August 8, 1999
Lovers (1999) **
Directed by Jean-Marc Barr. Dogma 5 film about a French girl (Elodie Bouchez) falling in love with an illegal immigrant from Yugoslavia.
Himalaya - l'enfance d'un chef (1999) *
Directed by Eric Valli. With Thilen Lhondop, Gurgon Kyap, Lhaka Tsamchoe. Unlike Khyentse Norbu’s The Cup, this film set in the Himalayas was directed by a European, and it shows. It’s a perfect example of a regrettable trend in international filmmaking, where the characters behave the way most Westerners imagine that exotic foreigners (in this case, Tibetan herdsmen) ought to be behaving. The vistas are suberb (no surprise here), the tents seem authentic enough, but everything else appears superficial and forced.
Fin aout, debut septembre (1999) *
Directed by Olivier Assayas. With Francois Cluzet and Vieginie Ledoyen. Is there a movie here?
Le Comptoir (1999) *
Directed by Sophie Tatischeff. With Mireille Perrier, Maurane and Michel Laprise. This film will try the patience of any viewer. It's neither a comedy nor a drama nor a romance, nor anything else for that matter. Set in a remote corner of Brittany, it's slow, unfocused and infuriatingly tedious. Jumping back and forth between the present and the past, it's like an annoying flea just begging to be squashed.
Le Temps retrouvé (1999) *
Directed by Raoul Ruiz. With Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich and Emmanuelle Beart. Ruiz is an odd maestro - absolutely brilliant one moment (Genealogie d'un crime), boringly inept the next (Trois vies et un mort). And this lethargic adaptation of Marcel Proust's novel represents Ruiz at his very worst. Not only is the film uninspired, lazy and conceited, it doesn't even make any sense.
Kennedy et moi (1999) **
Directed by Sam Karmann. With Jean-Pierre Bacri, Nicole Garcia, Patrick Chesnais. After “American Beauty” and “Wonder Boys”, here’s another movie about a family man facing a mid-life crisis and making an ass of himself. Someday, a brilliant scientist will win a Nobel Prize in physics for discovering the strange telepatic waves that allow screenwriters in remote corners of the world to simultaneously come up with exactly the same characters and narrative ideas.
Pourquoi pas moi? (1999) **
Directed by Stephane Giusti. With Julie Gayet, Brigitte Rouan and Marie-France Pisier. Uplifting French film about a bunch of happy-go-lucky lesbians who finally decide to come out of the closet. So they invite their parents for a quiet weekend in the country. Homophobia almost never raises its ugly head - everybody is gay and happy. A nice little fairy tale that makes Better Than Chocolate look gritty and realistic by comparaison.
Un Pont entre deux rives (1999) **
Directed by Gerard Depardieu and Frederic Auburtin. With Gerard Depardieu, Carole Bouquet and Charles Berling. This must be the zillionth French movie about adultery. This time, a wife (Bouquet) cheats on her husband (Depardieu) with her lover (Berling). It's nicely crafted, often pleasantly low-key, but unforgivably unoriginal. Set in 1961, it tries to make some obscure comments about class differences which only make it look like one of those dated, pre-New Wave melodramas, so derided by the Cahiers du Cinema crowd.
Muriel Leferle (1999) **
Directed by Raymond Depardon. Documentary about a young woman caught stealing a car.
Peau neuve (1999) **
Drame d’Emilie Deleuze. Avec Samuel Le Bihan, Catherine Vinatier, Claire Nebout, Candice Dufour et Fabien Lucciarini. Fatigué par son travail en tant que testeur de jeux video, un père de famille décide subitement de devenir... conducteur d’engin de chantier. Il quitte sa famille pour suivre un stage de formation de quatre moins. Contrairement à ce qu’on pourrait s’attendre, “Peau neuve”, la première réalisation d’Emilie Deleuze (la fille du célèbre philosophe français) n’est pas une comédie noire (genre “American Beauty”), mais plutôt un drame serieux, remarquablement subtil et souvent très interessant. C’est une ouvre qui traite du besoin de changer sa vie, ses habitudes, ses valeurs, ses attentes, bref... sa peau.
Pas vu pas pris (1999) **
Directed by Pierre Carles. With Pierre Carles, Karl Zero and Anne Sinclair. A biting expose denouncing the hypocrisy of the French media establishment. Everything had started with a private conversation between a media mogul and a government minister, accidently recorded by a camera. Then came a simple TV report, consisting of interviews with top Gallic media executives trying to explain why they had never aired that conversation. And finally we have this film, which deals with the deliberate suppression of that report by all the French TV stations. Ironically, the original conversation was actually quite innocent. Once again, "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up".
Je regle mon pas sur le pas de mon pere (1999) **
Directed by Remi Waterhouse. With Jean Yanne, Guillaume Canet and Laurence Cote. Amusing little French farce about a father-and-son team of charming swindlers, who play on human greed and stupidity. Conventional and rather clumsy in execution, it's nonetheless a very likable and entertaining effort, with Cote (playing one of their victims) injecting a hefty (and much needed)dose of sex appeal.
Est-Ouest (1999) **
Directed by Regis Wagnier. With Sandrine Bonnaire, Catherine Deneuve, and Oleg Menchikov. A French woman (Bonnaire), married to a Russian physician, comes to live in the Soviet Union in 1946, and soon bitterly regrets her stupidity. The Stalinist oppression is exposed once again in this slow-moving, often touching drama about love, freedom, injustice and cruel deception. It could be seen as a sequel of sorts to "Letter To Brezhnev".
Les Enfants du siècle (1999) **
Drame biographique de Diane Kurys ("Entre nous", "La Baule les Pins"). Avec Juliette Binoche, Benoît Magimel, Robin Renucci, Isabelle Carré, Stefano Dionisi. Les relations amoureuses (et orageuses) entre la célèbre romancière George Sand et l'écrivain Alfred de Musset. Elle, une féministe avant date. Lui, un génie fou. Ils partent en Italie, où Alfred trompe George avec des prostituées, tandis que George trompe Alfred avec un médecin. Resultat: les pauvres spectateurs doivent endurer leurs chicanes incessants pendant presque trois heures. Néanmoins, "Les Enfants du siècle" reste un film bien fait, assez conventionnel, mais toujours fascinant. Il présente aussi une belle reconstitution de l'epoque, avec les costumes et le decor sortis tout droit du début du XIX siècle.
Les Convoyeurs attendent (1999) **
"Les Convoyeurs attendent"... et les spectateurs restent stupéfait devant cette étrange comédie belge, à la fois absurde, réjouissante, originale et déroutante. C`est l`histoire de la famille Closset, qui habite dans une petite ville industrielle où règne le chômage et la misère. Le père a un rêve: gagner une voiture en battant un record du Livre Guinness. N`importe quel exploit fera l`affaire: il embrigade donc son fils pour ouvrir et fermer une porte plus de 40 824 fois en 24 heures. Une bagatelle, quoi... Tenace, mais aussi très ridicule dans son acharnement, le père est un personnage complètement grotesque. Il apparaît comme un crétin qui mène sa famille à la catastrophe. Et de son côté, en baignant tout dans une atmosphère de l`ironie et du sarcasme, le film joue constamment avec le spectateur, transgressant les règles habituelles du récit classique. Comédie de Benoît Mariage. Avec Benoît Poelvoorde, Morgane Simon, Bouli Lanners, Lise Lacroix et Jean-François Devigne.
It's like a Ken Loach movie... dubbed and re-edited by a bunch of doped-out pranksters. All the requisite elements of a earnest social-realist drama are in place. All that's missing are logic and reality. Baffling and incomprehensible, this Belgian comedy is full of jokes without punchlines, bizarre ideas, obscure allusions and absurd story arcs.
Le Ciel, les oiseaux et... ta mère! (1999) **
Directed by Djamel Bensalah. With Djamel Debbouze, Olivia Bonamy et Stephane Soo Mongo. "La Haine" meets "Conte d'ete" in this mind-boggling, deeply flawed, often entertaining and quite original little film about four tough, foul-mouthed ghetto kids on vacation in Biarritz. Dialogue is fresh, exciting... and often completely incomprehensible. Viewing this film is like listening to a hopelessly drunk jazz player blowing hard on his trombone. It's clumsy and imperfect, but highly refreshing.
Ca commence aujourd'hui (1999) **
Story of an elementary-school principal in a poor town in northern France.
La Bûche (1999) **
Directed by Danielle Thompson. With Emmanuelle Béart, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Sabine Azéma. Question: is the director English or French? It doesn't matter. The film is very, very French: husbands cheat on their wives (having children with their mistresses), and wives cheat on their husbands (having children with their lovers). And so three sisters (or maybe half-sisters?) have to sort out their complex family ties (an unknown half-brother, a stepfather's first wife, etc.), while making exactly the same mistakes as their parents.
Le Bleu des villes (1999) **
Directed by Stephane Brizé. With Florence Vignon, Antoine Chappey and Mathilde Seigner. Who wants to see a movie about a female trafic cop who dream of being a singer? Anyone? Granted, it doesn't sound very promising, but this French comedy/drama is actually quite entertaining and amazingly subtle. No, really. The heroine is like a butterfly - an ugly worm giving tickets to motorists who slowly metamorphoses into a beautiful creature ready to sing and fly.
Au coeur du mensonge (1999) **
Directed by Claude Chabrol. With Sandrine Bonnaire, Jacques Gamblin and Valeria Bruni-Tedeshi. When a little girl is raped and murdered, her art teacher becomes the prime suspect. But while his wife (Bonnaire) continues to support him, she still has an affair with another man. So it's up to a police inspector (Bruni-Tedeshi) to solve the murder mystery. What we've got here is a standard police drama, very well made, but hardly memorable.
Asterix et Obelix contre Cesar (1999) **
Directed by Claude Zidi. With Gerard Depardieu, Christian Clavier and Roberto Benigni. An entertaining, live-action-packed adaptation of Albert Uderzo and Rene Goscinny's comic books. It's very predictable, but in an exciting, funny and fast-paced way. Whether fighting snakes, lions, crocodiles, spiders or Roman soldiers, Asterix and Obelix never loose their Gallic sense of humor. And the production values (especially the sets and the costumes) are impressive.
A mort la mort (1999) **
Directed by Romain Goupil. With Romain Goupil, Marianne Denicourt and Dani. Pretty cruel, but not particularly funny satire about the old French radicals from May 68 events in Paris. They are presented as Militants Anonymous, forced to cope with their addiction to mass demonstrations, petitions and other types of organized protest. The humor doesn't work - it's often too creepy (or just plain bizarre), but there are some nicely twisted bits of pseudo-feminist objectification of the male body.
Les Amants criminels (1999) **
Directed by Francois Ozon. "Hansel And Gretel" meets "Natural Born Killers".
Alice et Martin (1999) **
Directed by Andre Techine. With Juliette Binoche, Alexis Loret and Carmen Maura. A solid, well-directed French drama about a young man (Loret) trying to deal with death of his father. The effective use of a "hidden" flashback greatly enchances the dramatic tension of this psychologically complex story that examines the issues of guilt, mental illness and personal responsability. Binoche is superb as Loret's supportive girlfriend.
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