When visitors from the real world arrive (husbands, lovers, bankers, journalists), they are provided with a director’s chair to sit in, and they watch the action and nod and smile like proud grandparents. They’ll never understand. “I’d drop a guy for a film,” a character says in “Day for Night.” “I’d never drop a film for a guy.”La Nuit américaine chronicles the production of Je Vous Présente Paméla (Meet Pamela, also referred to as I want you to meet Pamela), a clichéd melodrama starring aging screen icon, Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont), former diva Séverine (Valentina Cortese), young heart-throb Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and a British actress, Julie Baker (Jacqueline Bisset) who is recovering from both a nervous breakdown and the controversy leading to her marriage with her much older doctor. In between are several small vignettes chronicling the stories of the crew-members and the director; Ferrand (Truffaut himself) tangles with the practical problems one deals with when making a movie. Behind the camera, the actors and crew go through several romances, affairs, break-ups, and sorrows.
The production is especially shaken up when Alphonse's fiancee leaves him for the film's stuntman, which leads him to a one night stand with Julie, when one of the secondary actresses is revealed to be pregnant, and when Alexandre is killed suddenly in a car crash.Truffaut’s film is like a little anthology of anecdotes from movie sets. We recognize all the familiar types: The callow young love-mad star (Jean-Pierre Leaud); the alcoholic diva past her prime (Valentina Cortese); the sexy romantic lead (Jacqueline Bisset), whose breakdowns are hopefully behind her now that she’s married her doctor; and the aging leading man (Jean-Pierre Aumont) who is finally coming to terms with his homosexuality. There are also the functionaries with supporting roles: The script girl, the stunt man, the producer, the woman who runs the hotel.
Maria (Ana Fernandez), whose parents live in the country, cannot stand her father's authoritarian ways and moves to the city. She finds a job as a cleaner and tries to survive in a wretched apartment in the shabby part of a big city. She is pregnant, and the fact that her boyfriend has abandoned her does not help matters. When her father goes to the hospital for an operation, her mother comes to stay with her.in another words Solas (Alone) tells the story of Maria (Ana Fernández) and her mother Rosa (María Galiana). Maria is one of four adult children, all of whom moved as far as they could get from their parents and the farm where they grew up. Before the movie starts, the father (later revealed to be a violent, cruel, abusive man) has fallen ill and been brought to a hospital in Seville, where Maria lives. Rosa has been staying at the hospital with him, but the doctor tells her to leave before she falls ill herself. Maria takes Rosa to stay with her in the rundown suburban apartment where she lives, and Rosa rides the bus every day to visit her husband.Maria is intelligent and wanted an education, but her father wouldn't allow it. Now, at 35, she works for a cleaning service; she is lonely, poor, angry and bitter. She discovers she is pregnant by a man who doesn't want a baby and tells Maria to get an abortion.
When she tells him she wants to have the baby and raise it with him, the man rejects her. In her anger and despair, Maria starts drinking heavily.As her mother Rosa returns from shopping one day, she meets Maria's neighbor (vecino) Don Emilio (Carlos Álvarez-Novoa), a kind old widower living alone with his dog. A friendship blossoms between them: he lends Rosa some money when she runs short at the supermarket, and she cooks for him after he burns a stew he forgot was cooking. He falls in love with Rosa, but Rosa is faithful to her abusive husband. (At one point she says to Maria about her father, "He must not have an easy conscience. I do.") Rosa's husband recovers and she returns with him to the country, not knowing about Maria's pregnancy. Maria tells Don Emilio about the baby and tells him she plans to abort it. In a long, emotional scene, he offers to be like a grandfather to the child if she decides to keep it, but Maria has been so badly treated by the men in her life that she has trouble believing him. The movie ends with Maria visiting her parents' grave with her baby girl and Don Emilio. He is going to sell his apartment in Seville and the three of them will move into Rosa's house in the country to raise the baby.
Based on a novel by Gabriele d'Annunzio, The Innocent (L'Innocente) is set amongst the aristocracy of 19th-century Italy. Wealthy Tullio (Giancarlo Giannini) thinks nothing of squiring his mistress (Jennifer O'Neill) in full view of his friends and the public. But when Giannini's cast-off wife (Laura Antonelli) begins an affair with a young novelist (based, it is said, on author d'Annunzio), it is too much for the philandering aristocrat. Outside of Erich von Stroheim, few directors were as masterful at combining lavishness with depravity as Luchino Visconti. The Innocent turned out to be Visconti's last film; he died in 1976, shortly before the picture's premiere."L'Innocente" was the final film from Italian director, Luchino Visconti, and stands up to his greatest achievements. Laura Antonelli, one of the most alluring stars of 70s Italian cinema, stars as Giuliana Hermil, a beautiful aristocrat who is ignored by her philandering husband, Tullio (Giancarlo Giannini). Everywhere Giuliana goes, she is confronted by the most recent of her husband's conquests, the sensual Teresa Raffo (Jennifer O'Neill). After being embarrassed once too often, Giuliana decides to turn the tables and make her husband jealous. However, she underestimates the power of her plan as well as her husband's passion for her, which results in mounting tragedies.Adapted from the 1892 novel by Gabriele d'Annunzio, the script for "The Innocent" is extremely good, with Giuliana's revenge beautifully plotted.
At times, it's difficult to tell her intentions, but that doesn't really distract from the story. The cast is also one of the most stunning looking in history - Antonelli, O'Neill, and Giannini are joined by doe-eyed Didier Haudepin as Giannini's younger brother (he starred 12 years earlier in the notorious French film, "This Special Friendship"). Their physical beauty rivals the sumptuous Italian villas and scenery with which Visconti populates the film.I'm not sure why it took until 2009 for this near-masterpiece to be released on DVD, but fortunately they did a nice job. The film looks gorgeous.
In 1939 Italy, Guido Orefice is a funny and charismatic young Jewish man looking for work in a city. He falls in love with a local school teacher, Dora, who is to be engaged to a rich but arrogant civil servant. Guido engineers further meetings with her, seizing on coincidental incidents to declare his affection for her, and finally wins her over. He steals her from her engagement party on a horse, humiliating her fiance and mother. Soon they are married and have a son, Joshua.Through the first part, the film depicts the changing political climate in Italy: Guido frequently imitates members of the National Fascist Party, skewering their racist logic and pseudoscientific reasoning (at one point, jumping onto a table to demonstrate his "perfect Aryan bellybutton"). However, the growing Fascist wave is also evident: the horse Guido steals Dora away on has been painted green and covered in antisemitic insults.Later during World War II, after Dora and her mother have reconciled, Guido, his Uncle Eliseo and Joshua are seized on Joshua's birthday, forced onto a train and taken to a concentration camp. Despite being a non-Jew, Dora demands to be on the same train to join her family. In the camp, Guido hides their true situation from his son, convincing him that the camp is a complicated game in which Joshua must perform the tasks Guido gives him, earning him points; the first team to reach one thousand points will win a tank. He tells him that if he cries, complains that he wants his mother, or says that he is hungry, he will lose points, while quiet boys who hide from the camp guards earn extra points.Guido uses this game to explain features of the concentration camp that would otherwise be scary for a young child: the guards are mean only because they want the tank for themselves; the dwindling numbers of children (who are being killed by the camp guards) are only hiding in order to score more points than Joshua so they can win the game.
He puts off Joshua's requests to end the game and return home by convincing him that they are in the lead for the tank, and need only wait a short while before they can return home with their tank. Despite being surrounded by the misery, sickness, and death at the camp, Joshua does not question this fiction because of his father's convincing performance and his own innocence.Guido maintains this story right until the end when, in the chaos of shutting down the camp as the Americans approach, he tells his son to stay in a sweatbox until everybody has left, this being the final competition before the tank is his. Guido tries to find Dora, but is caught by a soldier. As he is marched off to be executed, he maintains the fiction of the game by deliberately marching in an exaggerated goose-step as he passes Joshua's hiding place.The next morning, Joshua emerges from the sweatbox as the camp is occupied by an American armored division; he thinks he has won the game. The soldiers let him ride in the tank until, later that day, he sees Dora in the crowd of people streaming home from the camp. In the film, Joshua is a young boy; however, both the beginning and ending of the film are narrated by an older Joshua recalling his father's story of sacrifice for his family.
Loulou is a 1980 French drama film directed by Maurice Pialat. It stars Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu. For Loulou, Pialat was nominated for the Golden Palm award at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.Maurice Pialat's character study eschews traditional plot development in its examination of the power of sex and passion to overturn class restrictions and social conventions. Isabelle Huppert is Nelly, a middle-class Parisian housewife, married to possessive husband Andre (Guy Marchand). When she meets street thug Loulou (Gerard Depardieu), her middle-class respectability is thrown out the window and she leaves Andre for Loulou. Loulou, who has no job and resorts to robbery to survive, is more than willing to live off Nelly's money.
But Andre won't give her up and, in the mind-set of a middle-class bourgeois, tries to convince her to return.Once described as the true heir to Jean Renoir’s legacy, French filmmaker Maurice Pialat is noted for his brutal, insightful portraits of the less savory aspects of family life and French society, as well as for his ability to evoke unusually powerful and realistic performances from his actors regardless of their professional status. Pialat, who is known as one of his country’s more “difficult” directors due to both his subject matter and on-set clashes, was born in Puy-de-Dôme but raised in Paris after the age of three.
He started out as a painter and jack-of-all-trades and did sporadic work as an actor. In the late ’50s, Pialat became fascinated with cinema, and he got his start making short films, notably Amour Existe (1961), which won a prize at the Venice Festival.After spending much of the ‘60s working in French television, Pialat made his feature-film debut in 1968 with Naked Childhood, a cinema verité-style drama utilizing nonprofessional actors. A study in New Wave realism that was relentless in its focus on the unglamorous realities of life, the film won Pialat international acclaim. His subsequent work continued in the realist vein, with very rare excursions into the genre realm (Police (1985), Sous le Soleil du Satan (1987)). Some of Pialat’s more notable films include Loulou (1980), a study of middle-class ennui and the liberating benefits of hooliganism; À Nos Amours (1983), which focused on the emotionally problematic life of a promiscuous teenager (Sandrine Bonnaire); Under the Sun of Satan (1987), a religious moral drama that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes; and Van Gogh (1991), a nearly three-hour look at the last year of the painter’s life. A frequent collaborator with actors Gerard Depardieu and Sandrine Bonnaire, Pialat also worked as an actor in both his films and those of other directors. watch clips for Isabelle Huppert: teammovieschannel
Love sick aka Legături bolnăvicioase tells the story of Alexandra and Cristina, two students who fall in love and try to make their relationship work, as Cristina's brother, Sandu, always gets in the way of their happiness. His involvement and role in the girl's life is revealed from the beginning and it changes the story, now having two delicate themes to work on, as the title suggest. The romance between the two girls starts innocently, with shy looks and stollen kisses, and soon transforms into a sweet, full of love connection that only trembles at the sight of Sandu. Cristina is overly protective and weirdly secretive of him, and as much as she loves Alex, she cannot let got of her brother, and that will ultimately come between them.Overall, the film is not perfect: there are some gaps in the script and some situations and feelings are never properly explained, but sometimes that is better for the story. It keeps a little bit of mystery over the already exposed relationships and makes you think. BUT there are some wonderful little things that make the movie special.First of all,the acting in it is superb: I don't know if you will think the same, but to me it looked amazing, as all of the stars perfectly portrayed their characters, displaying a sense of reality and emotion that is hard to transmit- when I say reality, I talk about how a normal Romanian person would act or talk. Their chemistry has palpable and seemed real, especially between the girls, and it was interesting to watch so many legendary Romanian actors in supporting roles: the lady who rents the room for Alex (probably one of my favorite characters- she is the incarnation of the typical over 50 lonely woman living on a pension), the parents, especially Kiki's mother and Alex's father, the taxi driver at the end (famous rapper) and the older woman who travels with Sandu (huge celebrity over here).
As for the three main characters, what can I say? Maria Popistasu played Cristina with a carefree, but sensitive spirit, who worries too much about the people around her instead of her own happiness; I liked this character best, although I probably identify myself more with Alex. One of my favorite scenes is when she calls a special person to leave a Happy Birthday message- her voice, the way she talks to it, her bittersweet words that almost erupt with love and longing are just wonderful, as crazy and inappropriate it seems. (you'll understand when you'll see the movie). Ioana Barbu was the perfect Alex to Popistasu's Cristina, showcasing perfectly the sweet, innocent, rather naive character (it was also her debut in acting). Sandu, played by Tudor Chirila, a famous singer in Romania, didn't have enough screen time, but that helped the movie get its much needed mystery- in the end, you still haven't figured him out, and maybe that is for the best, as the core of the story was the relationship between the girls.
Forbidden Relations (Hungarian: Visszaesők) is a 1983 Hungarian drama film directed by Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács. It was entered into the 1983 Cannes Film Festival.The Hungarian Forbidden Relations is a shockingly straightforward treatise on the subject of incest. A woman's (Lili Monori) love for her brother (Miklos B. Szekely) goes far beyond filial devotion. His feelings for her are likewise intense. The problem goes beyond conventional morality: incest is illegal in communist Hungary, and as a result both brother and sister are thrown into prison. American audiences weren't always certain whether Forbidden Relations was simply a paean to individual freedom or an advocacy of impure love.from another words startling and sensual tale of a brother and sister bound by love and separated by the rules of society.
When the incestuous relationship between siblings Juli and Gyorgy results in a pregnancy, Gyorgy is sent to prison, which only serves to amplify their love as they fight back against those keeping them apart.With Joe Horvath, Lili Monori, Miklos Szekely B.
