The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (France, 1972) takes an idea out of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest—an innocent man is mistaken for a government agent and targeted by the enemy—and gives it cynical twist and a comic treatment closer to the Pink Panther films. When “St. Bernard” Milan (Bernard Blier), the ambitious assistant […]
Venus in Fur (France, 2013), adapted by Roman Polanski with playwright David Ives from his Tony Award-winning play, is Polanksi’s second theater piece in a row. This is a two-hander between a playwright (Mathieu Amalric) auditioning actresses for his adaptation of the novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and an actress (Emmanuelle Seigner) who arrives late […]
Marie’s Story (France, 2014), France’s answer to The Miracle Worker, is also based on real events. Marie Heurtin was born deaf and blind to loving but overworked parents in 19th century rural France. Kept at home because no institution but the asylum would take her in, she lived in sensory isolation, loved but untutored and […]
The Last Panthers (2015) are the final incarnation of the infamous international network of jewel thieves formed by criminals and soldiers of fortune from Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. The Pink Panthers are indeed real but this TV mini-series is fiction, a sprawling story that opens on a jewel heist in the French port […]
L’Auberge Espagnole (2002) could be the official film of the international student exchange program. French filmmaker Cedric Klapisch takes the old clichés of culture clash, college roommate chaos, and a young adult’s education outside the confines of the classroom and turns it into vision of the then-new European Union as communal household. Xavier (Romain Duris), […]
The “bonnes femmes” of Claude Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) are four shopgirls at a small appliance store in Paris. Good time girl Bernadette Lafont spends her nights in empty flirtations with boorish womanizers, social climbing Lucile Saint-Simon withers under the disdainful gaze of her boyfriend’s haughty parents, seemingly confident Stephane Audran secretly follows her […]
