Laurent is a poster designer who is about to begin rehearsals for his first stage play, a musical comedy. To celebrate this auspicious event, he holds a party at his apartment, to which his best friends are all invited. News that the lead actress in Laurent’s play has been run over by a bus laden with Dutch tourists puts a damper on the evening, but Laurent wastes no time looking for a replacement, not knowing that his girlfriend Valérie covets the part. As Valérie’s dreams of stardom are crushed she realises that her relationship with Laurent is over – or so she thinks. Either way, the evening will prove decisive for them both.
Tag: FRANCE
Beautiful housekeeper Babette travels to England after the Nazis invade her home country of France. There, the British intelligence officers devise a plan for Babette to sneak back into France, where she could use her feminine charm on key Nazi officer Schulz, gleaning valuable information for England. However, Babette, although willing and spirited, is naïve and untrained, making her less than ideal for matters of national security.
In 1963, 22-year-old Bertrand Blier invited 11 of his peers to come to a film studio and talk about their lives. The record of what was said, Hitler? Connais pas!, is a discussion of values that remains relevant and fascinating today. The footage was shot just five years prior to May 1968, and the atmosphere of that time is clearly discernible: these young people may not yet be revolutionaries, but there is clearly a ferment in the air.
Magda is the unwed daughter of a white South African farmer. Spending much of her time looking after her father, Magda leads an uneventful and isolated life, largely avoiding other people. However, that changes when Magda discovers that her father has been having an affair with one of the farm’s African workers. Unable to handle the revelation that her dad has a mistress, Magda takes surprisingly drastic and violent action.
In Paris, a gold smuggler is at war with other local gangsters who want piece of the action. Then the mob shows up and makes things worse. Also, an undercover US Treasury Department agent is trying to infiltrate the smuggler’s business.
Jacques Arnaud arrives in a small town somewhere in the province. Soon a citizen reports to him that strangers have broken into his house where they stole a mysterious “black dossier”.
In 1978, Ruiz was commissioned to make a television documentary about the French elections from the viewpoint of a Chilean exile in the 11th arrondissement. But, contrary to the producers’ expectation, the Left lost. Ruiz seized on this anti-climax to make a documentary about nothing except itself – a film whose central subject is forever lost in digression and ‘dispersal’, harking back to his Chilean experiments of the ’60s. It is the best, and certainly the funniest, of self-reflexive deconstructions of the documentary form. Ruiz drolly exaggerates every hare-brained convention of TV reportage, from shot/reverse shot ‘suture’ and talking-head experts to establishing shots and vox pops (narrator’s note to himself: “Include street interviews ad absurdum”.)