Reluctantly, a sulky adolescent returns to her parents’ house for yet another boring summer vacation, dabbling in desire and the art of desirability, eventually mixing reality with vision, caged fantasies with the fierce female sexuality.
Tag: FRANCE
In 1935, at the age of 13, Simon Chalumot is enrolled in a military school by his father. His reluctance to become a soldier is apparent to all and he is bullied and abused by the military staff and his fellow pupils. At 15, he runs away, but is captured and returned to the school by his father, a patriotic veteran of the last war. Soon after, Chalumot graduates to a higher military school, but now the bullying is so brutal that he can take no more…
Jean-Claude Lauzon’s highly praised film tells the strange story of Léolo, a young boy from Montréal. Told from Léolo’s point-of-view, the film depicts his family of lunatics and Léolo’s attempts to deal with them. Not one individual in the boy’s life is well adjusted. His brother, after being beaten up, spends the film bulking up on growth protein. The grandfather hires half-naked girls to bite off his toenails and, in a brutal rage, almost kills Léolo. As he witnesses his family decay around him, Léolo retreats into himself and the fantasy world he has constructed. In response to the weirdness of his daily life, Léolo creates a little mental mayhem of his own which Lauzon renders in an amazing series of free-form, surreal images.
A “cyclo” is a bicycle-drawn taxi similar to a rickshaw, and, in this story, the nickname of an 18-year-old boy trying to scrape together a living in the desperate poverty of Ho Chi Mihn City. Cyclo lives with his grandfather and two sisters, and drives his taxi for a bitter woman who devotes most of her time to her mentally unstable son. When the pedal-cab is stolen, Cyclo is forced into a life of crime to repay the debt and falls in with a group of petty thugs led by a self-styled poet. What Cyclo doesn’t know at first is that the poet is also a pimp, and he’s been using his romantic wiles to lure Cyclo’s older sister into a career as a prostitute.
In April, 1975, civil war breaks out; Beirut is partitioned along a Moslem-Christian line. Tarek is in high school, making Super 8 movies with his friend, Omar. At first the war is a lark: school has closed, the violence is fascinating, getting from West to East is a game. His mother wants to leave; his father refuses. Tarek spends time with May, a Christian, orphaned and living in his building. By accident, Tarek goes to an infamous brothel in the war-torn Olive Quarter, meeting its legendary madam, Oum Walid. He then takes Omar and May there using her underwear as a white flag for safe passage. Family tensions rise. As he comes of age, the war moves inexorably from adventure to tragedy.
Bob is an aging thief who has seen better days and is battling both an addiction to heroin and a growing gambling problem. But he still thinks he has one more big score in him and plots a massive heist of a Monte Carlo casino. In order to pull off the theft, he’ll need an amazing team of accomplices and will have to outwit his nemesis, the local police chief. The chief knows that Bob is up to something, but can he figure it out before Bob makes off with millions?
Originating from the filmmaker’s childhood confusion over an English expression regarding sex, Marie Paccou’s 1998 animation is the absurd, yet emotive tale of a woman who wakes one day to find a small man growing out of her abdomen. Telling her surreal story through sketchy black-and-white animation, complemented by a philosophical voiceover, at the center of Un Jour is a thought-provoking metaphor that is bound to provoke many different readings.