News

Actress Anouk Aimée, the sophisticated French beauty who graced the films of Federico Fellini, Jacques Demy, Sidney Lumet, Bernardo Bertolucci and Claude Lelouch, has died. She was 92.

Aimee’s daughter said in an Instagram post on Tuesday that the star died at her home in Paris without providing further details.

Perhaps best known for her role opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant in Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman (1966) — for which she received an Oscar nomination for best actress and won a Golden Globe — Aimée also starred in such art house standouts as Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963), Demy’s Lola (1961), Jacques Becker’s Montparnasse 19 (1958) and Bertolucci’s Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981).

Her career kicked off in the late 1940s and lasted all the way through a reunion with Trintignant in The Best Years (Les Plus belles annees), Lelouch’s 2019 epilogue to A Man and a Woman.

With more than 80 feature credits,...

With the release of Ari Aster's third feature film, "Beau is Afraid" (read our review here), the word around the virtual water cooler is that Aster has solidified his place as the next great auteur. The word "auteur" gets thrown around a lot these days, joining the ranks of words like "iconic" that have seemingly lost all meaning in favor of becoming a way to say, "I really like this." Artistic assessment by the masses has grown increasingly hyperbolic, with every new film earning as many 5-star Letterboxd comments reading "a masterpiece" as it does 0.5-star declarations of "the worst movie ... ever." But auteur theory gained prominence back in the 1940s, birthed from French theorists André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc and given its name by American film critic Andrew Sarris.

The foundation was based on the idea of "director-as-author," but has evolved to also encompass a director's signature style or recognizable motifs.

The notion of the camera-stylo, introduced by Alexandre Astruc in 1948, had a very circumscribed meaning: “the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.” Quickly, though, the metaphor of camera as pen took on its own life: the French New Wave used it to propel auteur theory, while others used the metaphor in the opposite direction—filmmaking as a giant pen held by a crew, with the […]...

The notion of the camera-stylo, introduced by Alexandre Astruc in 1948, had a very circumscribed meaning: “the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.” Quickly, though, the metaphor of camera as pen took on its own life: the French New Wave used it to propel auteur theory, while others used the metaphor in the opposite direction—filmmaking as a giant pen held by a crew, with the […]...

Jean-Luc Godard quipped that his criticism represented a kind of cinematic terrorism. Serge Daney said his writing taught him not to be afraid to see. The Parisian publishing house Post-Éditions has made available a long overdue collection of his articles in French to decide for ourselves. Jacques Rivette became a filmmaker even before he became a critic. When he came to Paris from Rouen in 1950, he had already completed a short film, unlike Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer or Chabrol, his colleagues-to-be at Cahiers du cinéma and later fellow New Wave directors. By his own admission, he never wanted to be a film critic, not in the traditional sense of the term. But, considering his own dictum that “a true critique of a film can only be another film,” he never ceased to be one. Textes Critiques as an object has the appearance of a cinephilic totem: half-a foot in size, portable,...

Every so often, usually while walking around Toronto on a busy day, I'll be struck by the vividness and accuracy of Agnès Varda's singular portrayal of a day in the life (barely two hours, really, making it even more remarkable) spent in the various layers and spaces of the urban environment. I speak, of course, of Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda's 1962 classic and the first film of hers I fell in love with. In those instances, I'll find myself returning to the moments I've cherry-picked as my favorites over the years, skipping across the linear sequence of events that follow the titular singer (Corinne Marchand) across Paris as she waits for the results from a medical examination within the film's designated timeframe (minus half an hour, as the film famously ends at the ninety minute mark). More than for any other film, engaging in these mental replays feels very much like replaying the events of a day I had once experienced myself long ago—albeit one that I’ve been able to revisit and come to know nearly by heart, complete with all of my favorite moments and details waiting in their proper places, so often have I gone back to that June 21st in Paris, 1961.Varda has even made it relatively easy for anyone who wishes to explore and investigate to their heart's content the events of that fateful first day of summer from so long ago now, not only by making such a crisp cinematic itinerary of the various locations visited in the film itself, but also by helpfully providing a map in her book Varda par Agnès complete with a color-coded legend indicating the locations of key scenes from the film, practically inviting the reader to recreate Cléo’s journey for themselves on the streets of present-day Paris. At once attentive and relaxed in its tour of the city (mainly focused in the Left Bank), Cléo is ably conducted in a number of different registers: as an uncommonly lovely essay-poem on the ebb and flow of urban life, an at-times somber meditation on the precarious balance between life and death, and a revealing and honest study of female identity and the ways it is scrutinized and distorted in the public’s relentless gaze. In a feat of remarkable economy and resourcefulness, the film was shot in chronological order across a five-week period, beginning on the date of the story’s events, synchronized as closely as possible to the times in the day Cléo experiences them, in keeping with narrative fidelity and proper quality of light for each scene. Neatly arranged into thirteen chapters, each with its duration clearly stated so we can easily keep track in real time, Cléo’s lucid odyssey through the various public and private spaces that make up her day is observational cinema at its most fertile, free, and magically attuned to its subjects, partly the result of Varda and her team’s carefully planned and executed shoot, partly that of simply being in the right places at the right times.Together, the films of the French New Wave make up one of the most valuable and immersive audiovisual documents of a specific time and place in history—namely France in the late 1950s and early 1960s—that we have. This is especially true of the Paris-situated films, which create the alluring image of an interconnected network of overlapping stories concentrated in a single city. The sharing of certain actors, cinematographers, writers, composers, and other key artists and technicians across different films by different directors especially helped make the impression of one Paris holding an eclectic anthology of New Wave tales. This perception was further reinforced by the cheeky self-referential winks and nods that so many of the New Wave directors—Jean-Luc Godard in particular—lovingly included in their films as gestures of solidarity and support with their nouvelle vague comrades. This is why the eponymous hero of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur, noted by many as a crucial New Wave precursor, gets name-checked by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard’s Breathless, why Truffaut muses Marie Dubois and Jeanne Moreau both pop up in A Woman Is a Woman, with Moreau getting asked by Belmondo how Jules and Jim is coming along, and why Anna Karina’s Nana glimpses a giant poster for the same Truffaut film as she is being driven to her fate in the final moments of Vivre sa vie.Varda got in on the fun herself in Cléo from 5 to 7 not only by casting Michel Legrand, who provided the film with its robust score, as Cléo’s musical partner Bob (a part that gives the legendary composer a substantial amount of screen time and amply shows off his incandescent charm), but also by extending the invitation to Godard, Karina, Sami Frey, Eddie Constantine, Jean-Claude Brialy, producer Georges de Beauregard, and Alan Scott, who had appeared in Jacques Demy’s Lola. They all show up in Les fiancés du pont Macdonald, the silent comedy short-within-the-film that serves triple duty as a welcome diversion for our stressed heroine, a loving cinephilic tribute to the legacy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, and an irresistible, bite-sized New Wave party. And yet I find Cléo to be perhaps the most enchanting of all the New Wave films not for the aesthetic commonalities and cleverly devised linkages that bind it to The 400 Blows, Breathless, Paris Belongs to Us, and its other cinematic brethren, but rather for the tapestry of curious details that root it in its specific time and place and entice on the power of their inherent uniqueness and beauty. “Here,” Varda seems to say as she follows Cléo across the city, “let’s have a look at these interesting people and places on this first day of summer here in Paris, and see what we can see after watching them for a while.” The film’s opening scene continues to extend this invitation as it draws us in closer. It shows us, through the sepia-hued Eastmancolor that deviates from the rest of the film’s silvery monochrome and the “God’s eye” overhead shots (long before Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson adopted the technique as their own), the cryptic spectacle of Tarot cards being shuffled, placed down, and turned over to reveal the story of Cléo’s potential fate before we’ve even gotten a chance to properly meet Cléo herself. The slightly macabre illustrations to which Varda and cinematographer Jean Rabier dedicate their tight close-ups and the elderly card reader’s accompanying explanations of their meanings lend an air of prophecy to the events to come while also fueling Cléo’s anxiety surrounding her fate (when pressed for a clearer forecast of the future through a palm reading, the reader’s evasive response is less than inspiring). This introduction effectively locks us into Cléo’s perspective, preparing us for the next hour and a half that we will spend quietly observing as, following her distraught exit from the reader’s apartment, she grapples with her fears and insecurities, contemplates and revises her appearance and the identity behind it (tellingly, we discover late in the film that Cléo's real name is Florence), and comes to terms with the ultimately fragile nature of her own mortality. In our allotted chunk of time with her, we see the pouty girl-child subtly shift and adjust her attitude, inching a little closer towards a place of earned maturity, grace, and acceptance regarding her fate, wherever it may take her.Along the way, the film seems to expand to take in as much of the people and places around Cléo as it can. Scene by scene, her Paris makes itself felt and known through key peripheral details: a pair of lovers having an argument in a café near where Cléo sits, listening in; the procession of uniformed officers on horseback heard clip-clopping through the street on the soundtrack and seen reflected in the array of mirrors placed throughout a hat shop; a spider web of shattered mirror and a cloth pressed against a bloody wound, indicating some incident that occurred just before Cléo happened along the scene of the confused aftermath. Other stimuli fill a dazzling program of serendipitous entertainments for us to take in one by one: whirlwind rides in two taxis and a bus, an intimate musical rehearsal in Cléo’s chic, kitten-filled apartment (with Legrand, no less, clearly having a great time, his nimble fingers releasing ecstatic bursts of notes and melodies from Cléo’s piano as if they were exotic birds), the aforementioned silent short, a sculpting studio (the space alive with the indescribably pleasant sound of chisels being tapped at different tempos through soft stone), a frog swallower, a burly street performer who wiggles an iron spike through his arm, and the soothing sights and sounds of the Parc de Montsouris, among a hundred other subtle and overt pleasures scattered throughout this gently orchestrated city symphony, a heap of specificities found and sorted into a chorus of universal experience.Very much in her own way, across a body of work informed by a boundless spirit of generosity, Agnès Varda has gone about carefully collecting and preserving a marvelously varied assortment of subjects throughout her busy life, shedding fresh light on some of the most unlikely (and overlooked) people and places in the world. She refers to her self-made approach to filmmaking as ciné-criture (her own version of Alexandre Astruc's caméra-stylo), which, as we’ve come to know it through Varda’s intensely personal works, is a little like cinema, a little like writing, and uses aspects of both media to make a compassionate, genuine, and wholly original film language. Just as Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller), the dreamy young man whom Cléo encounters in the Parc de Montsouris, translates the world around them into a stream of fanciful observations and flowery speech, so too does Varda, in allegiance with poetry, ditch any semblance of objectivity, going instead for presenting the world simply as she sees it, investing it with her own unmistakable blend of charm, warmth, eloquence, and empathy, all somehow executed with nary a shred of ego or preachiness.“All these stories we simply can’t understand!” randomly exclaims a café patron to her young companion at one point late in Cléo’s journey, perhaps suddenly becoming aware, as we gradually have, of the unfathomable multitude of trajectories that trace themselves across every city every day in a dense tangle of narrative strands. In picking up Cléo’s and diligently following it with her camera for an hour and a half, Varda draws our attention to all those other strands that make up the lives of other people, leading off into their own directions, fated to become entangled with others still. Wisely, deftly, one discovered strand at a time, she helps us better appreciate, again and again, the humble miracle of so many lives coursing and thriving alongside each other, each one special and strange, each rooted in its own distinct flavor of being-ness. Cléo from 5 to 7 in turn roots us in another person’s life for its short time span and ends up giving us a whole universe, casually overflowing with meaning, life, lives, and the myriad details that shape and define them. No, we can’t understand all the stories we come across in a day. But then again, sometimes we don’t really need to understand so much as simply see. See, and accept, and appreciate what is...and then move along to whatever’s next.

Misery is constant and humor is fleeting in the world of A Woman’s Life (Une Vie), an emotionally overcast period drama from French filmmaker Stéphane Brizé (The Measure of a Man). Shot in square-shaped academy ratio, it recalls — in a certain aesthetic and thematic light — the Danish Dogme films of the mid ‘90s, but without the pitch-black misanthropic wit that made that collective famous. Based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1883 novel of the same name (Tolstoy apparently loved it), it follows the endlessly unfortunate life of Jeanne Le Perthuis des Vaud, heiress to the fortune of a wealthy farming family in France in the 19th Century.

Judith Chemla stars as our doomed heroine, at first a wistful young pixie living in the family château who spends her days frolicking around and contemplating rain and skies and the like. Her blissful bourgeois existence is rocked, however, when she is wed...

NEWSPortoThe late summer film festival lineups are starting to be unveiled. Toronto, partially announced, already looks massive (highlights include new films directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Jonathan Demme, and, yes, Nick Cannon), San Sebastien has announced the 14 films in its New Directors competition, including Notebook contributor Gabe Klinger's sophomore film Porto, and the Venice Days unofficial sidebar of the Venice Film Festival has its full lineup online.Speaking of lists, Filmmaker Magazine has picked its "twenty five new faces of independent film."A petition has been posted online to save the historic Rko studio globe in Hollywood.Recommended READINGThe Criterion Collection has posted King Hu's notes made for the Cannes Film Festival screening of his prize-winning wuxia classic, A Touch of Zen:But when I started working on the scenario, I discovered that translating the concept of Zen into cinematic terms posed a great many difficulties. Not long afterward, I...

Film-maker and writer whose theories on cinema influenced Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol

The writer and film director Alexandre Astruc, who has died aged 92, personified the gap between theory and practice. In his crucial and influential 1948 essay La Caméra-Stylo (The Camera-Pen) in L’Ecran Français, he wrote of the cinema becoming “a means of writing as supple and as subtle as that of written language”.

He called for an end to institutional cinema and for a new style that would be both personal and malleable. He was convinced that the cinema would replace the novel, but first the cinema must become more like the novel, in that cinéastes could express their obsessions and thoughts, even abstract ones, at the level of profundity and significance of an essay or novel. This was the first loud clarion call taken up by the young directors of the French New Wave a decade later, expanded and modified by François Truffaut,...

Award-winning French screenwriter known for his work on Jules and Jim, Paris Belongs to Us and and My American Uncle

The French New Wave, which changed notions of how films could be made, gave birth to a group of young directors headed by Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais and François Truffaut. Although they believed in Alexandre Astruc’s concept of the caméra-stylo – that film-makers should use the camera much as a writer uses a pen to create a personal vision – they still depended, for the most part, on screenwriters to help forge that vision. Among the writers most in demand, particularly by Truffaut and Resnais, was Jean Gruault, who has died aged 90.

Gruault arrived at the start of the New Wave when he co-wrote (with the directors) Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us (Paris Nous Appartient, shot in 1958, but released in 1961) and Truffaut’s Jules and Jim...

From the Pudsey The Dog movie to Joe Cornish and Roger Ebert, what happens when critics make films themselves?

Arts critics tend to get a rough time of it in the movies. Even looking at this year's awards season hopefuls, Birdman casts a wonderfully scabrous Lindsay Duncan as a theatre critic who is determined to kill the hero's play, and Mr. Turner presents John Ruskin as a lisping, pretentious fop, a representation that has led some to take mild umbrage.

To look even further back, at Ratatouille's sneering Anton Ego, or Lady In The Water's film-savvy 'straw critic', or Theatre Of Blood's gleefully murderous tract, there's not a whole lot of love for critics in film. Any of this might give way to the preconception that critics, especially film critics, don't actually like films and that they're out of touch with both the filmmakers whose works they...

Adieu au langage - Goodbye to Language

A Works Cited

Introduction

From its bluntly political opening (Alfredo Bandelli's 'La caccia alle streghe': "Always united we win, long live the revolution!") to its hilarious fecal humor and word play—with 3D staging that happily puts to shame James Cameron and every other hack who's tried their hand at it these past several years—Adieu au langage overwhelms us with a deluge of recited texts, music and images, hardly ever bothering to slow down to let us catch our breath. Exhilarating and certainly not surprising—this is the guy who made Puissance de la parole after all!

The release of a new Godard film or video means a new encounter with texts, films and music often familiar from the filmmaker's earlier work—reworked and re-contextualized—as well as new discoveries to be sorted through and identified. This life-long interest in quotation...

Elio Petri’s “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and Grand Prize at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, has been inducted into the Criterion Collection, the most important series of Blu-ray releases on the market. This is such a unique, bizarre film, one that I wasn’t familiar with until this release, which continues to prove that Criterion isn’t just a great company for known classics like Robert Altman’s “Nashville” but some films that may have fallen through the cracks of cinema history as well.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

While it is essentially a police procedural, Petri’s film is, to this viewer, primarily a satire of power gone awry. In it, a detective murders his mistress and then plants the evidence needed to convict him. We watch as the power structure that should put this guy away makes mistake after mistake and...

Winner of the Best Foreign Language Film in 1970, as well as the Grand Jury and Fipresci Prize Winner at the Cannes Film Festival, Italian auteur Elio Petri’s Investigation Of a Citizen Above Suspicion gets a splendorous digital transfer from Criterion this month, a notable title that remains one of the director’s finest works, as absurdly surreal as it is bafflingly realistic in its depiction of Italy’s actual political situation during the time period. And, perhaps due to this depiction, but also in part due to Petri’s own left wing siding, its protagonist’s paranoia towards liberalism seems to unmask the evils allowed by a democracy as merely a pretty euphemism for fascism. But whatever Petri’s own political agenda may or may not be with this darkly comedic tale of a grotesque abuse of power, it certainly would be apt to describe the film as Kafkaesque...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Dec. 3, 2013

Price: Blu-ray/DVD Combo $39.95

Studio: Criterion

Gian Maria Volonté goes on the record in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.

The Oscar-winning 1970 thriller Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is the provocative Italian filmmaker Elio Petri’s most internationally acclaimed work.

A striking and visceral film, Petri maintains a tricky balance between absurdity and realism in telling the Kafkaesque tale of a Roman police inspector (A Fistful of Dollars’s Gian Maria Volonté, in a commanding performance) investigating a heinous crime—which he committed himself.

Both a penetrating character study and a disturbing commentary on the draconian crackdowns by the Italian government in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Petri’s portrait of surreal bureaucracy is a perversely pleasurable rendering of controlled chaos.

Criterion’s Blu-ray/DVD Combo release of the film is presented in Italian with English subtitles and contains the following features:

• New...

Tier ?

The Tree of Life (Terence Malick)

Tier 1

The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo)

No Man’s Land (Victor Trivas )

This Is Not a Film (Mojtaba Mirtahasebi & Jafar Panahi)

Tier 2

L'apollonide (Souvenirs de la maison close) (Bertrand Bonello)

Le gamin au vélo (Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne)

Le Havre (Aki Kaurismaki)

Miss Bala (Gerardo Nananjo)

Oslo, August 31 (Joachim Trier)

Play (Ruben Östlund)

Puzzle of a Downfall Child (Jerry Schatzberg)

Le rideau cramoisi [The Crimson Curtain] (Alexandre Astruc)

Tier 3

Chatrak (Vimukthi Jayasundra)

Drive (Nicholas Winding Refn)

The Hunter (Bakur Bakuradze)

Impardonnables (André Téchiné)

Ninja Kids!!! (Takashi Miike)

Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen)

Wu Xia (Peter Chan)

Tier 4

L’assassino (Elio Petri)

Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai 3D (Takashi Miike)

Melancholia (Lars von Trier)

Tier ...

(the rest)...

Versatile French actor whose work ranged from popular comedy to melodrama

Annie Girardot, who has died aged 79 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease, was an extremely versatile performer whose distinguished career stretched from the Comédie-Française, through popular comedies and melodramas to the French New Wave and beyond. Jean Cocteau, in whose play La Machine à Ecrire (The Typewriter) she starred, called her "the finest dramatic temperament of the postwar period". Hardly ever considered a sex goddess like her near contemporaries Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot, the petite Girardot, with her strongly etched features, often set off by short hair, and a warm deep voice was, nevertheless, able to create an erotic charge when needed.

Ironically, following her screen debut in 1956, and after nine French films in four years, she came to international prominence when her voice was dubbed into Italian in Luchino Visconti's Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers,...

Jean‑Luc Godard's masterpiece remains a startling example of the French new wave and marked the arrival of one of cinema's most influential directors

Two trailers bookend my half-a-century of writing professionally about the cinema and bracket the career of the man who is arguably the most influential moviemaker of my lifetime. Fifty years ago this month I dropped into an Oslo cinema while waiting for a midnight train and saw an unforgettable trailer for a French picture. It cut abruptly between a handsome, broken-nosed actor I'd never come across before, giant posters of Humphrey Bogart, and the familiar features of Jean Seberg, whom I knew to be an idol of French cinéastes as the protegee of Otto Preminger. Shot in high contrast monochrome, rapidly edited, interspersed with puzzling statements in white-on-black and black-on-white lettering, it was like no other trailer I'd seen, and I was captivated. Not until my...

"Les Ames Fortes" (Savage Souls) marks veteran Chilean director Raoul Ruiz's second cinematic outing with the work of one of France's literary greats. First it was Proust's "Time Regained". Now he tackles an adaptation of a novel by the lesser-known Jean Giono.

"Les Ames Fortes" was the closing movie at this year's Cannes film festival where it failed to impress. It seems to have had a similar effect on French audiences: The film has racked up not much more than 200,000 admissions to date.

It's easy to see why. This a faltering and confused tale based on the story of a young servant girl, Therese, played by supermodel Laetitia Casta.

At the age of 22, Therese runs away with her fiance, Firmin (Frederic Diefanthal), to a small town where she marries, finds work and settles down to start a family. While pregnant with her first child, she meets the rich and mysterious Madame Numance (Arielle Dombasle), who takes an immediate and inexplicable shine to the young girl, setting her and her husband up in a small house.

Not content with making the most of this unexpected good fortune, Firmin hatches a plan to defraud Madame Numance and her husband (John Malkovich). As a result, M. Numance has a heart attack and dies while Mme. Numance leaves the small town without a trace. Therese blames her husband and has him murdered. And there the movie ends with the audience left guessing as to what the future holds for the enigmatic Therese.

Although quite a simple tale, the movie manages to come across as disjointed and complicated. Only the relationship between Therese and Firmin seems clear cut. Madame Numance and Therese gaze endlessly into each other's eyes, but the sparse dialogue gives the audience no clue as to the real nature of their relationship. The rapport between the Numances is equally hazy, at times loving, at times sadistic, at times baffling.

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect is why Ruiz chose Casta to play the lead role. She simply cannot hold her own in the presence of heavyweights like Malkovich and Dombasle. Where a more seasoned actresses could turn the lack of dialogue to her advantage, Casta merely draws into play a limited range of facial expressions.

Perhaps because of -- or in response to -- Casta's lack of experience, the others appear to overcompensate. Thus, Dombasle frequently slips into high drama, while Malkovich contrives to be more impenetrable and arch than usual.

Ruiz is known to be a director who defies convention and brings to his work more than a touch of the surreal. In this at least, "Savage Souls" can be said to be a success.

LES AMES FORTES

MDI Productions

Producers: Alain Mijani d'Inguimbert, Dimitri de Clercq, Marc de Lassus Saint-Genies

Director: Raoul Ruiz

Writers: Alexandre Astruc, Mitchell Hooper, Alain Majani d'Inguimbert, Alain

Neuhoff

Director of photography: Eric Gautier

Production designer: Bruno Beauge

Music: Jorge Arriagada

Costume designer: Marielle Robaut

Editor: Valerie Sarmiento

Stereo/color

Cast:

Therese: Laetitia Casta

Firmin: Frederic Diefenthal

Madame Numance: Arielle Dombasle

Monsieur Numance: John Malkovich

Reveillard: Charles Berling

Rampal: Johan Leysen

Minister: Christian Vadim

Mute man: Carlos Lopez III

Running time -- 120 minutes

No MPAA rating...

"Les Ames Fortes" (Savage Souls) marks veteran Chilean director Raoul Ruiz's second cinematic outing with the work of one of France's literary greats. First it was Proust's "Time Regained". Now he tackles an adaptation of a novel by the lesser-known Jean Giono.

"Les Ames Fortes" was the closing movie at this year's Cannes film festival where it failed to impress. It seems to have had a similar effect on French audiences: The film has racked up not much more than 200,000 admissions to date.

It's easy to see why. This a faltering and confused tale based on the story of a young servant girl, Therese, played by supermodel Laetitia Casta.

At the age of 22, Therese runs away with her fiance, Firmin (Frederic Diefanthal), to a small town where she marries, finds work and settles down to start a family. While pregnant with her first child, she meets the rich and mysterious Madame Numance (Arielle Dombasle), who takes an immediate and inexplicable shine to the young girl, setting her and her husband up in a small house.

Not content with making the most of this unexpected good fortune, Firmin hatches a plan to defraud Madame Numance and her husband (John Malkovich). As a result, M. Numance has a heart attack and dies while Mme. Numance leaves the small town without a trace. Therese blames her husband and has him murdered. And there the movie ends with the audience left guessing as to what the future holds for the enigmatic Therese.

Although quite a simple tale, the movie manages to come across as disjointed and complicated. Only the relationship between Therese and Firmin seems clear cut. Madame Numance and Therese gaze endlessly into each other's eyes, but the sparse dialogue gives the audience no clue as to the real nature of their relationship. The rapport between the Numances is equally hazy, at times loving, at times sadistic, at times baffling.

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect is why Ruiz chose Casta to play the lead role. She simply cannot hold her own in the presence of heavyweights like Malkovich and Dombasle. Where a more seasoned actresses could turn the lack of dialogue to her advantage, Casta merely draws into play a limited range of facial expressions.

Perhaps because of -- or in response to -- Casta's lack of experience, the others appear to overcompensate. Thus, Dombasle frequently slips into high drama, while Malkovich contrives to be more impenetrable and arch than usual.

Ruiz is known to be a director who defies convention and brings to his work more than a touch of the surreal. In this at least, "Savage Souls" can be said to be a success.

LES AMES FORTES

MDI Productions

Producers: Alain Mijani d'Inguimbert, Dimitri de Clercq, Marc de Lassus Saint-Genies

Director: Raoul Ruiz

Writers: Alexandre Astruc, Mitchell Hooper, Alain Majani d'Inguimbert, Alain

Neuhoff

Director of photography: Eric Gautier

Production designer: Bruno Beauge

Music: Jorge Arriagada

Costume designer: Marielle Robaut

Editor: Valerie Sarmiento

Stereo/color

Cast:

Therese: Laetitia Casta

Firmin: Frederic Diefenthal

Madame Numance: Arielle Dombasle

Monsieur Numance: John Malkovich

Reveillard: Charles Berling

Rampal: Johan Leysen

Minister: Christian Vadim

Mute man: Carlos Lopez III

Running time -- 120 minutes

No MPAA rating...