Marie-France Pisier
A walk through the career of French filmmaker André Téchiné, from his own point of view and that of those who worked with him: Catherine Deneuve, Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Béart, Juliette Binoche and Sandrine Kiberlain, among others.
French thriller about a serial killer whose life is about to fall apart. Samuel Delauney is a professional hitman working for his mother, the glamorous and domineering matriarch Natacha who helps wealthy clients get rid of their enemies. Natacha has never quite forgiven Samuel for the one and only contract he never fulfilled. On that occasion, instead of killing his mark, he married her.
Djalil Boudaoud and Justine Lacroix are a surgeon and a television reporter who enter a romantic relationship despite the objections of their families to the cultural gap.
Paid is a film noir in the tradition of the French gangster movie. It is a story about underworld characters that have come to regret the choices they have made and now secretly long for a different and more meaningful life. It is also a love story between Paula Gireaux , a 28-year-old Parisian call girl working in Amsterdam and a hit man, Michel Angelo (30) whose hearts are touched when a six-year-old Bolivian boy abruptly enters their lives. The boy changes their fate. He gives them reason to reach for their dreams and to start a whole new life together. But, at the moment Paula and Michel decide to escape the underworld, Paula realizes that her hands are tied to a paid deal she has made with a powerful English narcotics baron, Rudi Dancer (55). The enticing offer Paula could not refuse, turns into the demon that stands in the way of her future with Michel. Eventually, Michel and Paula find their way to freedom but not without paying a high price
Paul, depressed from his recent break-up with Anna, returns home to Paris and moves back in with his divorced father and amorous younger brother, Jonathan. While his carefree sibling and doting father try in vain to cheer him up, a visit from his mother seems to be the only thing that brings him joy. When Paul is then left in the house to brood and talk to one of his brother's girlfriends.
Ordo Tupikos, a french sailor with greek origins, discover that his first wife, Estelle, with whom he had remained married a few months only 16 years earlier, is now a famous movie star called Louise Sandoli. But, more than her name, everything about Louise seems to have changed. Ordo decides to meet Estelle again, after all these years, to know what it's all about...
Lola, a young, energetic and cheerful student lives in Paris. She’s preparing to sit her law thesis, and works part-time at Chloroville, “Our green fingers look after your interior plants”. She has split up with Simon, a lawyer in his thirties who is always busy defending “the trial of his life”. Their stormy relationship held Lola back, and although they’ll love each other forever, it won’t be on an everyday basis.
The story of an immigrant woman struggling against old world traditions. Zouina leaves her homeland with her three children to join her husband in France, where he's been living for the past ten years. In a land and culture foreign to her, Zouina struggles against her mother-in-law's tyrannical hand and her husband's distrustful bitterness in an attempt to adjust to her life in exile.
A man discovers he's no longer as close to his ear as he once was in this absurdist comedy. Jeff is minding his own business when a phonograph record tossed from a passing car accidentally cuts off his ear. The ear falls into traffic, gets stuck on the windshield of another vehicle, and begins a long, strange journey, passing from car to car and hand to hand across the country. Jeff, however, can still hear whatever his separated ear is picking up, and is trying to follow the sounds in hopes of catching up with his former body part. However, a doctor warns him he only has a few hours to find his ear, otherwise reattachment will be impossible; in the meantime, Jeff's former girlfriend wastes several of his precious minutes with a discussion about the notion of giving their relationship another try.
A serious young man of free spirit is forced by his surroundings to become rich at all costs. A group of blind children tries to open the eyes of the unbelievers to the Christian faith. Retired nuns who open a brothel, to pay the running costs of the convent. These rather ironic paradoxes turn this fairytale into a philosophical fable.
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is on his deathbed. Looking at photographs brings memories of his childhood, his youth, his lovers, and the way the Great War put an end to a stratum of society. His memories are in no particular order, they move back and forth in time. Marcel at various ages interacts with Odette, with the beautiful Gilberte and her doomed husband, with the pleasure-seeking Baron de Charlus, with Marcel's lover Albertine, and with others; present also in memory are Marcel's beloved mother and grandmother. It seems as if to live is to remember and to capture memories is to create a work of great art. The memories parallel the final volume of Proust's novel.
Four gay French expatriots share a business in Barcelona. When they and their parents are thrown together for a "coming out" party, another French Farce ensues.
La Patinoire is about a film director who is shooting a highly symbolic film called 'Dolores' at an ice rink. He has hired a Lithuanian ice hockey team with which he is having enormous communication problems. His actors all have inflated egos, his film crew is made up of fools, and there is a politician on his back. But he must finish the film, no matter what, in time for the Venice Film Festival.
The trials and tribulations of a good guy who feels obliged to confess the truth to his wife or his boss every time he makes a mistake.
Dodo, a French man living in Florida, has one goal in life: Get by without working. Difficult to implement without the help of some women. Betty is one of them, and a gypsy's bride, who suddenly disappears, changing Dodo's life.
You're a provincial kid in Paris and suddenly you're the center of attention: Movie stars, famous directors and sexy women are doting on you because they all think you're the son of their long-dead legendary friend. You never knew your dad, but the facts of this famous guy's life suggest that he might have fathered you. Your mom tells you nothing. All the fuss makes you uncomfortable at first but soon you find it's rather fun to be the son of the famous Gascogne. And in the midst of it all you fall in love. It is, after all, springtime in Paris.
Documentary overview of the life of French filmmaker François Truffaut.
A look at the last few days of in the life of composer Frédéric Chopin's professional life.
A French civil servant throws The Governor's Party when his daughter comes of age regardless of colonial unrest and her parents' stormy marriage.
In the sixteenth century, Spain occupies Flanders, an Inquisition enforces the faith. Aging writer and philosopher, Zénon Ligre, comes to Bruges using a false name and papers to serve as a physician to the poor, establishing a clinic and steam bath. His methods and opinions are outside the mainstream, but he has the protection and friendship of the local Prior. Zénon, an aristocrat with a degree in canon law, lives humbly. He learns of bacchanals under Masonic signs involving monks and women, and he warns those involved. The Prior is dying, and he urges Zénon to flee to England. Zénon burns his writing. Will he leave or will he face ecclesiastical accusers and, perhaps, the stake?
Focuses primarily on three women and the (unseen) man who goes in and out of their lives. One member of this trio is a saleswoman with an open relationship that suddenly closes when she learns that her lover has been unfaithful. It seems that he has dallied with a book-dealer (her nemesis) who ultimately does not propose as much of a threat to the disillusioned saleswoman as a certain actress. Along with these three are several other females who interact with the main protagonists. Set up more in the manner of a stage play with changing scenes and acts.
In a futuristic society, contestants pit their survival skills against each other in a fight to the death for cash prizes, and the contest is aired live on television.
Cinematographer turned director (Xaver Schwarzenberger) has filmed a small, wintry story of epic human proportions. A young doctor (Hanno Poeschi) exiles himself to a remote Austrian village when he accidentally causes a death. Once at the village, winter sets in and against that harsh and poetic backdrop a rabies epidemic sweeps through the population. The doctor convinces people he is a biologist but then he treats someone bitten and gives his real profession away. As the epidemic raises questions of life and death, the doctor's mind is brought back to the death that caused his exile and he considers suicide for awhile. The same issues come up again when an enraged villager goes on a killing spree and in turn, is hunted by the citizens. Faced with the prevalence of death all around him, the doctor starts to gain some perspective on the personal experience that brought him here in the first place.
Hans Castorp, fresh from university and about to become a civil engineer, comes to the Sanatorium Berghof in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin Joachim, an army officer, who is recovering there from tuberculosis. Intending to remain at the Berghof for three weeks, Hans is gradually contaminated by the morbid atmosphere pervading the place. Wishing very much to be considered a patient like the others, he achieves his ends and stays in the sanatorium for ...seven years. During this time, he has enough time to take part in the furious philosophical debates pitting against each other Settembrini, a secular humanist, and Naphta, a totalitarian Jesuit. And to fall in love with the beautiful but enigmatic Clawdia Chauchat. When he is finally discharged in 1914 - along with all the other patients - it is only to plunge into the horrors of World War I.
William Tepper, whose only significant credit to date was the lead role in the Jack Nicholson-directed 1972 cult film (#Drive, He Said), wrote and stars in Miss Right. He plays Terry Bartell, a U.P.I. reporter stationed in Rome. Bartell is an inveterate ladies man who suddenly decides he's through playing meaningless romantic games and wants to find "Miss Right." As a prelude to beginning the search, he sets up a series of "farewell" dinners with his three current girlfriends, scheduled in his apartment in two hour intervals. Most of the film consists of these lengthy encounters, including one with veteran Italian actress Virna Lisi, playing an older married woman. Karen Black is another of the ladies, who arrives by jet for a midnight rendezvous and is unpleasantly surprised.
In this action comedy the French boxer Jo Cavalier is charmed on the train to Berlin for the Olympics in Hitler's Germany by the little boy Simon Rosenblum who asks his autograph; when it turns out his adorable young fan is a Jewish orphan in danger of persecution, he risks his one shot at Olympic glory to save Simon and his family, helped only by a German officer-gentleman who became his friend in World War I, by an adventurous escape to Switzerland, Nazi troops on their heals and braving impossible odds in roller coaster-style.
A master art forger and his partner in crime, an art expert who can vouch for the authenticity of the forgeries, are making a bundle. An art dealer figures out their scheme but agrees to keep quite if they forge some art lost in WWII.
The story about the life and loves of an amazing woman-Coco Chanel- who rose from the bottom with no family or financial support and became one of the most legendary of all our creative icons.
The scene is the restless Paris of the interwar years where an attractive and ambitious woman successfully makes her way in a world previously reserved for men: that of high finance. Originating from a humble background, she quickly becomes popular with small savers by offering them outstanding interest rates. Extremely popular, she makes no secret of her taste for the good things in life and her homosexual affairs. They will cost her dearly...
Father Craig Dunleavy leads a band of terrorists who hijack a cruise ship in the French Atlantic and demand a $70 million ransom. Harold Columbine is our main hero, as the teleplay spends as much time focusing on the problems and love affairs of individual passengers as it does on the hijacking itself.
In a small presbytery in Yorkshire, England, living under the watchful eyes of their aunt and father, a strict Anglican pastor, the Bronte sisters write their first works and quickly become literary sensations.
French Postcards rings both comic and true. The believable, fresh-faced characters are young naives from American colleges spending their French-English dictionaries, they compulsively seek out hundreds of monuments, romanticize the nomadic artist's life, and look for grown-up love. The French tutor them well, as befits their reputation. Jean Rochefort is the harassed headmaster with a hankering for affairs, and Marie-France Pisier is his very sexy wife. Watch for a newcomer named Debra Winger, and another-Mandy Patinkin.
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.
When French beauty Noelle Page falls in love with American pilot Larry Douglas, she believes he'll marry her. Instead, he returns to the U.S and marries the sweet but naive Catherine. Even though Noelle has found a new lover, an affluent Greek named Constantin, and has started a great career as an actress, she vows revenge on her onetime lover. But once her plan is in motion, she and Larry fall in love and plot Catherine's death.
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
Eric (Corin Redgrave) is a novelist whose imagination is unusually powerful. While exploring a run-down mansion in the French countryside, looking for sites for his stories, he meets a girl dressed in clothes from another time. Returning to the site, he encounters a modern woman who says he probably met a ghost. He is fascinated by the situation which cannot be what it seems.
Francois always despised the textile barons who ruled his local town. But he fell in love with the family heiress Gilberte. Ten years ago, he would have married her. Now only hatred holds them together. Francois is accused of murder. A hooker and a football star lie slaughtered. He thinks he has been framed by the mob. Going underground, he finds that the trail leads all the way to the top - to Gilberte's family. He needs friends. And friends are hard to come by in his town.
Director André Téchiné brings his usual obsessions -- including a preoccupation with the fortunes of the bourgeoisie -- to this episodic drama, which serves as a thinly-veiled portrait of France's economic peaks and valleys from the 1930s through the 1970s. Jeanne Moreau stars as Berthe Pedret, a simple laundry woman who marries Hector (Michael Auclair), son of a wealthy, upper class, Spanish immigrant family that owns a successful farm machinery factory. Through a series of vignettes, Techine depicts the passage of years, during which the ambitious working class woman blooms through several bold moves, such as negotiating a workers' strike settlement and using her alliance with the war-time French Resistance movement to increase the enterprise's prestige.
Two distant cousins meet at a wedding banquet for an elderly couple. Over time, a close friendship develops between them, but their spouses begin to think that they are more than just friends.
This Surrealist film, with a title referencing the Communist Manifesto, strings together short incidents based on the life of director Luis Buñuel. Presented as chance encounters, these loosely related, intersecting situations, all without a consistent protagonist, reach from the 19th century to the 1970s. Touching briefly on subjects such as execution, pedophilia, incest, and sex, the film features an array of characters, including a sick father and incompetent police officers.
A mysteriously linked pair of young women find their daily lives pre-empted by a strange boudoir melodrama that plays itself out in a hallucinatory parallel reality.
On a Mediterranean cruise, a young man hired as a tour guide is intrigued by the beauty of a female interpreter hiding behind her sunglasses. He makes advances to her by venturing into a series of strange stories.
Marie-Hélène lives in a manor with her husband George, but is not happy. She feels stifled and trapped by the constant presence of Cécile, her intrusive mother-in-law. One day, Jacques and a beautiful woman, Françoise, comes to visit. Marie-Hélène feels attracted to Françoise. To such an extent that the two women fall in love and run away to the city.
The third in a series of films featuring François Truffaut's alter-ego, Antoine Doinel, the story resumes with Antoine being discharged from military service. His sweetheart Christine's father lands Antoine a job as a security guard, which he promptly loses. Stumbling into a position assisting a private detective, Antoine falls for his employers' seductive wife, Fabienne, and finds that he must choose between the older woman and Christine.
A film director, Jean, his producer, Marc, and his assistant, Lucette, board the Trans-Europ-Express in Paris bound for Antwerp. Once in their compartment it occurs to them that the drama of life aboard the train presents possibilities for a film, and they begin to write a script about dope smuggling. Subsequently, they see actor Jean-Louis Trintignant walking through the station. As seen through the eyes of Jean, Marc, and Lucette, Trintignant becomes Elias, the chief character in the script. Elias is going to Antwerp to pick up a suitcase of cocaine for delivery to an international organization based in Paris.
A true story of Peter Kurten, a serial killer who committed nine murders and many other offenses in Dusseldorf during the Great Depression era.
A story about a widow who begins to receive blackmail letters demanding money from her. This is when everyone in the small town she lives in dismissing her husband.
Seeing an opportunity to make a financial recovery for the family, a nobleman attempts to wed his son to his wealthy friend's daughter. His plan is to send the boy for a cruise on the SS France with the prospective female. Upon arriving to meet the lovely girl, the young man switches places with his valet. Unbeknownst to him, however, is the fact that the girl has pulled a similar deception. Though Jean-Marc Ripert is responsible for much of the cinematography in this New Wave comedy, it is Francois Reichenbach who handled the camera for many of the ocean-liner scenes.
When Massa (Robert Hossein) is released from prison, he's sure that Luciano (Simon Andreu), an old freind, is responsible for his incarceration. Massa proceeds to keep watch on Luciano, who has been living with Massa's beloved sister Maria (Marie-France Pisier). Feeling doubly betrayed because of his unhealthy adoration for Maria, Massa is determined to get back at Luciano and ends up in a deadly game of roulette.
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).
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.
The dream of Charles Dombais, the wealthy owner of the shipping company, is to have a son to continue his business. Tragically, his wife dies shortly after giving birth to their son.
