Benoît Jacquot
A a woman crushed by a loveless marriage in the 1960s is forced to choose between accepting life as it is or choosing a more carefree existence with her younger lover.
London, 18th century. Casanova, famous for his taste for pleasure and gambling, arrives from Paris, forced into exile. In this city he knows nothing about, the libertine meets on several occasions a young prostitute, Marianne de Charpillon. She attracts him to the point he starts disregarding all other women. The legendary seducer is ready to do anything to get her, but la Charpillon always escapes under various excuses. She challenges Casanova: “You will only have me if you stop desiring me!”
In Benoît Jacquot’s production, Manet’s Olympia dominates the stage of the Opéra Bastille. In 1863, the painting caused a scandal: the prostitute awaits her client, her expression proud, her demeanour assured. Is this Violetta? Like Olympia, Verdi’s most celebrated heroine surrenders to the spectator just as she surrenders to love, going so far as to die on stage, a woman’s ultimate sacrifice for her lover. Or might it be the spectator who strips her bare and intrudes upon her privacy, in the image of this milieu of social voyeurism? Whatever the case, these two women regard us with defiance and subjugate those who cannot help but look at them.
In the 28th century, Valerian and Laureline are special operatives charged with keeping order throughout the human territories. On assignment from the Minister of Defense, the two undertake a mission to Alpha, an ever-expanding metropolis where species from across the universe have converged over centuries to share knowledge, intelligence, and cultures. At the center of Alpha is a mysterious dark force which threatens the peaceful existence of the City of a Thousand Planets, and Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.
A tale by Pierre Rissient: How I became a cinema lover in France and in the USA.
Laura is living on a lonely coast, in a rambling rented house, where she encounters a strange, ageless man, a man with uncanny knowledge of her own life. Together they begin a journey into the wilderness of time, love and human perception.
Werther loves Charlotte, but she promised her mother on her deathbed that she would marry Albert. After the marriage Charlotte suggests that Werther should travel – but not forget her. Benoît Jacquot’s production of Massenet’s tragic opera explores the conflict between duty and our most passionate desires.
France, around 1900. Coming from the vibrancy of Paris, pert Célestine is procured as a chambermaid in Normandy. In the Lanlaire's villa she encounters the lecherous man of the house and his asexual, tyrannical and jealous wife. Célestine is determined to avoid the fate suffered by the cook Marianne who has already secretly killed one child born out of wedlock and now despairingly realises she is pregnant again. The lively maid is intrigued by what the mysterious manservant Joseph is up to: he distributes anti-Semitic leaflets and suggests that she could work for him as a prostitute in Cherbourg…
Xavier is a 40-year-old father of two who still finds life very complicated. When the mother of his children moves to New York, he can't bear them growing up far away from him and so he decides to move there as well.
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
A look at the relationship between Marie Antoinette and one of her readers during the final days of the French Revolution.
A wanderer named Timothee (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) arrives in a French village in 1865 pretending to be deaf and mute. He uses tricks to hypnotize a beautiful young woman named Josephine (Isild Le Besco) and takes advantage of her until he is arrested and tried for his crimes.
Werther loves Charlotte, but she promised her mother on her deathbed that she would marry Albert. After the marriage Charlotte suggests that Werther should travel - but not forget her. In addition to the singing and orchestral accompaniment, the entire cast acts very convincingly. And, there's no backstage mugging, entrances and spoken nonsense to spoil the experience of the drama.
The plot revolves around Bernard – a schoolfriend of Olivier's who is preparing for his bac – discovering he is a bastard and taking this as a welcome pretext for running away from home. He spends a night in Olivier's bed (where Olivier describes a recent visit to a prostitute and how he did not find the experience very enjoyable). After Bernard steals the suitcase belonging to Edouard, Olivier's uncle, and the ensuing complications, he is made Edouard's secretary. Olivier is jealous and ends up in the hands of the cynical and downright diabolical Comte de Passavant, who travels with him to the Mediterranean.
Ann leaves Thomas and everything else behind when she catches him kissing another woman. With her music and help from Georges, she begins a journey to find herself.
After learning from her mother that her father lives in India, a young woman goes there to meet him for the first time.
The story of Napoleon Bonaparte's grandniece, the famous Princess Marie, her friendship and her work with Sigmund Freud.
In the nineteenth century, Adolphe, a young man of twenty four carefree years, plans to obtain favors Ellenore, a beautiful woman of thirty years, much more vulnerable. This yields to his advances and he disclaims all. But already, Adolphe loves less. Yet the idea of the pain is unbearable.
A young woman disguises herself as a knight to expose a gold-digging man divided between her and a Countess.
A businessman convicted of a white-collar crime becomes a changed person upon his release from prison.
In Paris, Dominique, a middle-aged fashion professional, solicits the services of the handsome Quentin , a bisexual bartender and prostitute who is 15 years her junior. After they first sleep together, their business transaction becomes transformed into a passionate love affair. However, the couple's romance becomes an ugly power struggle when social class and age distinctions begin to bubble toward the surface.
In the aristocratic society of the seventeenth century, the fate of Marianne child who survived the deadly attack on a convoy.
A bored, sexually frustrated woman's life improves when she begins hypnotherapy and tries feng shui, but her husband's life unravels.
A young Parisian must make major decisions about pregnancy, a job and her boyfriend.
Marguerite Duras tells the story of the death of a young English aviator in a French village.
When Duras saw 'La mort du jeune aviateur anglais', she told Benoît Jacquot that the film was about him, not her. "She treated me like a thief. So I offered to make another film, where she could say whatever she wanted about her life as a writer. That’s how we did Écrire. I brought the same film crew. We went to her house at Neauphle-le-Château and we set up in the room she called 'the music room,' where there was a piano and you could listen to records. She settled in and for two days of non-stop filming, she talked."
A worldly French teen is determined to escape from her current situation for a better life.
Philippe Garrel’s documentary on France’s second wave of masterful filmmakers. Featuring Jean Eustache, Chantal Akerman, André Téchiné, Leos Carax, Jacques Doillon and Benoit Jacquot.
This symbolic drama from director Benoit Jacques underscores the characters' human need for affection. Children steal lemons for the thrill, while women steal other women's men from them just to prove they can. Drug smuggling, clandestine love affairs, and two lovers involved with the production of Shakespeare's Othello carry on with their own off-stage tragedy.
A 20th-century prostitute (Dominique Sanda) arranges for her lover (Michele Placido) to wed a wealthy, dying millionairess (Isabelle Huppert) in Venice.
Each night in Paris, hundreds of men and women anonymously use telephone lines that date from the German Occupation and are no longer listed to talk to each other, to love each other. These people, shipwrecked lovers, are dying to love, to escape the abyss of solitude.
In this thriller, a UNESCO translator stumbles across a group which is hiding and supporting Nazis and facilitating their travel around the world. She had been given an assignment to study the work of a writer who recently had died, and the conspiracy is revealed in materials he left behind. She comes upon a young man who is going through the writer's papers, and she immediately assumes he must be one of the conspirators. However, he soon convinces her of his innocence in that regard, and the two together begin a search for the ringleader.
The fortunes of a small theatrical company based in the Paris suburbs.
A young man who seems lost, Nicolas, has an appointment with her sister Juliette. They are bound by a heavy childhood secret: their mother committed suicide when their father had instructed Nicolas to keep it. Since the father chased him and forbade Juliette to see him.
A dedicated clarinetist receives a valuable violin and has a difficult time deciding what to do with it.
India, 1937. Anne-Marie Stretter is the wife of the French ambassador and leads a solitary yet privileged life in Calcutta. The tedium of her existence is relieved by numerous illicit love affairs with government officials, young men who find her an object of desire and fascination. The Vice Consul is driven insane by his love for her and, expelled from the ambassador’s palace, cries like a sick animal. Life continues for Anne-Marie Stretter, the same tedious existence…
In "psychanalyse", a two part documentary, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan answers to questions submitted by his son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller under the direction of Benoit Jacquot. The Office de Radiodiffusion Television Francaise (ORTF, the french public TV) broadcast this program. This documentary and its text became famous because this is the only televisual experience practiced by Lacan. A fair amount is made of the fact that Lacan was renowned for his powers of seduction and what effect this had on transference in the clinical setting. According to some of the interviewees, he could be irresistibly seductive, so much so that some thought him "monster".
