From 9th September – 15th September

Mia Hansen-Løve wins the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival

French cinema seems better than either the British or the USA industries in bringing on the talents of women filmmakers. And this film which opens this week is a good example. It won the prestigious Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.

The director, Mia Hansen-Løve, is Parisian who has directed several fine films including Father of My Children (Le père de mes enfants 2009), Goodbye First Love (Un amour de jeunesse 2011) and Eden (2014). She writes her own screenplays successfully, something that many young directors would be well advised to avoid. She also has some experience of acting in films, which probably helps her work. And she partners the filmmaker Oliver Assayas, which probably also helps, though they have very distinctive styles and interests.

Starring in the film is one of the outstanding contemporary actresses Isabelle Hubert, a fellow Parisian. She has deservedly received a profile and extended interview in the September issue of Sight & Sound. She was recently seen at the Hyde Park Picture House in Valley of Love (2015). This was not a great film but was worth watching for the performances of Hubert and of her co-star Gérard Depardieu. Both are formidable presences in European cinema, and indeed beyond. My earliest memory of Isabelle Hubert is dashing from NFT Screen I to NFT Screen II to watch The Lacemaker (La dentellière, 1977). It was a great introduction and I have enjoyed every facet of her career since. Not all her films are great, but if she has appeared in a bad movie it is one I have missed.

So reckon a real treat in store and a must to see.

Sunday 14th February – 3.00 PM

A film by Jean-Luc Godard is always an occasion. Readers may not think that he is necessarily one of the cinema greats: but he is certainly one of the most fascinating filmmakers working in World Cinema. This film hails from the 1960s, the period when he delighted, confounded and upset audiences and critics alike. The starry cast, Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance and Michel Piccoli, may suggest a relatively mainstream story, but, as ever, Godard both subverts and innovates.

Importantly the cast also includes the veteran filmmaker Fritz Lang. This is a film about cinema set in the world of filmmaking. Lang is directing a version of The Odyssey. Whilst the film does not literally transpose the plot of Homer’s epic poem, there are intriguing parallels with the triangle at the centre of this film.

The Aegean locations were filmed by the talented Cinematographer Raoul Coutard and they look great. Watch for the beautifully executed tracking shots. There is excellent mise en scène and editing: the latter by Agnès Guillemot   and Lila Lakshmanan. There are a series of exemplary shot / reverse shot that have been much copied, including I would think by Michael Mann in Heat (1995).

The film has been restored and transferred to digital. One would expect it to look good and it has the original 103 minutes running time and the French release soundtrack [with subtitles]. It was filmed in Technicolor and on Franscope, 2.35:1. The last time I saw it I loved the sound and visuals and was fascinated as the cast presented this tragic tale.

Screening on October 18th at 1.30 p.m.

This is an early success from the burgeoning art cinema of the late 1950s. It won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. Set during the Rio de Janeiro Carnival it transposes the classic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice to that setting. The idea of such a mythic tale in one of the most famous and colourful events in Latin America was brilliant. And the film is well served by the fine colour cinematography of Jean Bourgoin. The film opts for a very simple depiction in terms of characters but the excitement of the masquerades, dance and music in the Carnival make it visually and orally compelling. There is though more than a trace of ‘exoticism’ in the representations.

The film is screening in its original format of 35mm, which should do proper justice to the stunning colour palette in which the drama is set. It was filmed in Eastmancolor, which sometimes suffers the ravages of time. Intriguingly for the date it was also filmed in the old Academy ratio, i.e. a nearly square frame. The language is Portuguese, though I think there was also some patois in there: it will have English sub-titles. On its original release in the UK it was certified as an A: now it is PG: ‘mild violence and sex references’ according to the BBFC. Note, two important characters are children and I thought they were very good.

Screening from Saturday June 4th.

Friends familiar with the films of François Ozon, like Jeune & Jolie (2013) or Dans la maison (2012), will expect something  slightly off-key with his new film. Essentially this is a ‘rom-com’ [romantic comedy], but one that is atypical of the genre. Among the pleasures that it offers are wit, and humour but also the unexpected. Moreover, the film is adapted from a novel by Ruth Rendell, a writer who, like Ozon, is able to confound expectations.

The film opens with a family tragedy but then explores the development of a new relationship, one full of ambiguities and ambivalence. The film manages to offer moments of emotion together with frequent and pleasurable surprises: note the UK trailer unfortunately pre-empts one of the best of these.

The lead protagonist is David, played with assurance and a sense of enjoyment by Romain Duris. He is possibly the most gifted and charismatic of the younger French actors, and he is always willing to explore different roles. Opposite him is Claire, played beautifully by Anaïs Demoustier. At times she reminded me irresistibly of the young Isabel Hubert.

I found the film both entertaining and involving.

Directed by Louis Malle, France, 1987
Screening on Sunday 17^th May at 3.30p.m as part of the Friends AGM.

This is in many ways the most personal film of the distinguished French filmmaker Louis Malle. The basic story is taken from experiences in his early years during World War II.

What happened in January 1944 was instrumental in my decision to become a filmmaker. It’s hard to explain, but it was such a shock that it took me several years to get over it, to try and understand it – and, of course, there was no way I could understand it. What happened was so appalling and so fundamentally opposed to the values that we were being taught that I concluded that there was something wrong with the world, and I started becoming very rebellious.

The film is set in a boarding school in occupied France, rather like the one that Malle actually attended. The film develops a narrative depicting a tragic chain of events, but as he recalls, one that was traumatic for the participants as well as the victims.

Malle started out in filmmaking in the 1950s. Even for a noted European director he has worked in unusually wide variety of industries and settings: in France, but also in the UK, in North America and on documentaries made in Asia. Malle comments that he had three great passions: Music, Literature and Film. The role of music in his work is exemplified by the marvellous score improvised by Miles Davis for his first feature, Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l’echafaud, 1957). A good example of the contribution of literature is in the very fine Vanya on 42^nd Street (1994) with its exploration of and homage to Anton Chekhov. Film itself crops up regularly: in today’s feature there is a sequence when the school students watch old movies:

…it was in the following years that they showed films in the school on Sundays, that’s when I saw the first Chaplin shorts. They were projected in this strange format that was rather popular in the late 1930s and 1940w, the 9.5 mm, which had a perforation in the centre – a terrible invention. Chaplin was forbidden during the war by the Germans, not only because he was Jewish but also because he’d made The Great Dictator. But his films, I was told, were still being shown, very discreetly, in schools and cine clubs. It was one of the great memories of my childhood, those Sunday evening, we’d darken the room, there’d be a white sheet, and everyone would sit and watch those films. I chose The Immigrant because, first, it was one of the great ones, and second, it was an evocation of freedom for those Jewish children when they see the Statue of Liberty, America being the Promised Land.

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