A two-part collection of mostly European T.V. commercials directed by a variety of well-known directors from across Europe and the U.S. Compiled and produced by Jean-Marie Boursicot.
Tag: FRANCE
This melodrama has Thelma and Jess, two Americans who move into a down-at-the-heels Paris neighborhood. The couple is still suffering from the loss of their only son in an automobile accident that happened some time in the distant past. Thelma tends to drown her sorrows in alcohol, while Jess is introspected and morose. After they hire a maid to help out with the housework, she falls for the taciturn Jess. Her interest seems to be only a simple attraction, yet appearances, as it turns out, are deceiving.
In a routine look at what it means to finally leave adolescence behind — even in one’s mature years — this series of mood swings and sequences focuses on two grown men. Francois and Leo are old friends, and at one point they decide to go out and search for one of their childhood buddies, the brunt of several of their practical jokes. In true form, the men opt for playing yet another practical joke on their friend, but their plans backfire when his wife Helene comes into the picture instead. Her presence forces them to reconsider their shenanigans in a new light.
Volpone, an elderly Venetian, connives with his money-crazed servant to convince his greedy friends that he is dying, knowing that each will try to curry favor with him in order to be named his heir. He is inundated with valuable gifts, and soon finds himself entangled deeper and deeper in a web of lies.
Charming con-artist Charlotte is suspected of murder when her boyfriend is found dead in her apartment. She flees to her former lover and despite the fact that he is living with his fiance, he succumbs to her charms and joins her in a wild romp across the French countryside to Spain.
A Greek-American filmmaker, known simply as «A», returns to his hometown in northern Greece for a screening of his latest controversial film. His real reason for coming back, however, is to track down three long-missing reels of film by Greece’s pioneering Manakia brothers who in the early years of cinema traveled through the Balkans, ignoring national and ethnic strife and recording ordinary people, especially craftsmen, on film. Their images, he believes, hold the key to lost innocence and essential truth, to an understanding of Balkan history.
——UPGRADED——
In the winter of 1943 two young Jews, Alek and Fryda, escape, via sewer tunnels, from the atrocities underway in Warsaw ghetto. Alek, entrusted with undeveloped photos of the horrors within, makes his way to a supposedly safe apartment only to find it occupied by Germans. Another tenant, a pole Stephania, abruptly offers to shelter him in her spacious apartment. She comforts him and they make love that very night. Stefania is uncommonly generous and willing to jeopardize her own safety by hiding a Jew. She even goes to a nearby church and rescues Fryda. But Fryda is ungrateful and proceeds to sabotage the trio’s safety in insidious ways.
Miéville’s first solo feature is a sensitive, emotionally complex portrait of three women: a young opera singer contemplating having a child; her mother, who is torn between two lovers; and her grandmother, who lives a life of solitude. As in so many of Miéville’s films, communication is the theme; each woman must struggle, often against the men in their lives, to find her own voice.