Amiel per la Pelle (Friends for Life) is largely told from a child’s-eye point of view. The heroes of the piece are Mario and Franco, young classmates and inseparable buddies. After several “Our Gang”-style adventures, the boys’ friendship is threatened when Mario reveals a secret that Franco confided in him.
Tag: FRANCE
Between eleven o’clock and midnight one evening, a notorious trafficker Jérôme Vidauban is shot whilst walking in a subway in Paris. The case is assigned to Inspector Carrel, who is Vidauban’s perfect double. Using his resemblance to the arch criminal, Carrel manages to infiltrate in Vidauban’s circle of acquaintances and contacts. He becomes embroiled in a bizarre web of intrigue and discovers no shortage of possible murder suspects, all of whom appear to be surprised to see him still alive.
Danielle Darrieux plays an impoverished reform-school escapee who finds a new lease on life when she enrolls in a school for pickpockets run by Fagin-like Saturnin-Fabre. Before long, Darrieux is the school’s prize pupil, though she intends to abandon her life of crime should the right man come along. But Saturnin-Fabre has other ideas, and grooms Darrieux for her entree into High Society, the better to divest foreign ambassador Andre Luguet of his valuables..
Matty is an actor whose career is on the fast track; however, he’s not able to handle the pressures of life in Hollywood, so he heads to Miami to recharge his emotional batteries. Given Miami’s night life, this might not have been the wisest choice he could have made, as he’s soon sunk deep in a sea of drink and drugs.
Léon, a humble civil servant, has the unusual ability to walk through walls, however thick they are. One day, he falls madly in love with a charming hotel thief by the name of Suzan. In order to impress her he poses as Garou-Garou, a dangerous gangster. Mistaken for him, he is arrested and sent to jail but he, of course, leaves his cell (and comes back to it) just as he likes, infuriating the prison warden. But, despite this wonderful gift, he remains shy in the presence of Suzan.
In 1971, Jean Eustache films his grandmother Odette Robert. She tells him about her life: her unhappy youth, her marriage with a man who likes women, the death of her parents, of her children. She speaks about her tragedies, her life of humiliation and servitude, with a calm, almost neutral voice. In the same way she admits that “it doesn’t interest her to live”. Filmed in black and white, in a few steady shots and in a continuous way, this document is the real and moving testimony of the life of a woman of the beginning of the century.
Dedee is a prostitute, working in Monsieur Rene’s night club on Antwerp’s harbour. The porter is Marco, her pimp. Dedee is not happy, until she meets Francesco, an italian sailorman. They fall in love and Dedee begins to dream about an escape of her daily dullness.
Two segments. The first one arranges six stories from Cesare Pavese’s “Dialoghi con Leucò”, taken from classical mythology. The second segment is taken from Pavese’s novel “La luna e i falò”: after WWII the emigrant ‘The Bastard’ comes back to his village in the Langhe (northern Italy) to find that everyone he knew has died and the war has deeply changed relationships between people.