ABCs at the Movies: The Doubles Round!

[southendmd]

IMDb user:  This film, a tribute to Dennis Potter (pennies from heaven, the singing detective), is the best french comedy I've ever seen. Basically it's a typical well-made french film about relations, with great acting, set in Paris. But it's more than that: it's also a musical. Here are some reasons why I think it's a great movie. First, the chansons, play-backed by the actors, are brilliant. Imagine a Wehrmachtofficer lipsinging to an Edith-Piaf chanson (in the opening act). The best thing about the chansons, is the fact that they actually support the story, as they serve as moments of reflection and introspection for the players. Maybe it's the contrast between the extreme sentimentality and the 'serious' acting that makes this film so great. Go see it.

[Fran]

Also known as:  The Soft Skin

From IMDb:  The title of the film, "La peau douce" ("The Soft Skin"), is notable for the multiple images and meanings it suggests. Truffaut's fourth feature film is study of the delicate balances of life and the important role that happenstance can play.

The opening sequence sets everything in motion. Pierre is rushed to the Paris airport and very nearly misses his plane for Lisbon. Had he missed that plane, we would not have the particular chain of events that follow. Chance meetings and ironic occurrences are what makes life "happen," and they can disrupt the delicate surface (the "soft skin") of what looks like a complacent, bourgeois existence.

Apart from having a roving eye, Pierre Lachenay is a pretty harmless figure. He has achieved a degree of success in the literary field as an editor and scholar (not a risk-taking creator, but one who safely appreciates the creativity of others such as Balzac or Gide). With everything seemingly under control in his life, he is unable to resist the compulsion to pursue the flight attendant. Apart from her physical appeal, Nicole offers Pierre a different angle on life: non-intellectual and romantic. The film does not condemn Pierre for his dalliance. By using Jean Desailly for the lead, Truffaut allows us to see him as an "Everyman." This could happen to anybody. Nicole, for her part, is attracted to Pierre's intellect and the way he brings out her own natural intelligence. This dynamic is central; the characters complement each other. Casting a handsome actor like Alain Delon would have destroyed this effect.

What is interesting to watch in this film is the way Pierre's life gradually self-destructs. He is fully aware of what he is doing, and Desailly is adept at conveying the protagonist's ambivalence. He does not really want to give up his home life for Nicole, yet he is drawn by her enough to continue an affair that will lead to annihilation. A finely drawn portrait of middle-class life is given to us in this film. We are allowed to see the way someone can be busy enough (in this case with travelling) not to take the trouble to observe how complacent his life really is. And the disrupting effect of his affair on the delicate surface of his life is devastating. It is hard not to be sympathetic when Nicole leaves him -- now he has no one.

[memento]

aka À bout de souffle



Plot: Michel Poiccard, an irresponsible sociopath and small-time thief, steals a car and impulsively murders the motorcycle policeman who pursues him. Now wanted by the authorities, he renews his relationship with Patricia Franchini, a hip American girl studying journalism at the Sorbonne, whom he had met in Nice a few weeks earlier. Before leaving Paris, he plans to collect a debt from an underworld acquaintance and expects her to accompany him on his planned getaway to Italy. Even with his face in the local papers and media, Poiccard seems oblivious to the dragnet that is slowly closing around him as he recklessly pursues his love of American movies and libidinous interest in the beautiful American. 

[southendmd]

IMDb user"  As everyone in America retreats to their suburban mansions and the computer screens, it is a great experience to go out to the movies and see a film of real social import. If you love history and art, like I do, you certainly do not want to miss this film. The brutal effects of Nazi destruction never goes away, it keeps on coming, like a nightmare from the 20th century that we are all dreaming about. This film demonstrates the innate power of art. It shows, through a deep examination of the looting of Europe's treasures, what these works really meant to the countries who had them. And it reveals the utterly strange connection between the life of Hitler, failed art student, and the hellish destruction he unleashed on the world. In this season of filmic dreck at the mall, this strong documentary is definitely worth seeking out. 

I just saw this film last week--unbelievably powerful.  The scenes of workers frantically packing up the thousands of treasures in the Louvre in Paris, also the senseless destruction of the bridges and medieval treasures of Florence; it's truly heartbreaking.

[Lynne]

Savior is a 1998 war film starring Dennis Quaid, Stellan Skarsgård, Nastassja Kinski, and Nataša Ninković. It is about an American mercenary escorting a Serbian woman and her newborn child to a United Nations safe zone during the Bosnian War.

Dennis Quaid is Guy, a former French Foreign Legionnaire who has become a volunteer for a Bosnian Serb Army. Before joining the French Foreign Legion, he was Joshua Rose, a U.S. Marine on embassy duty in Paris. His wife (Nastassja Kinski) and son are killed in a bombing by an Islamic terrorist. In a fit of revenge he storms into a mosque and shoots some of the worshippers. In order to avoid arrest, he and his friend Peter (Stellan Skarsgård) join the Foreign Legion. They soon tire of the boredom of peacekeeping and leave the Legion to become mercenaries.

[Fran]

From IMDb:  Oklahoma mechanic Pike Peters finds himself part owner of an oil field. His wife Idy, hitherto content, decides the family must go to Paris to get "culture" and meet "the right kind of people."

Also from IMDb:  This film features Will Rogers in his first talkie. It's an OK effort, but the camera is stodgy and most of the characters are two-dimensional. Great exteriors, good oil-strike scene, followed by the usual "innocents abroad" situations. Marguerite Churchill is a knock-out as Will's daughter.

[memento]

Plot: The story is told mainly in the present tense and also in retrospective interview clips including several by the protagonist many years later. Our hero is first shown inventing stories as a French boy in a small town between WW1 and WW2. As a young man he meets a local girl, marries her and is employed by her father. On the liberation of France he runs away to Paris where chance encounters lead to his learning important lessons in begging, sex and employment as means of survival. Following the end of the war in France he deliberately inveigles himself into Resistance circles, copies the speech and knowledge of genuine veterans and is eventually regarded as a hero. His contacts and apparent experience result in his being sent to occupied Germany as a military observer. Here he is coincidentally forced to order the summary execution of several French defectors to the SS following which he confesses his lies. He is jailed for a short period of time on an unrelated charge following which he is rehabilitated to become an international political success.

[southendmd]

Plot:  In 1980 the black Falashas in Ethiopia are recognised as genuine Jews. In turn they are secretly carried to Israel. The day before the transport the son of a Jewish mother dies. In his place and with his name (Schlomo) she takes a Christian 9-year-old boy. Upon arrival this second mother dies. Schlomo is adopted by a good family but remains depressed until he secretly sends a letter to his real mother. From the beginning he experiences large and small racist difficulties. In his teens he and Sarah fall in love. Her father is an extreme racist. Schlomo tries to gain "real Jewishness" by winning a competition in Bible interpretation. No change of Sarah's father's attitude. Disappointed he goes to the police and reports himself as not being a Jew. But the police officer just gives him a scolding. "The newspapers are full of that stuff, the Falashas are no Jews. Now they begin to believe it themselves." His adoptive parents send him to France to study medicine. When he afterwards marries Sarah she loses her family and her status as a "white Jew". But he dares not tell her the truth until she becomes pregnant. She leaves him, but only because he had not trusted that she would love him as much anyway. His adoptive mother reconciles them. Sarah's first line when she returns: "Unbelievable what three mothers would do for you." But she makes a condition for returning: Schlomo must meet his real mother again. As a doctor he takes a job in the Ethiopian fugitive camp where she is still alive.

Filmed in Israel and Paris

[Fran]

From IMDb:  Harry and Inez are a dance team at the Wonder Bar. Inez loves Harry, but he is in love with Liane, the wife of a wealthy business man. Al Wonder and the conductor/singer Tommy are in love with Inez. When Inez finds out, that Harry wants to leave Paris and is going to the USA with Liane she kills him.

[memento]

This film is an excellent example of a revenge thriller which follows Julie Kohler, the bride of the title, as she exacts revenge on those responsible for her husband's death on their wedding day. We aren't immediately told what happened to make her want to kill the men concerned but learn throughout the film.

When we are first introduced to Julie Kohler we see her attempting to throw herself from a window but this suicide attempt is prevented and soon she says that she is going away. She boards a train bound for Paris but promptly gets off on the other side and walks over the tracks to the other platform. She then seeks out a man who she only knows by name and lures him to a balcony during a party she has gatecrashed. After tricking him into climbing over the rail to retrieve a scarf she has "accidentally" dropped she says her name and no more then pushes him to his death. As she proceeds through her list of targets we learn why she wants to kill them and how the people who seemingly have no connection came to kill her husband.

The film is fairly gripping and well acted, especially by Jeanne Moreau in the title role. It does have one or two plot holes, the main one being how did she learn who was responsible for her husband's death when the police hadn't found any of them. That can be forgiven though, I think as spending time on that would have detracted from the main story.