Casts & Crew
Also Directed by Pierre Léon
Balibar, well-known as an actress and singer, left none of her talents unused in her directing debut. In this eclectic homage to Greek tragedy, Balibar and Léon are free of any convention. With a cameo by Barbet Schroeder.
Elegantly and carefully, Léon trains his sights both on Chekhov’s famous play written in 1896 and on its earlier, lesser known version entitled "The Wood Demon" (1889), combining the two.
Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield suddenly decide to abandon their suffocating universe. They embark on a trip around the world in search of an impossible sanctity.
Léon returns to Dostoevsky to film an episode from The Idiot, starring Jeanne Balibar as the femme fatale Nastassia Philippovna, who finds herself juggling the affections of four men over the course of a single evening. One is her benefactor, the bourgeois Totsky (film historian Bernard Eisenschitz). Another is the opportunistic Ganya (Serge Bozon), whom Totsky has promised 75,000 rubles if he will marry Nastassia. Enter Rogozhin, who offers Nastassia 100,000 rubles for her hand. And of course, the “idiot,” Prince Myshkin, who loves Nastassia madly and vows to “save” her. Shot in elegant black-and-white with a peerless cast, The Idiot distills the power of Dostoevsky’s great novel into a singular hour of cinema.
Something takes us underground, where gods and monsters are active, amid the ruins of a world they move around with their innumerable hands. Inspired by Fritz Lang and Richard Wagner, Remains is a daydream.
Two film directors and a writer are in Portugal for an expedition through various images, moments from the history of Western allegorical representation. The writer is Jean-Louis Schefer, and this tale encapsulates his life’s mission.
Five extraterrestrials like no other are enjoying their last moments on planet Earth. Only one will stay to keep the secrets.
Léon uses images from Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible to reflect upon the 2010 beating of young cineaste Joachim Gatti by police and the economically vulnerable members of French society. - Film Society of Lincoln Center
