Jean-Claude Biette
The title reflects the brand of a financial institution, the bank of the Saltim family: Frederic, the younger brother, runs the family bank; his brother Bruno rejected the position of executive director, and chose to fund a theatrical company. Around them, there is a net of family members, friends, and acquaintances who seem to swirl around the banking brothers. Frederic and Bruno are both trying to control the future of their beautiful niece, Vanessa. The coffee shop owners Eve and Jim complicate everybody's life with their intrigues and lies. A strange stage director comes from his foreign exile. And lack of funds suddenly reveals the true colors of everyone - in banking, on stage, and everywhere.
A thirty-three-minute documentary featuring interviews with director Pier Paolo Pasolini, actor-filmmaker Jean-Claude Biette, and Pasolini friend Ninetto Davoli.
Pierre Léon ingeniously condenses and updates Dostoevsky’s novel about a 19-year-old intellectual reconnecting with his estranged family in his impressive debut feature.
Arthur is a history teacher who lives alone in Paris after having broken up with Claire. He is a sensitive man, full of existential doubts and questions. He has to go to Lisbon to meet an eminent historian whose work is the subject of his thesis. Having just made up with Claire, he decides to take her along. She's an ideal travel companion and it seems their relationship has not yet exhausted its potential. But moving from Lisbon to Oporto, their fantasy of a second honeymoon clashes with the reality of a world on the verge of a nightmare.
It is due to some professional obligations that brothers Charles and Fredi turn their attention to theater. Charles, an actor does not want Fredi to write a book on him.
A "three people relationship" with a pact involving a terrible past. The pact concerns France, Anne and Pierre.
Felicie and Charles have a whirlwind holiday romance. Due to a mix-up on addresses they lose contact, and five years later at Christmas-time Felicie is living with her mother in a cold Paris with a daughter as a reminder of that long-ago summer. For male companionship she oscillates between hairdresser Maxence and the intellectual Loic, but seems unable to commit to either as the memory of Charles and what might have been hangs over everything.
A miraculous mushroom is discovered by a film director's daughter.It would be used to cure an actress.
Christian, an art critic, must write a study on the painter René Dimanche in order to understand why he did not produce anything for eight years. He asks his friend Ingrid to help him break through this mystery.
The fortunes of a small theatrical company based in the Paris suburbs.
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…
The sister of a manager who finds work for the unemployed, instructs his brother's employee to find unemployed people.
Straub-Huillet’s first color film, adapts a lesser-known Corneille tragedy from 1664, which in turn was based on an episode of imperial court intrigue chronicled in Tacitus’s Histories. The costuming is classical, and the toga-clad, nonprofessional cast performs the drama’s original French text amid the ruins of Rome’s Palatine Hill while the noise of contemporary urban life hums in the background. Their lines are executed with a terrific flatness and frequently through heavy accents; the language in Othon becomes not merely an expression but a thing itself, an element whose plainness here alerts us to qualities of the work that might otherwise be subordinated.
A moral adventure: one sees friendships being born and being discarded, under the pressure of avowed authorities such as the family and the prejudices it states, or unavowed as the economy that no individual alone expresses.
