In 1963 Paris, 13-year-old Anne is a listless student, largely unconcerned with grades—or the Cold War anxiety hovering over daily life. She lives with her divorcée mother and increasingly politically aware older sister Frédérique, and wants most of all to wear stockings, sit in cafés, and spy on her sister. Diane Kurys’ tenderly crafted, autobiographical directorial debut is by turns sweet and solemn, delicately honing in on the quiet loneliness of trying to find oneself in the early years of teenagehood.
Tag: FRANCE
After her grandmother’s death, Marta inherits a diary that takes her on an emotional journey into her family’s past. Through its heartfelt pages, she is drawn into a long flashback where memories resurface, until the diary finally reveals the dark secret her grandmother carried in silence for a lifetime.
A bored bisexual millionaire picks up a young destitute street artist and whisks her away to her villa in Saint Tropez. They meet a dashing local architect and both fall for him, setting in motion a ménage à trois of deception and betrayal.
Teenage siblings Nenette and Boni were raised apart as a result of their parents’ divorce. Their mother, who doted on her son Boni, has died. He works for an interesting couple as a pizza baker, and is surprised and enraged when his younger sister, having run away from boarding school, suddenly turns up. There’s a problem that they must confront.
Édourd Berlon lives care-freely, collecting lovers until he meets Hélène Laroche, a married woman. Despite their different worlds-his simplicity, her luxury-they run away together. Can their love survive their differences?
Louise lives alone and seems to like it that way. She has been through a divorce and the recent death of her mother. Recently, she has moved to Annecy, a moderate-sized city, to take work as a schoolteacher. She encounters a much younger man, Luigi, an Italian who is down on his luck. Though he moved to France to find work, he was robbed of his money and papers and is stranded. When he helps her bury her dogs, which her neighbour has poisoned for barking, their relationship grows to a new level.
Louis Trebor, a man nearing 70, lives alone with dogs in the forest near the French-Swiss border. He has heart problems, seeks a transplant, and then goes in search of a son sired years before in Tahiti. Told elliptically, with few words, we see Louis as possibly heartless, ignoring a son who lives nearby who is himself an attentive father to two young children, one named for Louis. He leaves his bed one night – and his lover – to kill an intruder; he dreams, usually of violence. Will his body accept his heart? Will his son accept his offer?
In her second feature (and her first solo feature), the multidisciplinary artist Niki de Saint Phalle pursues her own take on the fairy tale, and the result is a visionary exploration of female desire that unfurls according to the logic of dreams and poetry. The film follows a princess (played by Saint Phalle’s daughter, Laura Duke Condominas) who, following a series of encounters with fantastical beings, is magically transformed into an adult, and finds herself navigating a frightening and surreal new world. A work suffused with ideas and strong ties to Saint Phalle’s work in other media (sculpture, painting, assemblage, etc.), Un rêve plus long que la nuit is both an exemplary artist’s film and an underseen gem of 1970s French avant-garde cinema.