Jean-Pierre Kalfon
A director from the French New Wave has a meeting with a young, fashionable female actor with a background in television. Nothing goes the way it should.
A journey in the company of Bernadette Lafont, French Cinema’s most atypical actress. Tracing her career from pin-up girl, to New Wave model of sexual freedom, to drug-dealing granny in the film Paulette, by way of La Fiancée du Pirate and Les Stances à Sophie, this film pays tribute to her extraordinary life and artistic odyssey. Her grand-daughters, Anna, Juliette and Solène, revisit the dreams of Bernadette, in the family home in the Cevennes region where they, like her, grew up. Her close friends, Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon, reminisce on their artistic and human complicity. Throughout the film, Bernadette Lafont in person, with her inimitable character actress voice, re-evokes a life in cinema marked with insolence, courage and freedom.
Sasha, a French woman of thirty, dies suddenly in Berlin. Her Fiancé, Lawrence, and her sister Zoé, must come to terms as the consequences of this shock set in.
The story starts where the tale ends: Snow White wakes up to the age of sexuality and discovers a world where the dwarves have become tall, and her Prince Charming is deprived of charisma. And, most terrible of all, her mother is incomparably more sexy.
The story of a rabbi and his talking cat, a sharp-tongued feline philosopher brimming with scathing humor and a less than pure love for the rabbi's teenage daughter.
Georges Nail lives in a new suburb. He's married, loves his wife, son and dog. Paul Hammer is good looking, rich and intelligent. But he is torn by his severe judgment of the world and a desire to be part of it. One day, their paths meet. Nail sees this meeting as an opportunity to create a new friendship. On his side, Hammer sees it as a new reason for living : to crucify the perfect image of the happy western man and his incarnation in the person of Georges Nail. A nail is the perfect victim for a hammer.
Told in four vignettes, this existential comedy relates the exploits of four aspiring criminals who hope to improve their lot, but find that they might not have what it takes for a life of crime.
A psychologist discovers troubling links between Nazism and modern-day big business.
A subjective documentary, a real logbook that follows the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy in the U.S.A.
The making of The Dreamers, its background and relation to the May 1968 student riots in Paris.
Sexy, gritty and as provocative as a lap dance, The Bathers takes an insider's look at the lives of six women working as dancers at a seedy Parisian peep show. Governed by their overprotective boss, the girls' routine of glittery neon lights and lecherous customers is soon disrupted when an enigmatic stranger enters the scene. Now, drugs, sex and bickering all take a back seat as the girls unite to save this man haunted by a mysterious past and unforgiving demons. A fascinating glimpse into a world of back alleys and primal instincts, The Bathers transports us to a netherworld where the show always goes on.
A young American studying in Paris in 1968 strikes up a friendship with a French brother and sister.
Jean-Henri Roger's Lulu stars Elli Medeiros as the title character. Lulu is a transsexual who lives with John (Gerard Meylan). One of the town drunks she serves at her bar accuses her of killing a local criminal. A detective (Bruno Putzulu) starts a quirky investigation into the charge. A journalist (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) with affectionate feelings for Lulu figures in the plot. Lulu was shot on Digital Video.
Nathalie and Louise are friends from childhood. While studying drama at University Louise becomes hopelessly obsessed with her friend. Jealous of the male friends she has she breaks up the friendship, followed by a suicide attempt. Later, Louise marries, but finds time to see the, by now quite accomplished actress, Nathalie. They fight through the years, La Repetition following them as their friendship comes together and breaks up frequently, while never actually reaching anything that can be called a climax.
Late 17th Century: Anne de Grandcamp and Lucie de Fontenelle, two little girls from Normandy, arrive at the Saint-Cyr school founded by Madame de Maintenon for educating the daughters of impoverished nobles ruined in wars and making them into free women. Madame de Maintenon is the secret wife of Louis XIV, and empowered by his support, she offers "her" two hundred fifty girls a playful and avant-garde education. Anne and Lucie, two inseparable friends, allow themselves to be carried away by the promise of a bright future. But Maintenon has arrived at the pinnacle of power through scheming and debasing herself and she now fears the fires of hell. She is counting on her model school to atone for her past sins.
After a drug deal gone wrong, Bédé goes into hiding in the countryside at a reformative school for criminal youth. His location is found out, and he and the pupils have to protect themselves with whatever means they have.
The mother of three children seems to become romantically involved with the man playing Don Juan in the same local countryside theatre where she is acting. The children decide to try to poison the man who is threatening their family life. The real life and the stage roles get intertwined...
Kamar, who just arrived at Bassra, falls in love with the young wife of the old Obeid. But, until now, nobody has survived to be able to praise himself for obtaining favors from this beautiful, capricious woman.
Robert is an architect and artist, in Vichy after separating from his Parisian wife. Robert finds it calms him to stand in the shadows of the home of Juliette and Patrick and watch her cook. She thinks he's a prowler and confronts him, then invites him in...
Roland and Martine, once child stars in a TV series, have sunk into a life of crime. Answering an ad from Isabelle, a young girl seeking work with children, they abduct her with the intention of selling her into prostitution. At the last moment, having become fond of her, they relent and set out to take her home. She rebels, insisting that she enjoys their exciting life of stolen cars, stolen cheques, hotels and restaurants left without paying the bill, and the threesome become a formidable team. Then Isabelle's mood changes again and she disappears with a hitch-hiker. Worried over her future, Roland and Martine trace her to the town where she is about to get married and abduct her, this time from the church steps. Roaring off in a stolen ambulance, the three are happily on the run again.
300 kilos of heroin have disappeared in Necrocity, a city of terror—city of night—where Captain Speed has a gang, and the government hides the dead. Pierre Clémenti’s In the Shadow of the Blue Rascal (À l’ombre de la canaille bleue) is an experimental crime film considered to be a landmark of Parisian underground cinema.
This debut directorial effort by French actress Virginie Thevenet is a routine erotic tour through Parisien night spots and the infamous Bois du Bologne with its drag queens. A worldy-wise young woman latches onto her opposite, a shy and inexperienced young man, and leads him by hook or crook through the wild side of night life in the city of light. As she initiates him into an erotic demimonde, viewers are treated to street scenes and the special ambience that characterizes the lowest rungs of the social scale in Paris.
In this strange and beautiful crime drama, Bernard Giraudeau is Daniel Chetman, someone who wants to leave the life of violence he knew in his neighborhood -- and cannot do so because his nemesis, a strutting street gangster now involved with organized crime, continues to terrorize the inhabitants of Chetman's turf. After much spilled blood, a parade of ugly underground types, and various sexual scenes, Chetman reduces the forces of evil to a reasonable level of opposition -- but who knows if the neighborhood will be different in the end...
Two actresses fall prey to the supernatural manipulations of a nightclub magician.
Claude Massoulier is murdered while hunting at the same place as Julien Vercel, an estate agent who knew him and whose fingerprints are found on Massoulier's car. As the police discover that Marie-Christine Vercel, Julien's wife, was Massoulier's mistress, Julien is the prime suspect. But his secretary, Barbara Becker, while not quite convinced he is innocent, defends him and leads her private investigations.
Liberty Belle tells the story of a group of student's involvement with a group who oppose the French Algerian war. The film premiered at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival.
Passionate about music, Julien nevertheless works with a sculptor. One day, he meets young Hermine at a religious bookseller.
Set amid the European community in an unspecified North African country, a colony on the verge of nationalism just before the war. And colonized is what happens to a French diplomat, Julien Rochelle, when he meets the mysterious beauty Clothilde de Watteville. Schmid 's favorite axiom, that love is projection, never had such a thorough airing. Is Clothilde really the wife of a French official now holed up in Siberia? Or is she Hecate, goddess of black magic and devourer of the Arab boys she meets far from the European quarter? Only our projections know for sure; for the rest, she is a "woman looking out into the night." Drawn from a novel by Paul Morand, who based the main character on his wife Helene, Schmid's film achieves an atmosphere of magic in which psychological credibility is not so much absent as irrelevant-a film that distances itself from the drama it invokes, perhaps as the elusive Clothilde turns her back on the madness she provokes.
A young journalist stumbles across something much more sinister than a simple suicide in the death of a politician - the death seems to be an assassination contrived by an American multinational company intent on taking over several French industries. The journalist's objective is to garner enough evidence to expose the American corporation for what it really is, before French companies start disappearing - and before any more corpses accumulate, including his own.
Comic artist and writer Woody performs a simple courier operation for his friend Harry who works for the CIA. But when he successfully fends off hostile agents, he earns the respect of the beautiful Natalia, who requests his assistance for her defection. Woody uses this request as leverage to use the CIA's resources to bring his comic book creation, Condorman, to life to battle the evil Krokov.
In the 1930s a young fellow, Simon Chalumet, is sent to a military school by his overbearing father, an ex-soldier who has little sympathy for his son's more gentle temperament, or for his interest in films.
The film follows four families, with different nationalities (French, German, Russian and American) but with the same passion for music, from the 1930s to the 1960s. The various story lines cross each other time and again in different places and times, with their own theme scores that evolve as time passes. The main event in the film is the Second World War, which throws the stories of the four musical families together and mixes their fates. Although all characters are fictional, many of them are loosely based on historical musical icons (Édith Piaf, Josephine Baker, Herbert von Karajan, Glenn Miller, Rudolf Nureyev, etc.) The Boléro dance sequence at the end brings all the threads together.
A young Parisian advertising executive becomes so captivated by the unsettling charm of his mysterious new employer that he eventually abandons his family and friends, viewing it a privilege to let the ubiquitous employer take over his home, his life, his desire. Only his wife remains suspicious, recognizing both the pathos and the evil in the man’s soul-stealing power.
Mercenary James Shannon, on a reconnaissance job to the African nation of Zangaro, is tortured and deported. He returns to lead a coup.
Young police inspector Corinne Levasseur interrogated a dealer without the judge's consent. Following an indiscretion of her lover, the substitute Berthot, Corinne is transferred to a small town in the North who lives under the thumb of a rich industrialist and his family. He is given subaltern tasks. Intrigued by the strange death of a teenager, she stubbornly leads an investigation that allows her to trace the chain of a child prostitution network in which are mixed a notable and his son-in-law. A young investigating judge decides to investigate the case, but he is the victim of pressure ...
"Chronicles of the Present Times" - An experimental trilogy comprising 'Visa De Censure No.X', 'Livre De Famille' and 'Anima Mundi'. New Old flows together footage from more than a decade of his wandering between scenes, sets, and drugs, an accelerated world tour through various iterations of the counterculture.
Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.
First of all, "La chanson de Roland" is a great film. But, unfortunately, it's quite an unknown one. Unlike other "medieval" films (e.g. Anthony Mann's "El Cid") there's no "sword-battle-american-pulp-shit" stuff, but a hard intellectual effort in order to offer us a realistic version of the European Middle Ages.
After a car accident in which his mother dies, Antoine Chapelote decides to change his life and become a con-artist. He meets a young girl Caroline who helps him with his scam.
A thriller in which the characters are Latin-American exiles living in Paris. It is also a comedy about artists who play at revolution rather than actually participate in one
From 1935 to 1945, the happiness of a couple turns to sadness when their Traction Avant auto is used by the gang des Tractions Avant.
Shot in 1967 but not released until 1975, actor Pierre Clémenti’s acid-infused experimental whirlwind of colour and music featuring a who’s who of the French 60s underground.
Imprisoned as an accessory to murder, Catherine gives birth to a son she conceived in prison. Eighteen years later, her sentence served, she is reunited with the boy, Simon, who has remained in an orphanage the entire time. She is accompanied by toothsome prison buddy Sarah, and gradually these people whose lives have been frozen in time "thaw" and get on with the business of living.
Nico is an ethereal poet haunting the gaps between scenes of Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Bulle Ogier, Laurent Terzieff, and Garrel’s father, Maurice, discussing the filmmaker’s staple topics: love, psychoanalysis, and the failures of May ’68.
Viviane, a French Consul's wife, is in New Guinea to find exotic feathers for export to Paris. She encounters four European travelers who are en route to "la vallée": The Valley, high in the Guinean mountains, is shown on maps as 'obscured by clouds' and is beyond their previous experiences. Viviane joins their trek to find rare feathers and soon becomes entwined in their journey. Their extended stay with the Mapuga tribe brings a denouement between western and indigenous values before their final quest toward the 'Valley of the Gods'.
An alien, with the ability to travel through time, visits our planet at various eras.
30 year old child enters the new city, riding on a donkey. He says he is the Savior. He has spent no time among men. He is trembling with cold. His clothes are soaked. His mother was overprotective ; his father conspicuously absent. He knows that he must face the mockery, refusal, ignorance and blindness of the men around him. They travel in gangs, in large numbers : soldiers, mercenaries or the like, on majestic, imposing horses. Everything is out of proportion to his thin, bewildered, innocent body ; he is the madman of the new city...
Follows the dissolution of the marriage between Claire, an actress and Sebastien, her director.
Paul (Jean-Pierre Leaud) leaves his wealthy parents behind to go on a spiritual quest. He meets up with Yvan (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), leader of a vegetarian cult whose members survive by begging for food in uncomfortable robes. The religious fanatics draw the ire of local peasants when they are arrested for stealing eggs. Yvan butchers a goat and has a carnivore carnival orgy on the meat. Marianne (Bernadette Lafont) is one of the followers, and she and Paul go to a remote island to live off seaweed and vegetation, but a development company moves in to wreck the paradise. Paul is brokenhearted when Mariane goes off with one of the greedy developers in this symbolic film that decries the allure of the material world.
The harsh life of a troubled young man provides the basis of this grim French tragedy that begins when the fellow stops into a shop to buy a pack of the title cigarettes. There he meets a pretty shop girl with whom he falls in love and eventually marries. It was a foolish choice, for the two cannot get along and constantly fight. Things get worse when the husband resumes his criminal activities and gets caught. The two are about to divorce when the woman gets pregnant. The time comes for their baby to be born and while sitting in the waiting room, the husband reflects upon his past activities, which are revealed via flashback.
Half family photo album, half ciné-tract, the film was shot in Paris during the events of May ‘68 and in Rome where the actor was featuring in the film Partner by Bertolucci. Rediscovered in a basement in 1999, this silent film appears to be one of Clémenti’s most purely beautiful and concentrated works, at times recalling Brakhage and Eisenstein. - MUBI
A young woman, unsatisfied by her husband, searches for sex in the brothels of a seaside town.
An experimental and poetic portrait of a woman.
This satire concerns three French singing idols and their attempt to stay in the public eye. A press conference, backstage hedonism, psychedelia, manipulative managers and disc jockeys are portrayed as the pop culture is thoroughly and effectively lampooned in this independent feature.
Four prisoners are gathered in the same cell. Each tells the others how he got there.
In June 1944, a young doctor, Chevalier, under the threat of guns, is forced to treat a wounded man in a camp of resistance fighters (maquisards). He recognizes the man, minister of the Third Republic, called Morel by his companions. Carnot, the chief of the maquisards, is suspicious of a doctor who expressly disapproves of the resistance and wants to have him shot as soon as he has treated Morel. Philippe, who is second in command, intervenes in favor of the Chevalier. Meanwhile, peasants denounce the maquisards to the Nazis and the camp is surrounded by the Germans. The camp is saved thanks to Philippe who takes command of the group. He decides to leave the shelter and they begin the long march through the Cévennes to rally maquisard Napoleon in the Vercors...
Four young people, tired of working life, decide that they can earn money from crime than they can from work. The film follows their training at the first "crime school", as well as their work.
A French crime potboiler starring Verner and Kalfon as rival gang leaders who clash over control of the narcotics trade. Parisian drug gangs are battling over turf, leading to kidnappings, beatings, murders, betrayals, and other intrigues. Featuring Chet Baker's marvelous free-jazz Score, (rivaling Miles Davis's for "Ascenseur pour l'echafaud") and the most beautiful French Babes the World has ever seen. It pricks the Conscience, probes the libido, and excites the senses!
The year is 2050. Doctors have been replaced by a machine called Sherlock, a kind of super-scanner that not only diagnoses but also heals depending on the patients' means. Doctors have now become financial advisers who sell health insurance and solutions that are more or less drastic.
