Love at Twenty
Love at Twenty unites five directors from five different countries to present their different perspectives on what love really is at the age of 20. The episodes are united with the score of Georges Delerue and still photos of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
François Truffaut
François Truffaut
Andrzej Wajda
Marcel Ophüls
Marcel Ophüls
Shintarô Ishihara
Shintarô Ishihara
Renzo Rossellini
Renzo Rossellini
Jerzy Stefan Stawiński
Yvon Samuel
Casts & Crew
Jean-Pierre Léaud
Marie-France Pisier
Patrick Auffay
Rosy Varte
François Darbon
Jean-François Adam
Pierre Schaeffer
Cristina Gaïoni
Geronimo Meynier
Eleonora Rossi Drago
Nami Tamura
Koji Furuhata
Barbara Frey
Christian Doermer
Barbara Lass
Zbigniew Cybulski
Władysław Kowalski
Damian Damięcki
Jan Englert
Marian Opania
Barbara Sołtysik
Jolanta Wołłejko
Catherine-Isabelle Duport
Also Directed by François Truffaut
Madame Jouve, the narrator, tells the tragedy of Bernard and Mathilde. Bernard was living happily with his wife Arlette and his son Thomas. One day, a couple, Philippe and Mathilde Bauchard, moves into the next house. This is the accidental reunion of Bernard and Mathilde, who had a passionate love affair years ago. The relationship revives... A somber study of human feelings.
Now aged 17, Antoine Doinel works in a factory which makes records. At a music concert, he meets a girl his own age, Colette, and falls in love with her. Later, Antoine goes to extraordinary lengths to please his new girlfriend and her parents, but Colette still only regards him as a casual friend. First segment of “Love at Twenty” (1962).
Adèle Hugo, daughter of renowned French writer Victor Hugo, falls in love with British soldier Albert Pinson while living in exile off the coast of England. Though he spurns her affections, she follows him to Nova Scotia and takes on the alias of Adèle Lewly. Albert continues to reject her, but she remains obsessive in her quest to win him over.
In the future, the government maintains control of public opinion by outlawing literature and maintaining a group of enforcers, known as “firemen,” to perform the necessary book burnings. Fireman Montag begins to question the morality of his vocation…
Various experiences of childhood are seen in several sequences that take place in the small town of Thiers, France. Vignettes include a boy's awakening interest in girls, couples double-dating at the movies, brothers giving their friend a haircut, a boy dealing with an abusive home life, a baby and a cat sitting by an open window, a child telling a dirty joke, and a boy who develops a crush on his friend's mother.
A timid and clumsy young man is looking for a room through newspaper ads. A young lady answers his phone call. When he arrives to the apartment with his suitcase, he finds the young lady in the company of a baby girl entrusted to her by her brother. Soon, another young man arrives wearing trendy sunglasses and with a bold behavior which contrasts with the shy demeanor of the first one. They each try to entice the young lady. One maneuver tried by the bold guy is the cigarette/steam locomotive trick later to be seen in Jules et Jim. The shy young man tries his luck again, but finally they both give up. Together they leave the apartment and the young lady who is shown both relieved and disappointed. This short film was disowned by Truffaut, but it can be considered a prelude to the "love trio" theme found in several later films by Truffaut. (IMDB)
Based on the Henry James short story "The Altar of the Dead", in which a man becomes obsessed with the many dead people in his life and builds a memorial to honor them. This film is also based on other short story by Henry James, "The Beast of the Jungle". It would be the last film Truffaut would act in.
For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.
Beginning with "The 400 Blows," director Francois Truffaut made a series of films about the impetuous Antoine Doinel, in which this is the last. Antoine is now 30, working as a proofreader and getting divorced from his his wife. It being the first "no-fault" divorce in France, a media circus erupts, dredging up Antoine's past. Indecisive about his new love with a store clerk, he impulsively takes off with an old flame.
Charlie is a former classical pianist who has changed his name and now plays jazz in a grimy Paris bar. When Charlie's brothers, Richard and Chico, surface and ask for Charlie's help while on the run from gangsters they have scammed, he aids their escape. Soon Charlie and Lena, a waitress at the same bar, face trouble when the gangsters arrive, looking for his brothers.
Also Directed by Andrzej Wajda
As an aging woman married to a workaholic doctor by chance meets a young man who makes her feel young again. All of this is films by a director making a film about her which cuts in and out of the on camera and off camera drama.
Danton and Robespierre were close friends and fought together in the French Revolution, but by 1793 Robespierre was France's ruler, determined to wipe out opposition with a series of mass executions that became known as the Reign of Terror. Danton, well known as a spokesman of the people, had been living in relative solitude in the French countryside, but he returned to Paris to challenge Robespierre's violent rule and call for the people to demand their rights. Robespierre, however, could not accept such a challenge, even from a friend and colleague, and he blocked out a plan for the capture and execution of Danton and his allies.
In what might be termed Russo-Shakespearean noir, a ruthless woman's adulterous affair with a drifter sets in motion a chain-reaction of murder and deception in a remote village in 19th Century Mtsensk.
Based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem (Solaris). The main character, race car driver Ryszrd Fox, is involved in many car accidents. After each car crash he gets a transplant for one or another internal organ. After a while there is a question: Who really is Ryszard Fox?
In 1988, the Figaro magazine asked to a few famous directors a series of short movies, to celebrate the 10 years of the revue. The thematic : The French seen by - The movies have been released for the French revolution bicentenary. Werner Herzog - Les Gaulois David Lynch - The Cowboy and the Frenchman Andrzej Wajda - Proust contre la déchéance Luigi Comencini - Pèlerinage à Agen Jean-Luc Godard - Le dernier mot
A segment of “Love at Twenty” tells the story of a man who rescued a child from a polar bear attack.
A grand and patriotic tale of Poland's struggle for freedom just before Napoleon's war with Russia. Written in poetic style by Adam Mickiewicz, this story follows two feuding Polish families as they overcome their old conflicts and petty lives. However, they are able to unite as one with their patriotic and rebellious efforts to free the country they deeply love from Russian control.
no movie overview
Also Directed by Marcel Ophüls
Marcel Ophüls interviews various important Eastern European figures for their thoughts on the reunification of Germany and the fall of Communism.
We follow Marcel Ophuls' two journeys to Sarajevo in 1993. He is starting a documentary about war correspondants. But this also becomes a reflexion about truth and life. The form consists in many interviews of mostly French and American journalists and reporters of television or newspapers.
Winner of a Best Documentary Academy Award, Marcel Ophuls' riveting film details the heinous legacy of the Gestapo head dubbed "The Butcher of Lyon." Responsible for over 4,000 deaths in occupied France during World War II, Barbie would escape--with U.S. help--to South America in 1951, where he lived until a global manhunt led to his 1983 arrest and subsequent trial.
A famous American secret service agent tries to rescue a German 17 year old prodigy scientist who has been captured by the Russians.
From his childhood in the lowlands of northern France to his death in Nice, a look at the life of painter Matisse: his early education, his apprenticeship at the Beaux-Arts and his decades-long career as a painter, sculptor, and draftsman.
Television film
Commissioned by French TV, Yorktown covers the bicentennial commemoration of the Siege of Yorktown, near the end of the American Revolutionary War, where the Americans and their French allies defeated the English. The festivities celebrating Franco-American friendship give Ophüls some amusement, as he takes a gleefully ironic look at the formally “friendly” meeting between Mitterand and Reagan, or exposes the absurdity of patriotic folklore.
Also Directed by Shintarô Ishihara
A segment of “Love at Twenty” is a weird, grotesque and clumsy tale of obsessive and morbid love.
Also Directed by Renzo Rossellini
A segment of "Love at Twenty" tells the story of a tough mistress who loses her lover to an older, wealthier and more-appreciative woman.
In the 1960s, increasingly concerned with cinema's functions as an artistic and educational tool, Rosselini removed himself from the commercial arena and became the first major director to embrace the new medium of TV. Holding that the camera has the opportunity and duty to impart knowledge, he devoted his creative energies to TV films on science and history: The five-hour "The Age of Iron" (1964), "The 12-hour "Man's Struggle for Survival" (1967); "The 6-hour "The Acts of the Apostles" (1968), as well as biographies of Socrates, Blaise Pascal, Augustine of Hipp, Descartes, Jesus, and Louis XIV. Of these, only "The Rise of Louis XIV" (1966) received its due acclaim, mostly because it is one of the few films to get theatrical release. Stylistically, the TV work established the foundation for materialist cinema, the direct descendant of Neorealism.
A film by Renzo and Roberto Rossellini.