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The films in this program are
double-featured. One ticket buys admission to any two consecutive films.
You can't really tell a story unless you take to the road. Narrative itineraries always run away from known territory, light out for terra incognita, and finally fetch up on some kind of homeground--familiar or transformed, but always seen in a brand-new light. Sometimes the journey comes to an end on some unmapped frontier, an outland where you can stake a claim and reinvent yourself. Movies especially lend themselves to this form of travel; they are ribbons of dreams unreeling like the brightly colored lines weaving through roadmaps.
From December 26 through January 10, we present a wonderfully varied selection of great French films about drifters and dreamers who get definitively lost or find brand-new identities; men, women or families who risk all for actual and psychological lebensraum; all manner of pilgrims who embark on killing or renewing quests and those innocents (as well as sinners) abroad who find true citizenship and salvation overseas. Join us for a road trip you won't forget!
Note: All films are subtitled in English.
program notes and times
OVERSEAS / OUTREMER
Brigitte Rouän, 1992; 95 minutes
In Algeria during French colonial rule just after WWII, we witness the same dramatic events through the eyes of each of three sisters, Frenchwomen who consider this foreign land their true home. Zon (Nicole Garcia) marries a mostly absent naval officer, and plays the role of constant mother, while Malene (Brigitte Rouän) loves her bookworm husband, though working their farm falls on her practical shoulders. Gritte (Marianne Basler) resists marrying her fiancé, a young diplomat, and embarks on a powerfully passionate affair with a handsome Algerian rebel. In Rouän's Rashomon, the personal and the political merge in a mesmerizing chronicle of strong, beautiful women abroad in a strange land.
Friday, December 26: 2 and 6:15 pm
Saturday, December 27: 4 and 8:15 pm
CHOCOLAT
Claire Denis, 1988; 105 minutes
A young woman returns to West Africa in 1988, where she lived on a plantation as a child with her mother (Giulia Boschi), father (François Cluzet), and Protée, their black houseboy. In flashbacks, the aptly named France Dalens revists her past: Despite his status in a racist society, Protée (Isaac Bankolé) is the best man-morally, sexually-in the place, and both mother and daughter gravitate to him in different ways, as a kind of anchor in the daunting silence and immensity of their African environment. A beautiful, delicate movie for adults about what or whom may constitute homeground.
Friday, December 26: 4 and 8:15 pm
Saturday, December 27: 6 pm
HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR
Alain Resnais, 1959; 91 minutes
A French actress (Emmanuele Riva) comes to Hiroshima to make a film about the devastation of the atomic bomb and finds herself deeply in love with a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). As their brief encounter continues, she shares with him her terrible WWII memory of losing the German boy she adored and having her head shaved as a collaborator. By means of innovative use of flashbacks, sound and visual transformations of the lovers' very flesh, Resnais unforgettably merges Nevers (the actress's hometown, where she suffered so much) and Hiroshima (her lover), the past and the present, individual and universal human anguish. From a script by Marguerite Duras, with music by Georges Delerue.
Sunday, December 28: 4 and 7:45 pm
Monday, December 29: 2 and 6 pm
SUNLESS / SANS SOLEIL
Chris Marker, 1982; 100 minutes
A fictional cameraman tries to make sense of the cultural dislocation he sees and feels in Japan, West Africa and Iceland. Using diverse images, letters, quotes and musings, Marker continues to extend the limits of the "documentary." Here, he makes use of new video technology and image-processing provided by Hayao Yamenko, credited with special effects. The rest is a poetic, philosophical and political collage, which Marker describes as like "a musical composition, with recurrent themes, counterpoints and mirror-like fugues."--Bergan and Karney, Holt's Foreign Film Guide
Sunday, December 28: 5:45 and 9:30 pm
Monday, December 29: 4 and 7:45 pm
PÉPÉ LE MOKO
Julien Duvivier, 1936; 93 minutes
Black shirt, white tie, two-tone shoes, a stolen jewel winking from his palm--Pépé (Jean Gabin) is the very picture of a gangster-dandy. But this romantic outlaw is confined to the Casbah, refuge for the colorful dregs of Casablanca--and Pépé yearns for Paris and impossibly pure love. Enter Gaby, an elegant Parisienne (Mireille Balin), who soon plays inadvertent femme fatale to her doomed lover, as shady cop Slimane sets the couple up for the fall. Gabin's never been matched in his world-weary idealism: he captured the essence of Casablanca's "Rick" long before Bogart came on the scene.
Tuesday, December 30: 2, 6 and 9:30 pm
THE WALLS OF MALAPAGA /
AU-DELA DES GRILLES
Rene Clement, 1949; 95 minutes
A man (Jean Gabin) fleeing the police after murdering his mistress meets and spends his last days of freedom with a lonely waitress (Isa Miranda, Best Actress, Cannes) and her young daughter. Holt's Foreign Film Guide describes this Franco-Italian co-production as "a simple and honest slice of life in which two lost and lonely people find temporary solace together...complicated by the bewildered jealousy of the little girl, played with remarkable expressiveness by Vera Talchi." (Clement won Best Director prize at Cannes and an Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film.)
Tuesday, December 30: 4 and 7:45 pm
THE STORY OF ADELE H.
Francois Truffaut, 1975; 98 minutes
A quintessentially heartbreaking movie about a woman who loves not wisely but too well, and the exquisite
Isabelle Adjani (in Truffaut's words, "a musical composition for one instrument"). The daughter of Victor Hugo, Adele falls passionately in love with a young English soldier and pursues him relentlessly from one international posting to another, refusing to acknowledge his indifference, cherishing her obsessive fiction, becoming her own homeland.
Wednesday, December 31: 2 and 6:15 pm
THE PROUD ONES / LES ORGUEILLEUX
Yves Allegret, 1953; 105 minutes
In this adaptation of a Jean-Paul Sartre novel, Allegret goes for uncompromising realism when it comes to his Mexican milieu: hot, dirty, and home to flocks of flies. A young Frenchwoman (Michele Morgan) and her husband improbably choose this hellhole for a holiday, but the latter suddenly succumbs to fever, leaving Morgan stranded, without a peso to her name. She soon falls in love with a young doctor (Gerard Phillipe) who is drowning his grief for his dead wife in drink; redeeming him, she finds a new life for herself by joining him in his work.
Wednesday, December 31: 4 and 8:15 pm
WAGES OF FEAR / LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR
Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953; 140 minutes
Best Film and Best Actor (Charles Vanel) Cannes, 1953;
Best Film, Berlin Film Festival, 1953
Stranded in a sleazy South American town, four losers--Yves Montand, Folco Lulli, Peter Van Eyck, Charles Vanel--sign on to drive two trucks full of nitroglycerine 300 miles over very bad backroads. WAGES is probably one of the most hair-raising, edge-of-your-seat cinematic rides ever made--you sweat and grit your teeth right along with these money-hungry daredevils as they literally go through tropical hell.
Thursday, January 1: 2, 5 and 8 pm
THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA
Tran Anh Hung, 1993; 100 minutes
A film of extraordinary grace, set in 50s and 60s Vietnam, PAPAYA shows a lost world through the eyes of a 12-year-old servant, Mui, as she grows up. Tran Anh Hung's first feature possesses an hallucinatory, uninsistently mystical quality: precise, mundane household tasks--peeling, chopping, mopping, frying--cumulatively become magically sustaining ritual. The intensity of the film's nostalgia brings every scene into hyperreal focus, with only the whine of a plane overhead to signal PAPAYA's time period. Memory unfolds as sensuously as a flower in this Proustian dream.
Friday, January 2: 2 and 6:30 pm
Saturday, January 3: 4:10 and 8:30 pm
INDIA SONG
Marguerite Duras, 1975; 120 minutes
Setting her film in "a metaphorical India," Duras draws us into a strange, poetic movie full of slow tracking shots. A failed concert pianist (the richly sensual Delphine Seyrig), now a pampered wife, carries on many affairs while her husband, a French vice-consul (Michel Lonsdale), is as embroiled in ritual and artifice as everyone else in this waking dream. A truly mesmerizing cinematic experiment, full of heat and languor.
Friday, January 2: 4:10 and 8:30 pm
Saturday, January 3: 6:15 pm
LE GRAND JEU
Jacques Feyder, 1934; 115 minutes
After having his heart broken by a Parisian society belle, Pierre-Richard Willm runs off to Morocco to become a French Legionnaire--only to find the woman's double in a local cabaret singer. Marie Bell plays both roles, but another actress provides her Moroccan voice to add to the strange spell of passion. This erotic romance only proves that you can't run away from l'amour fou. (Also starring Françoise Rosay, the director's wife.)
Monday, January 5: 2 and 6 pm
Tuesday, January 6: 3:45 pm
TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN /
DEUX HOMMES DANS MANHATTAN
Jean-Pierre Melville, 1958; 100 minutes
Melville's low-budget, pre-New Wave experiment on the streets of a Manhattan is "as dark as it is beautiful." A French journalist (Melville himself) and a photographer pursue the story of a missing French diplomat who, it seems, has died in the apartment of his mistress. The choice is whether to protect the reputation of one's native land or to ferret out the truth--whatever that may be. Semi-documentary New York exteriors are cunningly intercut with French interiors, and a jazz score backs up this exhilarating jeu d'esprit.
Monday, January 5: 4:15 and 8:15 pm
Tuesday, January 6: 2 pm
RETURN TO INDIA
Bernard Favre, 1996; 92 minutes
October 1954: In one week, Pondichery will end its history as a French colony and join the recently independent nation of India. Within the sleeping "white city," there is bustling activity. Behind the high walls of the beautiful colonial houses--surrounded, invaded by lush tropical vegetation--the French prepare to leave their homes "in another country" for the last time.
Wednesday, January 7: 2 and 6 pm
Thursday, January 8: 4 pm
THE 317TH PLATOON
Pierre Schoendorffer, 1965; 94 minutes
In this Best Documentary Academy Award winner, Schoendorffer powerfully chronicles the experiences of a platoon of soldiers fighting and dying in Vietnam. Shot at the front, PLATOON pulses with striking images and events.
Wednesday, January 7: 4 and 8 pm
Thursday, January 8: 2 pm
THE WAR WITHOUT A NAME
Bertrand Tavernier, 1991; 240 minutes
Tavernier tries to provide a respectful, objective accounting of the Algerian War, as recalled by the conscripts who fought it. Some 40 of these veterans--Gaullists, Christians, Communists, laborers, farmers, teachers, etc.---are interviewed about their extremely varied experiences, from the 1954 demonstrations against conscription through the victorious entry of the Army of National Liberation into Algiers in 1962. An uncompromising film that permits us to witness the painful process of self-examination up close and very personal.
Friday, January 9: 2 and 6:30 pm
Saturday, January 10: 4 pm
special event: presented with special funding from the Ira M. Resnick Foundation
L'ATLANTIDE
Jacques Feyder, 1921; 125 minutes
A very rare silent, with live piano accompaniment by Curtis Salke.
An adventure tale about the discovery of a lost civilization in the middle of the Sahara desert ruled by a woman named Antinea (Stacia Napierkowska). Amid unrelenting heat and sand, a passionate Frenchman encounters this mysterious and beautiful femme fatale who arouses the kind of desire that can only lead to death in French sagas of love. Actually shot in the Sahara and Algiers, with real Arabs as extras, the phenomenonally successful L'ATLANTIDE was one of the first "colonial films" to achieve authentically exotic ambience.
Sunday, January 4: 4:30 and 7 pm
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