at least, that he is not.

Sometimes called Pierre and at other times Jacques, this is a character who began cinematic life in 1983 in André Téchiné’s “LA MATIOUETTE OU L’ARRIÈRE PAYS, about a hustler who returns to his birthplace in a small French village. The story flashed back to the hustler’s first arrival in Paris, at the age of 17, in I DON’T KISS in 1991, written in part by Nolot and based on his own story.

Nolot took over the continuation of the story as director and star with L’ARRIÈRE PAYS in 1998, followed in 2002 by PORN THEATER, in which the character, now called Jacques, recounts his life and losses at the age of 55.

In a way, the sharing of directorial duties between Nolot and Téchiné is perfect for the series. Téchiné is really much more of a romantic stylist, which seems more fitting for the first two films. Nolot’s vision is bleaker and much more unflinching. In fact, there are several moments in BEFORE I FORGET where you’re likely to find yourself wishing he had flinched just a bit.

There is a scene, early in the film, where Jacques thrashes about in the dark with either night sweats or nightmares and wakes up. He walks naked through his house in semidarkness. His flesh hangs wearily on his frame. The only glimpse of color in the frame is the orange juice he pours into a glass before he goes to his desk and sits down in front of his typewriter. Lit starkly, Nolot’s body evokes the work of both Lucien Freud and Ivan Albright, the late painter of the magic realist school whose work included the painting used in the film THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY. The images are meant to shock, but the shock is meant to open the door to our seeing something else, something that is almost beautiful because it is simply and without apology, truth.”

An Examined Life of Wicked Pleasure
– By Stephen Holden, New York Times
(Published: July 18, 2008)

Jacques Nolot’s film BEFORE I FORGET begins with the image of a blank screen with a small dot at the center that slowly expands into a round black hole, a stark image of the void that looms more prominently as we age.

But for Pierre (Mr. Nolot), the film’s 60-year-old protagonist, who lives alone in a modest Paris apartment, the near future is more ominous than for most. Pierre, H.I.V. positive for 24 years, has been advised to take a more aggressive drug cocktail than the medication that has sustained him. He is reluctant because of its toxic side effects, including hair loss. His body may be dilapidated, but his face is still handsome in a hawklike way, and crowned by an elegant gray mane.

With its shots of Pierre, naked, in the throes of simulated sex, BEFORE I FORGET is an unblinking portrait of a complicated, solitary gay man who has outlived his working years. A male escort who for decades was kept by a lion of French society 15 years his senior who has just died, Pierre is reduced to paying rent boys for sex, an activity he pursues assiduously even though he doesn’t appear to enjoy it very much.

Sex for pay has been the theme of his life since his late teens, and now the roles are reversed; it is his turn to purchase the kind of ritualized domination found in Jean Genet novels. You sense that he seeks to be punished by versions of his younger self. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Pierre that there is any other kind of erotic transaction worth pursuing.

BEFORE I FORGET is the third semi-autobiographical film in a trilogy by Mr. Nolot, a French actor, writer and director closely associated with André Téchiné. This movie follows Pierre around Paris as he visits acquaintances in his circle of johns and hustlers, has sessions with an obtuse psychiatrist and remembers how the family of his longtime sugar daddy closed ranks and shut Pierre out of his inheritance.

It forces us to glean what biographical information we can from details mentioned in conversation. If the closeted way of life the movie describes seems quaint in the age of gay liberation, the human nature it portrays has no shelf life. When you reach a certain age, it emphasizes, money becomes paramount.

Although Pierre, who is writing a memoir, declares more than once that he has contemplated suicide, he doesn’t seem especially unhappy. Even on the erotic front hope springs eternal. He and his friend Georges (Jean Pommier), a married, closeted lawyer, cheerfully compare the costs of hustlers. When the talk isn’t about the price of flesh, it is gossip about estates, how to protect undeclared income, smuggle money across borders and finagle financial security. Because of his bravado and power games with his older lover, we discover, Pierre lost out on his inheritance.

Mr. Nolot’s fictionalized self-portrait is proudly self-lacerating. While Pierre maintains an attitude of haughty independence, Mr. Nolot goes out of his way to puncture any illusions he may have of being desirable to the boys he covets. As the camera studies Pierre from a distance in his dimly lighted apartment and slowly surveys the possessions on his shelves, you sense a man who has accepted the choices he has made.

The picture of Pierre as a tough old bird is reinforced when Marc (Bastien d’Asnières), his regular rent boy, insists on dressing him in drag and taking him to the Pigalle district. He initially refuses. He would have to shave off his mustache, he protests. But he changes his mind.

Outfitted as a female streetwalker, a whole new personality emerges. With his sharp features, vigilant, birdlike gaze, his feet planted in a doorway, the drag version of Pierre is a hardened whore decades past her prime but still defiantly pounding the pavement.

THE DREAMERS (Innocents)
2003     Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci    115 minutes
In English and French with English subtitles.  No Vietnamese translation.

The tumultuous political landscape of Paris in 1968 serves as the backdrop for this tale about three young cineastes who are drawn together through their passion for film. Matthew, an American exchange student, pursuing his education abroad in Paris, becomes friends with a French brother and sister duo, named Theo and Isabelle, who share a common love of the cinema.

While the May 1968 Paris student riots–which eventually shut down most of the French government–are happening around them, the three friends develop a relationship unlike anything Matthew has ever experienced. Here they make heir own rules as they experiment with each other’s emotions and sexuality, playing a series of increasingly demanding mind games.

From review by Philip French, The Observer (London):

“Gilbert Adair has adapted his novel The Holy Innocents for the screen as THE DREAMERS, and as his novel is about politics, transgressive sex and the cinema itself, he has found a perfect collaborator in Bernardo Bertolucci. As in LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES, a brother and sister live in a hermetic world of incestuous self-absorption. The innocent is Matthew (played by Michael Pitt, a Leonardo DiCaprio type), a 19-year-old American in Paris, studying film and going nightly to the Cinémathèque. The brother and his slightly younger sister are Théo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green), the intense, chain-smoking, precociously intellectual children of a poet, once left-wing, now detached from politics. They meet Matthew at the demonstration over the sacking of Henri Langlois from Paris Cinémathèque, and draw him into their movie-obsessed world. When their parents go off on vacation he moves in with them to form a ménage à trois.

Oblivious to the gathering storm outside, they talk about films, debating the merits of Chaplin and Keaton, and playing games that become increasingly dangerous. With great dexterity, clips from films are worked into the narrative, as when the trio set out to break the record of running through the Louvre established by Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur in Godard’s Bande à part. They celebrate Matthew’s acceptance into their household by chanting ‘you are one of us’ in the manner of the circus folk in FREAKS. In his novel (which he has recently rewritten), Adair is explicit about incest and bisexuality. The movie deliberately turns the former into a deeply intimate, unconsummated affinity, and the latter into gestures and glances. When at Théo’s insistence Matt becomes Isabelle’s lover, they are shown to be virgins.

THE DREAMERS is an amusing, sophisticated movie, true to its times, cheerfully erotic, and played with unselfconscious conviction by its three young actors.

TO EACH HIS OWN CINEMA (Chacun son Cinéma)
2007    Directed by Theo Angelopoulos, Olivier Assayas, Bille August, Jane Campion, Youssef Chahine, Chen Kaige, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, David Cronenberg, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, Manoel de Oliveira, Raymon Depardon, Atom Egoyan, Amos Gitai, Alejandro Gondalez Inarritu, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Aki Kaurismaki, Abbas Kiarostami, Takeshi Kitano, Andrei Konchalovsky, Claude Lelouch, Ken Loach, David Lynch, Nanni Moretti, Roman Polanski, Raoul Ruiz, Walter Salles, Elia Suleiman, Tsai Ming-liang, Gus Van Sant, Lars von Trier, Wim Wenders, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou.

120 minutes
In French with English subtitles.  No Vietnamese translation

Review by Will Sloan, Inside Toronto (Film Festival):

To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, the festival’s president, Gilles Jacob, commissioned a project that would be any film snob’s dream: he hired 36 of the world’s best directors to direct 34 three-minute films about movie-going to be collected in an omnibus film called CHACUN SON CINEMA (English title: To Each his Own Cinema).

CHACUN SON CINEMA will inevitably be compared to this year’s PARIS JE T’AIME, which also had short contributions from a roster of international directors. It suffers in comparison, perhaps because PARIS JE T’AIME was about love and CHACUN son Cinema is about film, and, well, love trumps film every time. The hit-to-miss ratio is disappointing: there are some wonderful segments, a few disasters (I’m looking at you, Theo Angelopoulos, Youssef Chahine and Jane Campion), and a lot of underdeveloped stuff in between. 34 films are also just too much, and I can’t say I was saddened to see the film end.

Perhaps it would have been more satisfying if Gilles Jacob cut down the list of filmmakers to about twenty, and gave them more room to breath. I suspect that with a few extra minutes, many of these directors would have been able to develop their ideas more successfully. I also wish Jacob hadn’t been so strict on the rule of setting the films in and around movie theatres, and more about film in general. After 34 segments, you get tired of looking at those damn seats and projectors.

Is CHACUN SON CINEMA successful? Not really, but is it worth seeing? Considering the talent involved, certainly. And there are plenty of scenes that are good enough in their own right to justify the experiment. A few favourites: the Coen brothers’ “World Cinema”, with Josh Brolin as a cowboy-type who “enjoyed the hell out of Climates”; Takeshi Kitano’s hilarious “One Fine Day”, about a farmer’s ill-fated trip to a run-down theatre; “Occupations”, by an unusually funny (and violent!) Lars von Trier; Roman Polanski’s “Cinema Erotique”, about an unfortunate misunderstanding at a porn film; Hou Hsiao-hsien’s simple, evocative “The Electric Princess House”; David Cronenberg’s self-explanatory “The Suicide of the Last Jew in the World at the Last Cinema in the World”; and Raymon Depardon’s “Open-Air Cinema”, the segment that perhaps best captures the appeal of filmgoing.

Unlike PARIS JE T’AIME, I can’t see CHACUN SON CINEMA having much appeal to anyone who isn’t fanatical about film, but if its line-up of directors makes you drool, you’ll probably find it a worthwhile if slightly disappointing diversion.

CHILDREN OF PARADISE (Les Enfants de Paradis)
1943    Directed by Marcel Carné   190 minutes
French with English subtitles and optional Vietnamese audio.

Named “Best French Film in the History of Talking Pictures” by the French Academy of Cinema Arts and “Among the top 30 European Films of All Time” by panel of twenty leading European directors.

Filmed with great difficulty during the Nazi occupation of Paris, CHILDREN OF PARADISE is a prime example of French poetic realism.

Extraordinary acting,  along with the vivid costumes, sets and music all contribute to a rich and entertaining theatrical epic.

Set in the theatre district of early 19th century Paris, the film re-creates a glittering world of backstage life. Garance, an elusive courtesan, is loved by four men - a talented mime, an ambitious actor, a nihilistic villain, and a snobbish aristocrat.  Bursting with passion, jealousy, and deception, poet Jacques Prévert’s screenplay has been called “the finest work ever composed for the screen.” (The Washington Post).

Note:  This complete 3-hour restored version of CHILDREN OF PARADISE will be shown with one 15-minute intermission.

LES CHORISTES (The Choir)
2004      Directed by Christophe Barratier      96 minutes
French, with English subtitles.  No Vietnamese translation.

Academy Award Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film

A major hit in France, this is a beautifully-crafted film about how music helps pacify some troubled boys at a grim French boarding school in postwar France.  The film struck a chord because its heart is in the right place, that is, with the unfortunate students and their sympathetic music teacher against the institution and its heavy-handed principal.  Among the movie’s greatest strengths are the performance of veteran French actor Gerard Jugnot as the music teacher, and a glorious choral music score, composed by Barratier.

MONSIEUR IBRAHIM (Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran)
2003   Directed by François Dupeyron    95 minutes
French, with English subtitles.  No Vietnamese translation.

Jewish teen steals groceries and learns folk wisdom from Sufi shopkeeper in 1960s Paris.

2003 César Award for Best Actor (Omar Sharif)
2003 Venice Film Festival, Audience Award for Best Actor (Omar Sharif)

Review by Leslie Camhi, Village Voice  (New York):

Bond of Outsiders
“France’s long-standing “Jewish problem” is intertwined with its more recent “Muslim problem” - a fast-growing Arab and Islamic minority that many think poses a threat to the national identity. In the midst of this crisis, MONSIEUR IBRAHIM arrives, to sow a bit of hope and much confusion. The venerable Omar Sharif plays the title role, a grizzled, mysterious Sufi who runs the corner store in a working-class Parisian neighborhood. It’s the early 1960s - the music blaring from transistor radios never sounded so good, and the whores on the Rue Bleue never looked so chic. Sixteen-year-old Momo (Pierre Boulanger) is a connoisseur of both; they offer momentary relief from life with his taciturn, gloomy father (Gilbert Melki). Momo regularly buys (or shoplifts) the groceries for their sad little household at Ibrahim’s place. One day the wise and world-weary Sufi teaches this Jewish boy to smile disarmingly while stealing, and is soon dispensing off-kilter lessons from the Koran about appreciating life’s small pleasures on Sunday walks around the arrondissement.

“What does it mean to be a Jew?” Momo begins his religious disquisition, before offering his own grim assessment. “For my dad, it means being depressed all day. For me, it’s just something that prevents me from being something else.” Not for long, though. When Momo’s father finally abandons him, Ibrahim’s Koran lessons begin to take effect. France’s Jewish and Muslim problems dissolve into a kinder, gentler Islam.

Director François Dupeyron is attuned to the nuances of youthful passion and its dashed hopes. And he’s got rhythm—in MONSIEUR IBRAHIM, he captures the beat of rock ‘n’ roll hipsters and (in one memorable sequence) a trio of whirling dervishes.

Monsieur Ibrahim is unusual in its ambition to pose deep spiritual questions, but its enticing surfaces - including the beautiful working girls and Isabelle Adjani’s surprise cameo as a Bardot-esque starlet - are the best thing about it. Sharif’s smoothly professional performance emphasizes Ibrahim’s warmth and humanity, and his murky mysticism only occasionally touches the sublime.”

From review by Ruthe Stein, San Francisco Chronicle:

“The movie is about Ibrahim’s attempts to impart his knowledge, culled selectively from his precious Koran, to a troubled teen whose mother and brother have deserted him, leaving him in the care of a depressive father. The boy, Momo, is played by newcomer Pierre Boulanger, who has the appealing cockiness of Jean-Pierre Leaud in “The 400 Blows.” It’s a daunting task to share the screen with the radiant Sharif, but Boulanger is more than up to it.

Momo steals from his dad to pay for prostitutes, lying about his age to get them into bed. He regularly pilfers food from Ibrahim’s shop, a misdeed that does not escape the proprietor’s attention.

Ibrahim pretends not to notice because he feels a bond with the confused youth. Soon Ibrahim has become his surrogate father, advising Momo on everything from women (”It’s good to start with professionals, but you’ll soon appreciate novices.”) to the necessity of wearing good shoes and avoiding rushing around. “Slowness — that’s the key to happiness,” he sagely advises.

There’s a religious twist to the story. Ibrahim is a Muslim, though obviously a liberal one; his protege is Jewish. The boy’s real name is Moses. Ibrahim nicknames him Momo because, he says, it sounds “less impressive.” When Ibrahim praises the Koran and presents a copy to the boy, it doesn’t come across as proselytizing. Like Ibrahim, the movie is never dogmatic. It makes a gentle plea for understanding other religions and taking from them whatever works.

MONSIEUR IBRAHIM is adapted from a French play but never seems stage-bound. Director François Dupeyron opens the story up with dazzlingly cinematic street scenes. Crowds of teens hover near their dilapidated apartment buildings lost in music coming from their precious transistor radios. Meanwhile, hookers ply their trade a block away. Dupeyron vividly captures a seamy side of Paris rarely seen onscreen.

The movie also boasts breathtaking on-location shots of Momo and Ibrahim’s trip across Europe. The wily grocer has conned a car dealer into selling him an automobile, although he doesn’t know how to drive. He picks up enough rudimentary skill to get him and his charge to Turkey, where Ibrahim hopes to resume the life he deserted decades earlier. A man so wise should know you can’t go home again.”

HEADING SOUTH (Vers Le Sud)
France, 2006  Directed by Laurent Cantet      104 minutes
English and French with English subtitles.  No Vietnamese translation.

Award-winning French director Laurent Cantet travels to the post colonial Haiti of the 1970s to study issues of social class, sex tourism and economic power. HEADING SOUTH is based on short stories by Haitian writer Dany Laferriere, and stars three outstanding actresses, Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young and Louise Portal.

Sea, sex and sun for Ellen, Brenda and Sue, three North American ladies, on the wrong side of forty or fifty-odd, going through an enchanted interlude. Lonely, forsaken, neglected by men in their native countries, they can indulge here in carnal exultation without shame, thanks to handsome local young men they pay a few dollars. Ellen is a Boston French literature professor, Brenda, an unfulfilled wife from Savannah, Georgia and Sue, a sexually frustrated but good-natured Canadian factory worker. In this second garden of Eden they find exactly what they are looking for in Legba, an enigmatic local adonis-like boy, whose beauty and passion captivates them all. But the poverty and dangers of life in Haiti under “Baby Doc” Duvalier becomes an unavoidable factor in their relationship.

“HEADING SOUTH” is as sad as life is sad — and sad in the way that life is sad. It’s a morally and emotionally complicated story in which people think they’re doing one thing, when they’re doing another; in which people, driven by need, deny the realities and consequences of their actions. The film offers something unusual: a tragic spectacle of normal, recognizable and utterly sympathetic people condemning themselves.
* Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED  (De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté)
2005    Directed by Jacques Audiard    108 minutes
French with English subtitles.  No Vietnamese translation.

Winner of eight César Awards (the French Oscars), including Best Picture, Best Director, and Most promising Actress (Linh Dan Pham).

A young man struggles to free himself from his father’s criminal world, and pursue his dream of becoming a concert pianist - a painful character study of a man who attempts to find not only himself but also his place in the world.

Review by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (London):

With this stylish and audacious new gangland thriller set in Paris, Romain Duris has become one of the most exciting young actors of his generation - in France or anywhere else. Lovers of French cinema who have grown restless with the frazzled hostility of Vincent Cassel can be assured that there is a new top dog in town. Duris is the veteran of dozens of French movies from the past decade, but here he hits a dazzling streak in a compelling drama directed by Jacques Audiard, a reworking of the 1978 American film Fingers by James Toback. He is pure star quality: gloweringly sexy, hypnotically unstable and needy, combining rage and vulnerability in his handsome, delicate face that clenches like a fist. Duris is like a young Delon or Belmondo, or De Niro’s callow and destructive Johnny Boy in MEAN STREETS, or perhaps Michael Imperioli’s haughty young mafia soldier in The Sopranos.

Duris plays Tom, a young guy who struts around town listening to hardcore techno on his headphones, his chin jutting and head nodding like an aggressive alpha-male cockerel. He is making a good living in the violent and seamy world of speculative real-estate development in Paris. He and his slimeball associates buy up freeholds, fix city hall with bribes to allow them to bypass the auction rules, and then sell their acquisitions on at a profit. But first they must brutally intimidate sitting tenants into leaving, or deter squatters from showing up. These are often terrified immigrants from eastern Europe or Africa, and Tom and his buddies make it their business to persuade them to vacate the premises - with fists, baseball bats and bags full of rats. The scene in which these three wiseguys arrive in their expensive car in the dead of night, and then retrieve a wriggling sack of vicious vermin from the boot, ready to go to work, is a coldsweat masterpiece of brutality.

Tom is, of course, turning into a human rat himself and has been royally screwed up by his terrible old dad, Robert, a semi-retired hoodlum played by Niels Arestrup, who still fancies himself as a player in the property game. But there is a sensitive, creative side to Tom, inherited from his late mother, a classical pianist. Astonishingly, Tom nurses a secret ambition centred on higher things, triggered by seeing in the street, quite by chance, his mother’s old manager - a dignified, educated man who speaks to Tom with the gentleness and miraculous calm authority of an ideal father figure. He yearns to be a classical pianist, and it is an ambition to which Tom brings the fanatical anger, fear and control-freakery that he has amassed during his day job in the criminal jungle, and however absurd and bizarre it is, director and star make Tom’s ambition utterly plausible.

Violent crime and musicianship have, for Tom, things in common: a belligerent egotism, and a certain pathological inability to care about anything else. His tragedy is that he has the mercurial temperament and instinctive talent to be a thug - but for music he has only the mercurial temperament. As we can see only too clearly, his genetic destiny is to follow not his mother but his father, a foolish, damaged figure who is out of his depth in an increasingly violent world. Moreover, Tom’s father is becoming more of a burden to him. He is forced into doing irksome and dangerous “favours” for the old man, involving violence.

Audiard contrives a shocking and thrilling sequence in which Robert invites Tom to a cafe opposite a Tunisian restaurant whose proprietor happens to owe him money. Tom finds himself being wheedled and morally blackmailed into helping out with some strong-arm tactics. Out of nowhere, he has to follow the stupid old man into the joint, savagely attack the owners on his behalf and then return to the cafe, shaking with rage and a post-violence buzz. Audiard and his cinematographer, Stéphane Fontaine, unspool this bravura scene with terrific verve and fluency.

And all the time, Duris’s Tom is fastidious, psychotically focused, nervy and chronically insecure. His fingers twitch with a cold appetite for attack. Before a beating or a confrontation he will rub his hands together, as if to generate sparks. His life in Paris is aimless and even bohemian in its cynically aggressive and materialist way.

He cruises around town, intimidating tenants or potential business partners, womanising and covering up for his friends’ womanising. By day he moves at a different kind of restless somnambulist pace, as if the natural light itself was an unsettling stimulant.

It is exciting stuff from Audiard - who previously directed READ MY LIPS with Vincent Cassel and Emmanuelle Devos - and particularly from Duris, who steps up to the world cinema premier league with this blazingly charismatic performance.”

Amid the Pulp, a Meditation on Fathers, Sons and the Ties That Choke
By MANOHLA DARGIS, New York Times:

“As he walks - no, make that hurdles - through the electrifying French film THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED, the young actor Romain Duris brings to mind another dirty-sexy guy who once vaulted through the movies with barely restrained frenzy. Mr. Duris, who wears a black leather jacket in the film, along with the ankle boots of a tango dancer or a pimp, is playing the character inhabited by Harvey Keitel nearly three decades ago in a cinematic wack job called FINGERS.

Like that film, THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED is the story of an enforcer and would-be concert pianist that hinges on the struggle between the two sides of the male animal, the beauty and the beast. Mr. Keitel’s character, Jimmy, given to wearing a black leather jacket and a white silk scarf, plays Bach in his apartment on a baby grand piano; the rest of the time he’s a crude hustler of women and a reluctant fixer for his monstrous father. In Jacques Audiard’s superb remake, which improves on the original significantly, investing it with aesthetic grandeur and emotional depth, Jimmy is now Thomas (Mr. Duris), a real estate entrepreneur with an unlikely dream. As in the original film, music soothes but doesn’t fully tame him.

Mr. Audiard, whose films include A SELF-MADE HERO, and the art-house favorite READ MY LIPS, is a master of indirection. His lyrically titled new film opens with a quiet, uneasy scene that makes sense only in retrospect. Two men sit in a small, claustrophobic room, cigarette smoke curling through the soft light. One of the men is talking about his father, while the other just listens, impassive as a stone. The angry words pouring from the talker soon mellow as he reveals that his father, who once drove him crazy, had been reduced by illness, flipping the parent-child dynamic. “I nursed him like a baby,” he says. The listener, whom we will shortly come to know as Thomas, our doubtful hero, barely stirs, even when asked, “Do you believe in God?”

There are all kinds of gods in THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED - old gods, dead gods, gods of power and sex and money, and the fallen god Thomas calls Father. An unshaven wreck with a body gone soft with age and fat, Robert (Niels Arestrup) has seen better if not necessarily kinder days. He trolls the murkier depths of real estate, but he’s no longer on his game and leans on his son to close his dirty deals. As he sits across from Thomas in a cafe talking about his hot new girlfriend, dressed in a pale yellow suit jacket with greasy hair curling over the collar, he looks lost, condemned. The disgust in Thomas’s face as he sits across from this ruined spectacle is matched only by the unmistakable love.

Part psychological thriller, part love story (men and women, parents and children), THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED is also about what it takes to escape our own prisons. Written by Mr. Audiard and Tonino Benacquista, with whom he wrote READ MY LIPS, the film uses its pulpy milieu as a way to sneak in a meditation on what makes us human, including the ties that choke. Soon after the rats run wild, Robert asks Thomas to help him with a debtor. Thomas secures the money, but only after Robert has been beaten and his son has exacted bloody vengeance. In the film’s most chilling exchange, Robert pockets the cash and coolly says, “Not so hard, was it?” No wonder Thomas looks like a man on the run.

Working with the talented cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine, who beautifully mixes gaudy color with the noir shadows, Mr. Audiard keeps close tabs on Thomas; there are moments when it looks as if the camera is about to jump on the character’s shoulder or burrow into his ear. Getting inside Thomas’s head turns out to be key because, as it happens, THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED is also an existential mystery.

In time, this restless man, whose spidery fingers and jangling legs constantly tap out separate rhythms, will find harmony. He will embark on an affair with a married woman (Aure Atika) and take lessons with a concert pianist (Linh-Dan Pham), relationships that will pull him out of his prison and just maybe deliver him. Along the way there will be violence, some ugly enough to make your heart skip, and sex that might do the same. Mostly, though, there will be beautiful images, strong emotions and the joy found watching a movie aimed straight at the heart and head. THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED is essential viewing.”

PARIS, JE T’AIME (Paris, I love you)
2006        120 minutes  English and French with English subtitles.
No Vietnamese translation.
Directed as follows:

MONTMARTRE
Directed by Bruno Podalydes.
QUAIS DE SEINE
Directed by Gurinder Chadha.
LE MARAIS
Directed by Gus Van Sant.
TUILERIES
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
LOIN DU 16EME
Directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas.
PORTE DE CHOISY
Directed by Christopher Doyle
BASTILLE
Directed by Isabelle Coixet.
PLACE DES VICTOIRES
Directed by Nobuhiro Suwa.
TOUR EIFFEL
Directed by Sylvain Chomet.
PARC MONCEAU
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron.
PIGALLE
Directed by Richard LaGravanese.
QUARTIER DES ENFANTS ROUGES
Directed by Olivier Assayas.
PLACE DES FETES
Directed by Olivier Schmitz.
QUARTIER DE LA MADELEINE
Camera (color), Tetsuo Nagata.
PERE-LACHAISE
Directed by Wes Craven.
FAUBOURG SAINT-DENIS
Directed by Tom Tykwer
QUARTIER LATIN
Directed by Gerard Depardieu
14TH ARRONDISSEMENT
Directed by Alexander Payne.

LADY CHATTERLEY
France, 2006     Directed by Pascale Ferran     161 minutes
French with English subtitles.  No Vietnamese translation

WINNER  -   5 César Awards (France’s Oscars) for Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Actress, Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design
WINNER  -  Best Actress (Marina Hands), Tribeca Film Festival

Intelligent, deeply moving and exquisitely photographed, LADY CHATTERLEY brings D.H. Lawrence’s most celebrated literary work to the screen in a way that feels fresh, vital and modern.

Robbed of intimacy by her blueblood husband’s war injuries, Constance Chatterley (Marina Hands) longs for the emotional fulfillment and physical passion that her marriage lacks. When she espies the gamekeeper Parkin (Jean-Louis Coullo’ch) unselfconsciously bathing, stripped to the waist amidst the beauty of nature, she experiences a sexual awakening unlike anything she has ever dared to desire. Though separated by the boundaries of social convention, rough-hewn Parkin and high-bred Lady Chatterley unite in a love that is simultaneously innocent and erotic, a spiritual connection that transcends personal inhibitions and class prejudices.

Review by Philip French, The Observer (London):

“In early November 1960, a jury at the Old Bailey trial of the long-proscribed “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” decided that DH Lawrence’s novel was not obscene. A few days later, John F Kennedy was elected President of the United States. The conjunction of the two events created a widespread feeling that a major, liberating change was in the air. What, for better or worse, we now speak of as the Sixties probably started that week. Philip Larkin thought so when he later wrote:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.’

After all the seismic shifts in manners and mores over the 80 years since Lawrence wrote the book and especially the 47 since it became freely available to the public, the novel has clearly lost much of its capacity to shock, but has it become merely a period piece? This question is raised by Pascale Ferran’s LADY CHATTERLEY, which has gone down well in her native France, sweeping the board at last year’s Cesars, the French equivalent of the Oscars.  We are accustomed to English language films of French classics - several versions of Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Madame Bovary - but the French have rarely returned the compliment.

Still, this is the third version by a French director (Danielle Darrieux played Lady C in the staid 1955 one, Sylvia Kristel was Connie in the soft-core 1981 treatment) and after you have accustomed yourself to British characters speaking French in the English countryside, it is a serious, unprurient and absorbing experience.

Lawrence wrote three considerably different versions of the book, though the story remains essentially the same study of class, power, sexual liberation and the oppressive nature of industrial society and 20th-century life. Ferran has chosen to work from Lawrence’s second version, called “Lady Chatterley et l’homme des bois” in France, and “John Thomas and Lady Jane” in English.

The movie carefully establishes Parkin’s relationship to the seasons and the soil, as contrasted with the harsh, debasing work of the colliers employed by Sir Clifford and the empty emotional and spiritual life of Constance as she supervises household tasks and does a little petit-point. As in two other key works of the 1920s, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the film shows us Clifford’s impotence as both a real affliction and a symbolic wound and a reflection of the times.

The most eloquent sequences about the master-servant relationship come from the great scene in the novel where Clifford cannot control his new motorised wheelchair and is reluctantly forced to rely on Parkin’s help.

The six explicit sex scenes (what the prosecuting counsel in the 1960 Old Bailey trial referred to as ’bouts’) are carefully differentiated to become an essential part of the narrative development. First, there is the fulfillment of desire, then the achievement of mutual orgasm and the couple’s first tender night together. Finally, there’s the scene where they dance naked in the rain and decorate each other with flowers and laurel crowns, establishing a pagan world or creating a private Eden in which they are briefly the prelapsarian Adam and Eve.

There was a revealing exchange between the Old Bailey judge and the literary scholar Graham Hough. ‘It took them a long time before they did love one another, didn’t it?’ said the judge. ‘Yes. It often does, my lord,’ replied Hough.

There are certain oddities in the film. One is the use of intertitles to explain the progress of events, another is the intrusive use a couple of times of a female voiceover. A third is the treatment of Constance’s Cote d’Azur holiday with her father and sister as a home movie with flickering film and whirring projector. But this is an attractive, involving film with an excellent performance from Hands as the sensible woman standing between two men incapable of transcending conventional notions of power and male domination. Coulloc’h does well with the difficult role of Parkin, the working man alienated from his own class.”

From review by A.O. Scott, The New York Times:

“It is easy to forget just how modern Lawrence was, and remains. Even books that were daring in their day have a way of becoming respectable with the passage of time, as they are folded into the educational curriculum and the other machinery of middlebrow culture. Ms. Ferran restores Lawrence to the present partly by placing his themes in the service of her own sensibility.

Lawrence’s quasimystical notions about sex and nature have been revised and to some degree refined. His eros of dirt and sweat and animal impulses - less pronounced in the version Ms. Ferran chose than in its better-known successor - are replaced by the sensuality of sunshine, wildflowers and fresh air.

Which is not to suggest that there is anything soft or overly pretty about LADY CHATTERLEY, which is candid, unsentimental and, in spite of a nearly three-hour running time, remarkably brisk.  Lawrence was one of the first writers to insist that sexuality was a powerful, transformative realm of experience that deserved to be considered on its own terms, outside of traditional moral and religious considerations. His three versions of “Lady Chatterley” (Ms. Ferran’s source is the second) push this view beyond what seemed, to Lawrence and several generations of British censors, to be the limits of acceptable discourse.

Of course what once seemed transgressive is by now old news. But if novels and movies about sex have lost their salutary shock value, many of Lawrence’s essential insights about human nature remain true. What Ms. Ferran shows, with exemplary clarity and subtlety, is the way sexual attraction, and the connection it creates, alter both Constance’s and Parkin’s perceptions of themselves, each other and the world around them.

This is not an easy change to convey, in part because the lovers lack words to explain what is happening to them. But the actors’ faces and bodies prove to be impressively eloquent, as is Julien Hirsch’s verdant, summery cinematography. The film’s sex scenes (there are six in all) chart the progress of desire from curiosity to intimacy and convey how sexual chemistry can turn into love.

The first time Parkin and Lady Chatterley make love, it is in haste, fully clothed, on the floor of Parkin’s cottage. Afterward the camera lingers on Ms. Hands’s face - her loveliness is more sweet than smoldering - as if pausing to interpret the enigmatic smile that plays over her features. It is a look of pleasure certainly (though not exactly of sexual rapture, given how quick and clumsy Parkin was), but also of surprise, apprehension and insight. Something unexpected has happened to Constance, and she appears intrigued by the prospect of figuring out what it was. And of doing it again.

Ms. Hands, still in the early stages of her film career, has a beguiling mixture of poise and naturalness. Her Lady Chatterley is both decorous and straightforward, a woman whose easy friendliness helps to bridge the differences of background and status between her and Parkin. Class, at least as much a preoccupation for Lawrence as sex, figures less prominently in this film than it might have. This is partly because the actors, speaking French while pretending to be English, don’t have the accents that would mark their place in the British social hierarchy.

But the contrast between Parkin and Lady Chatterley is not just a matter of privilege, and Mr. Coulloc’h and Ms. Hands complicate the stereotypes to which their characters might be vulnerable. He is timid and kind as well as rough, and she seems to be as comfortable in the woods as in her drawing room.

In stripping LADY CHATTERLEY of some of its mystique, Ms. Ferran has rediscovered both the novel’s originality and the source of its durable appeal, which is not salaciousness but candor. She has made a love story that stands on its own, a film whose imaginative freedom perfectly matches the liberation experienced by its heroine.”

MURMUR OF THE HEART (Le Souffle au Coeur)
1971 120 minutes
In French with English subtitles.  No Vietnamese translation

Louis Malle’s critically acclaimed MURMUR OF THE HEART gracefully combines elements of comedy, drama, and autobiography in a candid portrait of a precocious adolescent boy’s sexual maturation. Both shocking and deeply poignant, this is one of the finest coming-of-age films ever made.

From Review by British Channel 4 TV:

A delicately observed study of Laurent, a teenage boy anxious to lose his virginity but somewhat stifled by life in a middle-class family where there’s little chance of enjoying his latest Charlie Parker disc, let alone getting laid. But when scarlet fever exacerbates a mild heart condition, he is sent to a sanatorium accompanied by his mother (Massari) - on the rebound from an affair. The point of the movie is not the much discussed singular and single, sensitively handled liaison between the 14-year-old and his mother but the observation of life c. 1954 and the portrait of the boy, played with great charm by Benoit Ferreux

From review by Desson Howe,
Washington Post, April 21, 1989:

After 18 years, Louis Malle’s 1971 coming-of-age, MURMUR OF THE HEART still holds most of its fresh intelligence and delicacy. Maybe it’s not the flawless classic that faulty memory recalls, but MURMUR is still a fabulous treat for anyone who enjoys the movies.

Celebrated over the years as a subtle treatment of incest, MURMUR OF THE HEART gains more significant ground in its frank dealings with the ungainly, blindfolded stumblings of male adolescence. Certainly, the incestuous element, which happens under plausibly extenuating circumstances, is tastefully depicted. But Malle’s world of sarcastic, upper-middle-class brats seems to be MURMUR’s most enduring creation. Writing almost directly from his own experiences (with the exception of the incest theme, he has emphasized in interviews), Malle shows you, unsqueamishly, what boys really do with their free moments.

CACHÉ (HIDDEN)
2005  Directed by Michael Haneke   117 minutes
French with English subtitles (no Vietnamese translation)

Michael Haneke, an Austrian filmmaker who usually makes films in French, would probably reject the notion that his latest film, HIDDEN, is a thriller. But it certainly operates like one.

In unraveling a nearly forgotten secret in the life of a self-satisfied and smug French intellectual, Haneke probes deeply into issues involving guilt, communication and willful amnesia. Starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, HIDDEN is one of the most accessible films by a director who often pursues off-putting subjects.

Auteuil plays Georges, the host of a TV literary review, a man, we later learn, born into wealth and a life where things have come easily for him. Binoche plays his wife, Anne, who has an equally busy career as an editor. Their son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), at the difficult age of 12, must more or less fend for himself.

What shatters the bourgeois calm of this family’s life is the anonymous delivery of a series of mysterious package and phone calls that Georges sees as threatening. The packages contain videotapes secretly shot from the street in front of their comfortable home, suggesting they are being watched.

Gradually, the tapes and the crude, childlike drawings that accompany them hint at things even more personal, things that cause Georges to believe he knows the perpetrator. Curiously and tellingly, he refuses to share this knowledge with Anne. Indeed he even tries to hide it but the secret watcher blows his cover.

The son keeps secrets from his parents, and so on. The film seems to argue that life would have gone on well enough for the Laurents had it not been for the unsettling knowledge that they had become visible, that someone knew something about them, that someone was watching.

“HIDDEN is Michael Haneke’s masterpiece: a compelling politico-psychological essay about the denial and guilt mixed into the foundations of western prosperity, composed and filmed with remarkable technique. It is one of the great films of this decade.”
– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian  (London)

“At times CACHÉ resonates, none too subtly, with the oft-repeated post-9/11 question: Why do they hate us? Because we don’t hate ourselves sufficiently, Mr. Haneke responds, doing his bit to make up the shortfall. But while this film can seem politically simplistic, it is nonetheless psychologically astute, and more complicated than it at first appears. Mr. Auteuil and Ms. Binoche are too sensitive and agile to be ideological marionettes, and in spite of his finger-pointing it is not really Mr. Haneke’s intention to reduce Anne and Georges to stereotypes. While the obvious movement of the film is centrifugal, drawing back from the cocoon of the Laurent household into a world of political violence and social misery, it also pulls in the opposite direction, propelled inward by the mysterious gravity of individual motives and feelings. The initial shot of the movie is answered by the last, which demands close attention and contains the intriguing suggestion that the real story !
has been hidden all along - that it has been driven not by the noisy public conflict between Arabs and Frenchmen, but rather by the quiet, perpetual war between fathers and sons.
– A.O. Scott, New York Times

“While HIDDEN is a gripping thriller, it is almost a moral and political enquiry into colonialism and its aftermath. The acting all around is outstanding, with Auteuil and Binoche working beautifully together as their marriage falls apart, expressing their emotional upheaval through the slight movement of an eye or the flicker of a lip. This is a movie that takes one back to the glory days of art-house films in the 1960s and 70s, when you left the cinema not in need of food and drink, but a sympathetic person to discuss the film with.
– Philip French, The Observer  (London)

HANOI CINEMATHEQUE
Hanoi’s unique ‘art-house cinema’, is a members-only film society.

Memberships are available at the box office for only 200,000VND per year.

Members receive regular emails with detailed schedules and reviews of the films.

Tickets to the films are by donation.

HANOI CINEMATHEQUE 22A Hai Ba Trung Street (at the end of the alley leading to Artist’s Hotel) RESERVATIONS: Tel: 936 2648 (14:00 - 20:00) Fax: 936 2649 Email: info2@hanoicinema.org CAFE CINEMATHEQUE from 17:00 weekdays and from 13:30 weekends.