French films are shit. Porquoi?

Aren't you making some awfully sweeping generalizations?

I am not an idiot, I am a dolt - as I explained somewhere else.

This is like..

Is that like the French version of Porky's?

you hate melies = you hate me

I would like to declare this the funniest thing any critic has said ever.

mark s loves melies = i love mark s (but you all know this)

ace french films (don't know if already mentioned up thread): la haine / nikita / rififi

Some classics for y'all to vibe with: pts 1 and 3 of 'The Trilogy' (tho you need pt 2 as well), 'Code Unknown', 'La Haine', 'Irma Vep', 'Read My Lips'....

The other day I actually saw a decent Francois Ozon film for once, too (8 Women).

Pete is surely trolling, as I can't even begin to list all my favorite French films.

Very torn on Trilogy. Liked One and Three, but felt none of them excelled as single films but the combined effect was really interesting. Apparently in France they showed them Two, One, Three: I don't think I would have gone back if I had seen two first. Yes to Irma Vep, and Read My Lips (thopugh it wastes its premise a touch). Last year was again a relatively mediocre year for French film though: if whatever Artificial Eye is distributing is to go by (but then every year seems a mediocre one for Artificial Eye: this year has already started with the ropey Kiss Of Life).

I saw a v good film in same vein which is out in France this month: 'Work Hard, Play Hard'. Hope it crosses channel.

If I could generalize a bit, one thing I notice in french films is a certain embodiment, and a linking of this embodiment to pleasure. This happens to two bodies: the bodies of the actors, and the body of the film.

The actors in french films have bodies, and enjoy them. (As opposed to British and American films, where plot and concept are seen to be the only legitimate concerns. I think this is what Pete is complaining about, in a very anglo-saxon way, when he says of 'Betty Blue' that they should have done the whole hog and made it pornography. He doesn't think the body has any business in anything except pron.)

Then there is 'embodiment' on the level of the film itself. The film has a body: it is not just a transparent 'window on life', but a thing we are invited to pay attention to as an artefact. In this sense, Godard is not so far from 'Les Demoiselles de Rochefort'. Both show an awareness of the film as something artificial, something being shaped, chopped, constructed, played with. The pleasure of playing with the medium is not restricted to the film-makers. The audience can share this pleasure.

My two eurocents.

Momus, much of what you say about French films re:the body is even truer of many recent Spanish films.

I'm off to see 'Lost in Translation' in a couple of hours. And I expect that I will find it full of cultural jokes, plot, character and situation stuff, but somewhat lacking in the bodily aspects of what it's like to be in Japan. But let's see.

i wouldn't make any generalizations about "french films," although if you break it down by generation one can notice different trends and counter-trends at work. france is "the republic of images" and the cinema here is simply too historically and otherwise extensive to sustain generalizations.

momus has a good point here, in that this DOES seem to be a cardinal (which is to say classical) aspect of the screenwriting ethos in america, which is unfortunate i think.

some american directors are able to animate their characters as COMMUNITIES and lend to the audience remarkably vivid and unpatronizing impressions of the secondary and even tertiary characters...john ford at his best does this.

and then there are directors who seem to aim for a level of abstraction even for the primary characters, like hal hartley. this achieves something different from the "centers of goodness" momus laments, but it may not be everyone's cup of tea.

Any talk of French movies being all about people sitting about talking in cafés or dinner parties is about 30 years out of date. Actually, one of the interesting things about the French film industry today is that one actually exists, unlike anywhere else in Europe. The British, Italians, Germans etc. make movies but they don't really have a dedicated industry any more because the number of movies they make are so small.

There are an awful lot of crappy, middlebrow movies made in France which are never shown internationally, but no more so than there are crappy American movies. I can think of several French movies I've seen recently which I thought were pretty good - Irreversible, Harry L'ami qui vous veut du bien, L'Adversaire...

Didn't just happen in France either.

But do viewers recognize that? Or that Veronika is less a whore or slut, but rather a target of men's sexual opportunism?

Is "some do, some don't" too flippant an answer? I try not to think much about what audiences might think, as the internet has shown me ppl can be super dense even about the clearest of messages. Which is not to say feeling the vibe of ppl reacting in certain ways doesn't sometimes affect me negatively in the cinema - grimmest example of this was some old chuckling appreciatively as the protagonist of "Thunder Road" berated the corpse of his drug addict ex-wife.

https://www.criterion.com/films/33280-the-mother-and-the-whore

From the ILF Criterion thread:

JANUARY: Winchester '73; The Grifters; Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling; The Mother and The Whore; and a 4K Upgrade of the Yojimbo/Sanjuro set.

All January Titles are also available on 4K.

Also: The Mother... release <does not> contain any of Eustache's other films.

― Charlie Hair (C. Grisso/McCain), Tuesday, October 15, 2024 11:27 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Well all those people who complained for years about Eustache not being available in Region 1 needed something else to complain about?

I'm not completely joking....

― Infanta Terrible (j.lu), Tuesday, October 15, 2024 12:38 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I see you've been lurking in the Criterion forum too!

I'm figuring they decided a full set wasn't feasible due to $$$ list price, and that they could bundle all the shorts as a second disc to an edition of The Little Loves, which itself is pretty obscure and could use the boost if sold separately from TMATW.

― Charlie Hair (C. Grisso/McCain), Tuesday, October 15, 2024 2:41 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I imagine there's going to be a ton of issues from now on since it looks like every new mainline title is getting a 4K edition, which of course limits what <they can> release.

One of the umpteen things that held back the Eustache releases were that the original 00s restorations were done in standard-def literally right before the HD-Blu wars and 1080p becoming the new industry standard.

― Charlie Hair (C. Grisso/McCain), Tuesday, October 15, 2024 2:51 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Another issue is that most of Eustache's short films aren't really that short, with a number of them clocking in at around 50 minutes (or more) apiece, and that his other feature, the documentary Numero zero weighs in at just under 2 hours.

Putting everything together would have resulted in perhaps a $100 MSRP 4K set, so this was purely a cost thing.

― Charlie Hair (C. Grisso/McCain), Tuesday, October 15, 2024 4:14 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

xhttps://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8694-the-mother-and-the-whore-lovers-of-paris

Just checked the DVD of The Mother and the Whore out of the library.

I rep the library system to all my friends. Not only the physical media, but Hoopla and Kanopy have good rosters of foreign / art films. Watching Purple Noon this week, after watching Je t'aime mon non plus Monday. I donate yearly, and pleased to do so.

Radiance put out a double feature of Claude Miller films: Garde À Vue and Mortelle Randomnée. Both feature the great Michel Serrault.

In Garde À Vue, he plays a wealthy man accused of having sexually assaulted and killed two young girls. Lino Ventura is the cop trying to break him down, Romy Schneider plays his wife. It's basically a bottle film, in that almost the entirety of the action takes place in the interrogation room, via dialogue. It's also set at New Year's Eve, which is a fun touch.

Mortelle Randomnée though truly blew me away. Serrault plays a sad sack private eye charged with finding out who a wealthy playboy is hooking up with, on the command of the guy's parents. This turns out to be a mysterious woman played by Isabelle Adjani. When she promotly dispatches her boyfriend, Sertault starts following her as she goes on a murderous spree across Europe. As the film progresses we go lower and lower on the social scale - spas and fancy restaurants giving way to miserable little towns and horrid suburbs. It is a film about grief, though I cannnot say much more without spoiling.

Through the extras I found out the shoot was pretty disastrous and Miller himself hated the final film. It is likened by some of the talking heads to the whole "cinéma du look" thing - which I can't confidently dismiss but I dunno, didn't feel too amazed when I saw Diva and as for that Luc Besson guy, he pretty much sucks, no? Mortelle is def a very stylish film but it is as interested in its character's psychology and the world it's depicting as any shallow "look".

I am quite surprised though that this film isn't bigger in contemporary internet cinephile discourse, considering how much people adore Adjani. There's a bounty of shots of her looking unbearably stylish.

Part of me is like "cool I should check out more by this guy", but I do also find him troubling - Mortelle being after all an account of a middle aged man stalking a younger woman, while in Garde it is revealed that (TURBO SPOILERS AHEAD) Schneider's character caught Serrault being inappropriate with her child niecce...but then it turns out he didn't kill the girls, the real culprit confesses. Serrault is unapologetic about his actual behaviour, and the film does not comment on it. Add to that some mentions in the booklet about other Miller films featuring "dated gallic attitudes" towards age gap relationships and...I dunno, makes me less interested in checking out more of his films, bit afraid of what I might find.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/10-great-french-horror-films

Maurice Pialat’s magnum opus gets restored in the new trailer for 'La maison des bois,' opening at @FilmLinc next month.

Watch: https://t.co/sZTY8wc4MU pic.twitter.com/l6CAPuqCMW

— The Film Stage 📽 (@TheFilmStage) March 19, 2026

fwiw, i loved the new digital print of Le Quai des Brumes, too, but i'm afraid the Enfants du Paradis revival bored me shitless, and i bailed at the halfway point.

Nilmar is right to suggest that it is very 'theatrical' in terms of both performance and staging - 'all the world's a stage' etc etc. it also seems to me to be a film that's quite hard to disentangle from its heroic production backstory.

to love it like gukbe, i think you wld maybe have to great affection for the central clown character, whereas i found him p insufferable.

― Ward Fowler, Friday, 7 December 2012 bookmarkflaglink

Got round to Les Enfants and this, really. But might finish part two.