Two ageing actresses share a Parisian flat. On their walls, pictures of actresses of movie stars of the Thirties. One still play small parts, the other does small works to live. They act. They re-act their faded glory, they re-act their parts, they act their lives, makingfrom each small event a source of games.

The opening credits instantly places Women Women on the scale of the myths with all these portraits of stars from the golden age of the studios. Written and directed by Paul Vecchiali and co-written by Noel Simsolo (both writers for prestigious French magazine Les Cahiers du cinema), who also plays in it, Women Women is one of the most beautiful and unique child of a generation, the one of the New Wave, nourished with American and French classical films myth. Imaginative transitions, characters starting suddenly to sing (wonderful songs by Roland Vincent), unexpected sudden talkings to the camera, Women Women is constantly inventing. Such are the scenes and dialogues, precisely written and magnified by the two outstanding actresses Hélène Surgère and Sonia Saviange. Passing through violently contrasted emotions, they are moving or seducing, funny or irritating, classy or vulgar, as complex as women can be, incarnating a certain idea of femininity.

To help her friend rehearsing the part of Andromaque, Helene brings up the memory of a dead child and make her express a powerful emotion and we can not tell at this point how sincere it is for the character or even for the actress. Life and acting are mixed and hard to separate. Walking in such uncertain territory, the spectator can only frontally receive the emotion. “What must I believe? What is true in all this?” asks Hélène to her friend who just gave her a great story about money bills found is the streets. All and nothing could be our answer. Everyting is staged and everything is true. The world is a stage, the stage is a world.

The film presentation at the Venice Film Festival made such a strong impression on Pier Paolo Pasolini that he had the two actresses re-acting one scene of the film in Salo the year after. Now available for the very first time in France, the DVD has unfortunately no subtitles. While waiting for an hypothetical English-friendly DVD, keep in mind Women Women is one of the most beautiful films of seventies French cinema and try not to miss it if it ever screens near your home.

Francis Chérasse

More information about Women Women

In the 16th century, Aliénor, who inherited the medical secrets of her father, visits the King of France to heal him from a mysterious disease. As she succeeds in curing him, he offers her in return to marry the man she wants. She chooses Bertrand de Roussillon who marries her against his will. As soon as they are married, he leaves their home. Alienor finds out soon that he joined the Republic of Sienna and is in love with another woman: Lisotta.


Adapted from one of the hundred novels of Boccace’s Decameron, The Dark Room follows the French cinematographic tradition of a revisited middle age. The filiation acknowledged by director Marie-Christine Questerbert with Robert Bresson’s Lancelot and Eric Rohmer’s Perceval is obvious as The Dark Room seems to be a kind of son of these two films, with a DNA sharing both its parents genes. A Bressonian minimalism and a Rohmerian taste for language meets there, with a common stylized representation of the times. The original text is rather modern too with its heroin chasing the man she wants and using tricks to put him in her bed, making a woman’s desire in the centre of the intrigue. She is also the one who holds the medicine secrets. Influenced by her research about the paintings of the era, the director made strong aesthetic choices. Quite abstract sets, strong dominant colours highlighted by the cinematographer’s fabulous work (Emmanuel Machuel who worked also on Van Gogh by Maurice Pialat or Money by… Robert Bresson), the production design is amazing. Discreet anachronisms contribute to blur the film’s time references and give it a fantasy taste. In this revisited middle-age, with the fascinating way the director has to represent it, the actors are still the centre of the attention. The cold virility of Melvil Poupaud echoes the boiling determination of Caroline Ducey whose sharp acting gives the character all its complexity. Led by this brilliant couple surrounded by a very well chosen cast, The Dark Room is an enchanting sensual tale.

The DVD is available as of February 23, 2010 with optional English subtitles and includes a preface by Hervé Joubert-Laurencin.

Francis Chérasse

More information about The Dark Room

There are two ways to see Jean-Paul Lilienfeld’s film: with or without bias. With a bias: it’s a reactionary film filled with right-wing clichés, a public danger for democracy and affirmative action, a manipulation that condemns suburban youth -as an evidence, it shows Arabs this way and teachers that way, etc etc.
Without bias: it is at first a feature film (though it was first shown on television -on French-German channel Arte- as the financers were didn’t want to run any ‘risks’ with such a touchy subject). A film with characters –outstandingly played by Isabelle Adjiani and the young non professional actors as her pupils (much more human and moving because simply more complex than those from Laurent Cantet’s The Class). A film with an atypical mise en scène, going from tragedy to slapstick sometimes, from hysteria to smile, melodrama (yes, so what ?) to suspense, daring to embrace the path of a realistic fiction without a heavy ideological purpose. This is precisely the strength and weakness of Jean-Paul Lilienfeld’s film: he played with fire by filming a social statement, staging a reality with no consideration at all for the political correctness of the time. It would have no importance at all if the political correctness in question was on the usual wild side. But it’s definitely not that obvious here, and that’s what upsets Skirt Day opponents, the film having been strongly commented in the media and tagged as political beyond its will. From a staged reality it has become a political plot, theorized by those who already condemned a fiction which they think can only be suspicious and even worse because its many biased interpretations.
The phenomenon aroused by Skirt Day eventually highlights the torments of today’s society, torn between extremes, which are themselves somewhat desperate responses to the current immobilism of the political center, the changing and contradictory values of which exasperate those who still believe in an ideal.

There are touchy subjects (suburbs and ghettos, religion, prison etc.) that are often taken over by extreme or dominant movements, which will always create controversies everytime the references won’t be the victims’ points of view. In Skirt Day, what is not acceptable in a society where the American affirmative action has become the casual unspoken rule is that the victims are also the executioners. So the gibes will rain, the words put in mouth too, and the witch hunt can start (this very sentence could be told reactionary by the extremes intelligentsia… Whatever…)

If Jean-Paul Lilienfeld’s film has also flaws such as the attempt of the director to stuff all his thoughts and memories –he grew up in Paris surburbs- in a 88-minute film, it has the courage –some may say the naivety– to raise questions without any self-censorship and that way to be paradoxically political in its apolitical attitude because neither from left nor right, which of course is too bad for those who where expecting another film -a good partisan film (propaganda in short), tested and approved, which leaves no shades of meaning and attacks the actual authority responsible of all the things that go wrong in our society. Who could that be? Certainly not each citizen, in an un-differentiated way. One definitely needs one identified scapegoat, not several of them.

In conclusion, Skirt Day is guilty, guilty of being a fiction not “cinematographic” enough to be politically correct from its opponents’ viewpoints: a gun, a hostage-taking, the GIGN (French Swat), it’s all too realistic yet caricatured, to prevent the film from being tagged as a biased film. So the film is guilty of being precisely a feature film and not a manifesto or a clear-cut lampoon. If he wanted to please everyone, Jean-Paul Lilienfeld should have given a part to Fox and Mulder or to some sexy vampire to make the film look like cinema and not politics. Everything must be at its place: genres, classes or people can not be mixed, it is not right. But there are as many skirt days as there are days in a year. So make yourself your own opinion by watching the film… if you’re not already biased!

Françoise Duru


The DVD is released in France on September 23. More information about Skirt Day.

Skirt Day by Jean-Paul Lilienfeld (2008, France)
With Isabelle Adjani, Denis Podalydès, Yann Collette, Jackie Berroyer
Sonia Bergerac is a teacher at a school for ‘difficult’ children. The considerable problems she encounters in adapting to her new workplace are compounded by her husband’s decision to leave her and before long she is teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Sonia wears a skirt to work -although the school’s head has prohibited his female staff members from doing so. Wearing a skirt certainly does not give others the right to treat her as a whore. She just wants to teach. But she’s scared, too. And that’s why she’s on antidepressants. One day, Sonia comes across a gun in one of her pupil’s school bags. Surprised, she grabs it, and, amidst the confusion accidentally fires a shot. The bullet injures her pupil’s leg. In spite of Sonia’s protestations, the commotion soon turns into a veritable hostage drama with all the usual trappings: immediate intervention on the part of the police and politicians, pa nicking parents, statements from the school’s head and teaching staff, and the arrival of the media in full force. All of which prompts a few people to drop their masks…

Watch the trailer here (French audio only):

Ask people around you, they will all give you the same answer: cows eat grass. However obvious this answer may seem, it is actually not the truth! Promoted in the 1950s in France, the “grass revolution” pushed the French cattle breeders to feed their animals with grass-based food only. By the end of the 1970s, the model one had to follow was the American one: corn and soya. The American model is now so deeply rooted that the people that raise nowadays their cattle on grass are seen as marginals and avant-garde. Grass, Matthieu Levain and Olivier Porte’s film, confronts two farms, one that is grass-based, the other one that works on a “high productivity” mode. The film confronts the two models.

The last few years witnessed many films about globalization, global warming and ecology in general. Grass is much more interested in analyzing the mechanisms of a failing system than in teaching a lesson. It is one of the very strengths of the film never to judge the people it features and never to self-indulge on easy editing tricks to emphasize its point. Of course, the family who runs the “high productivity” farm seems to be the fall guy but it may just be because… they are! Promoted by the E.U, the use of corn and soya is an implacable mechanism. Pushed by the cooperatives, the European laws, which favour the corn culture, and the overactive lobbies in Brussels, the usual way to feed and raise cattle today is a real trap for farmers. Swamped with debts because of the permanent expenses he is forced to make, the cattle breeder has no other option than produce more and more to survive. Whereas, freed from all the necessary intermediaries to maintain his activity, the farmer that bases his cattle food on grass produces less… and earns much more! The film shows it: another way is possible, more respectful of the environment, freed from a system that makes the most of the cattle breeders.

However strong the statement of Grass is, it is never only a thesis. It’s above all a carefully filmed documentary feature, with beautiful images and a cinematographic sense of writing. Beyond the specificities of the agricultural context, Grass prompts us to rethink the way our society works. It is as necessary as urgent.

The film will be available on DVD on September 8.

Francis Chérasse

More information about Grass

Check out the trailer (in French without subtitles):

Deeply moved by the funeral of her young cousin, 12-year-old Aviva announces her mother she wants to have a child. While she is willing to do everything to succeed, her parents pushes her to abortion when she gets pregnant. She runs away and starts a journey to reach her goal. Todd Solondz stood out as of his second feature Welcome to the Doll House before gaining international notoriety with Happiness, a highly cynical portrait of the neurotic American middle-class society. In the film, Solondz already played with all the moral landmarks of an audience enjoying to be shaken.

Palindromes follows the same path and challenges our moral beacons. The film is set as a loop: Aviva, after her journey, will come back to her starting point, not really the same she was, but not really changed either. Written as a series of scenes, the storyline makes her meet different characters while she incarnates different bodies. Curly brunette, she becomes a pale virginal redhead when aborting or a big black thirty-year-old woman when entering a community for lost children. Aviva goes from the loving arms of her mother (fantastic Ellen Barkin!), whose speech in favour of abortion is horrible, to those of a truck-driver, with whom she will spend a night in a motel. She then enters this house for abandoned children where they practice songs and dances dedicated to God or against abortion -nightmarish and bitter ended vision of the house held by Lilian Gish in The Night of the Hunter. It goes the same way with all the stereotypes the film is about: they’re pushed to their limits -until absurdity. This is one of the very strengths of Solondz cinema. Some scenes like the first one in which Aviva’s mother tries to push her to abortion is stretched to uneasiness, putting the viewer in the voyeur position of a shameless torrent of feelings.

Less cynical and provocative than Happiness, Palindromes is yet filled with a certain poetry and a real tenderness for its heroine. Maternity, abortion, pedophilia, the film deals with difficult and touchy subjects without ever shying away from them and always bets on the audience intelligence and will to question its certitudes. With its narrative boldness, its hard-line policy and the deepness of its subjects, Palindromes stands out as the best of independent American cinema and offers a radical vision of an American society stuck in its binary vision of the world.

Long-awaited in France, the DVD is eventually available. Without any special features though.

Francis Cherasse

More information about Palindromes.

French fantastic cinema gave birth to a few masterpieces such as the films by Jean Cocteau (The Beauty and the Beast), The Devil’s Envoys by Marcel Carné or The Devil’s Hand by Jacques Tourneur, but the « horror » genre has rarely been exploited in France. A major genre in the United States or in Italian cinema, the horror cinema -made to create fear- has at least given birth in France to a real masterpiece: Eyes Without a Face by Georges Franju, now available at last in a remarkable French DVD edition.

Professor Genestier, a renowned surgeon, feels guilty since a car crash he had with his daughter that left her faceless. To give her back a face, he needs to transplant skin he has to take off from young girls. Adapted by the famous duet Boileau and Narcejac (Diabolique, D’entre les morts adapted by Hitchcock through Vertigo) from a novel by Jean Redon, the plot of Eyes Without a Face comes at the same time from Frankenstein and The Body Snatcher (which, inspired by the Burke and Hare case, tells the story of criminals delivering dead bodies to the doctors of the nineteenth century Great Britain) and has given birth to countless avatars.

Seen by Georges Franju -a uncommon filmmaker whose work must be rediscovered-, this story turns into a morbid poem. Even if the director hides nothing from the surgery in a sequence that must have struck -and still strikes- its contemporary viewers, the film is much more a gothic tale than a gore film. Led by the virginal and ghostly figure of Edith Scob, the film insinuates fear by small touches, by the look it takes upon a reality contaminated by strangeness. The mask the actress wears, which let us see distinctly her eyes, becomes the theatre of our projected fears, the very mirror of our anxiety. With the beautiful music by Maurice Jarre and an intense performance by Pierre Brasseur, Eyes Without a Face is a unique film, a dark gem with a haunting poetry.

Thanks to the wonderful restoration made by Gaumont, Eyes Without a Face is available at last in France in the most beautiful transfer ever, the most complete too as the previous releases were cropped. Presented in this DVD edition with a 45-minute documentary about the director with some of his co-workers and friends (Jean-Pierre Mocky, Claude Chabrol and many others), Eyes Without a Face finally gets the showcase it deserves.

Francis Chérasse

More information about Eyes Without a Face

“I was enrolled in the army before I was seventeen year old. In September 1982, I arrived in west Beirut with the Israeli army, after the assassination of Bachir Guemayel, the day of his nomination. I left Beirut three days later, I was another person… This story is my story, which I decided to tell twenty years later.”

It’s following a discussion with a former fellow soldier, who told him about the recurring nightmare he had about the war they both were involved in, that Ari Folman realized he had no memories or very few of the conflict. He starts then an inquiry through his memory and tries to wake it up by meeting people that lived through the same events. At the centre of his quest are the dark days of the massacre of the Sabra and Shatila camps, which Folman has no memory of. A documentary director, Ari Folman decided very soon to make Waltz With Bashir an animated film. A choice that can be surprising but that helps the audience feel the total unreality of war for the late teenager he was and enables to avoid standard filmed interviews while preserving the protagonists’ intimacy… Mixing diverse techniques -flash and classical animation, 3D- Waltz With Bashir transcribes in images the process of memory, which only focuses on minor details and vague shapes. There are few details, the colours are not nuanced, the aesthetic work of David Polonski fits perfectly the purpose of the film. And when the precise memories of the events finally emerge to Ari Folman’s conscience, all the aesthetic choices gains even more strength. Formally stunning, Waltz With Bashir is a cry against the absurdity of war and a fascinating work about memory.

Francis Chérasse

More information about Waltz With Bashir.

Launched with Adieu Philippine, considered one of the emblematic films of the Nouvelle Vague, Jacques Rozier soon became a cult filmmaker. This status was reinforced by his scant production: he only released 4 feature films in his 45-year career, some of which remained unseen for long periods. The DVD edition of his cinematographic opus (2 shorts and 4 feature films) is thus an event.

Rozier was not made for his era: you only have to imagine him delivering a pitch to be convinced. Rather than efficiency (in terms of screenplay, cutting and directing), Rozier always preferred digressions and heading off the beaten track. It is no accident if most of his films are about vacations: time out from the everyday. As Bernard Menez says in one of the bonus sequences, these films are full of “hilarious scenes,” an indication of both their humor and their positioning outside the square.
This is no doubt why his films give off a fabulous sense of liberty along with a form of insouciance that is never corny or beside the point. Jacques Rozier’s departures are as sad as they are anywhere else. The characters have their moments of loneliness and weakness, sometimes slipping into melancholy. Yet he is interested in moments of grace, mostly those that spring from unlikely encounters. His films are never about loneliness. The characters are always in groups or pairs (friends more often than lovers) and if they are alone, they don’t stay that way for long. The flirting duo in Blue Jean, one of his first light-hearted and straight-fowrward short films gives way to the trio in Adieu Philippine, then the quartet in Du côté d’Orouët, or the traveling group in Naufragés de l’île de la tortue, a sort of whimsical and poetic precursor to Survivor. Of course, the math can be hard to figure out and the combinations change. Love is most often thwarted. It doesn’t matter because there are several loves on hand, which is enough to generate an adventure, one of the filmmaker’s watchwords. With him, we hit the road without knowing where it leads and what is true of his films is also true of his shooting schedule – there are plenty of anecdotes, especially in the bonuses… Rozier likes beginnings, promises and suspense much more than accomplishments. He takes his time and so do the scenes. They are drawn out, reaching another dimension. His world is utterly everyday – there are big discussions on minor issues. Making meals takes hours. Utterly poetic too – discussions get sidetracked, carried along by gritty characters. A child’s challenge becomes an escapade of pure grace in Rentrée des classes, his first short film. The preparation of eels turns into a Homeric moment of burlesque humor in Du côté d’Orouët. A ticket control in a train takes a surrealist turn in Maine Océan. As they say (once again), with Bernard Menez, “you have to see him to understand.” There is no better conclusion.

Emmanuelle Mougne

More information about the Jacques Rozier 4 DVD set.

Read the interview with Jacques Rozier.

In a stroke of well-orchestrated timing, given that September happens to be when school goes back, this month sees the DVD and theater release of La loi du collège (School Law), by Mariana Otero (in stores on the 16th) and the Golden Palm at the last Cannes Film Festival, Entre les murs (The Class), by Laurent Cantet (released on the 24th in France).

The first pioneered a new genre, the documentary series, in relating in six episodes the 1993 school year at the Garcia Lorca Junior High School in St Denis, in the suburbs of Paris.
The second is fiction that takes a school as its setting. For his fourth feature film (after Human Resources, Time Out and Heading South), Laurent Cantet has adapted the book of the same name by François Bégaudeau, which described a French teacher’s year at a junior high in the north east of Paris.

Two “classroom movies”
“Classroom movies” are practically a genre in their own right. Among those that spring to mind, there are comedies (Les Sous Doués (The Under-gifted) by Zidi, Kindergarten Cop by Reitman: the classroom as a backdrop for fooling around), and tragedies (school as the first of oppressive institutions – Young Torless by Schlondorff, If by Lindsay Anderson, etc.). In the second case, sometimes a teacher who is “not like the others” lets in a breeze of freedom (a romantic version as in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, or libertarian style as in Seeking Asylum by Marco Ferreri). Sometimes, too, things are reversed and the violence of the outside world bursts in (Blackboard Jungle by Richard Brooks back in 1955, Class 84 by Mark Lester, It All Starts Today by Tavernier or in a completely different style, Elephant by Gus Van Sant…).
Logically, this fertile playground most often attracts filmmakers interested in political and social issues or groups (Ferreri, Kiarostami, Philibert, Tavernier, Wiseman…).
Mariana Otero and Laurent Cantet undeniably belong here. But School Law and The Class do not fit into these categories. Heirs of a complex world in which “big causes” have disappeared, these two films make do with presenting characters grappling with the complexity of their situation. Both of them see school as a watching ground for “human chaos”. Mariana Otero says she did not want to make a film about learning, but about the law: how it is laid down, negotiated and practiced. Cantet’s film is in the same style. What matters here is language. He looks at how speech circulates and the relationship to power and authority, rather than a depiction of learning in the strict sense. For both filmmakers, school is where people confront one another, size each other up, show respect and try to get along. These films are “team players” (The Class ends with a game of soccer between teachers and students), which doesn’t stand in the way of a few close-ups on certain characters. It’s not easy for a film to give equal airtime all the way.

A similar structure: the issue of time and space
To render this confrontation, the two of them chose to be both radical and modest. Both opted for the same “time and space”: a school year and the closed environment of a junior high school.
Classroom, staff room, corridors, yard and school principal’s office: it all happens here, in a life governed by bells (which sound strangely like an alarm at Garcia Lorca Junior High). Inside this space, there is a lot of noise and cameras are on full alert – 3 cameras for Laurent Cantet’s film and the flexibility of a small crew for Mariana Otero. They share an objective: revealing classroom drama by taking their time. One was filmed over a period of a whole year. The other was constructed around (separate) workshops for students and teachers.
By keeping off-screen the private lives of both teachers and students, psychology and overly obvious determinism is avoided. This was particularly risky for the fiction because the film gives little opportunity to identify with the characters, preferring to explore situations of interaction rather than inner worlds.

Fiction / Documentary
In Laurent Cantet’s film, we leave the school grounds only once: at the start of the film, François Marin has a coffee at the bar of a café, then enters the school with two colleagues. The same is true in Mariana Otero’s documentary: a group of teachers, tired of strikes that don’t get anywhere, decide, as a last resort, to visit the School Inspectorate.
The out-of-school scene in The Class is individual. In School Law it is collective. This difference indicates contrasting approaches. For the sake of efficiency, Cantet focuses on the individual, structuring the film around attentive close-ups on faces. During the film, a story emerges. The teacher veers onto slippery ground. Drama slowly builds. The film ends with the expulsion of a student. For Otero, the camera is hand-held. She films the yard and the meetings. There are more people per shot. She takes in the “whole” school.
Paradoxically, the strength of each film lies in its ability to take on the characteristics of the “other” genre. In School Law characters disappear or reappear depending on events. Stories follow on from one another, which makes relevant the use of the series. On the contrary, in The Class, the actor-students and Bégaudeau, who plays the role of the teacher himself, contribute extra reality to the fiction.

Similar intentions
It is no accident that the classrooms chosen were in junior highs with a reputation for being difficult. In junior highs, the whole process of social sorting has not yet taken place. And in so-called tough neighborhoods, the issue of “getting along” is even more urgent.
These films use school to reflect their era, assuming that the outside will invite itself in – starting with the issue of identity and origins. As Khoumba and Esmeralda say to their teacher François Marin, why use the name Bill in an example, rather than Aïssata?
Furthermore, both of them incidentally raise the fundamental (and unresolved) question of what school can pass down today and reveal a world grappling with a possible breakdown in meaning.
We hear over and over, “You move, you run, you shout, you fly, why do you come to school?” looping a teacher’s sentence like a nursery rhyme in the credits of School Law. Fifteen years later, Henriette echoes her in The Class by saying to her teacher at the end of the year, “I didn’t learn anything this year. I don’t get what we’re doing.”
Through François Marin and the staff at Garcia Lorca Junior High neither of these two films gives an answer but they both give the question a real workout.

Emmanuelle Mougne.

More details about School Law available now on DVD and VOD.
Also check out the film blog including free videos.

Not adding subtitles is a choice. It’s the one that Xavier Brillat, Dancing’s co-director with Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic, has made for Haruki Yukimura & Nana-Chan, in VOD on Dissidenz after its screening in many film festivals like the very precious International Documentary Festival of Marseille (FIDM). It’s useless to bring more precisions than the director gives to the spectator – anyway, on Brillat’s own accord, nothing is said here but very common things, shibari master’s indications to his model, actors directions and commentaries for the foreign film crew and the photographers of the magazine SM Sniper. We enter Xavier Brillat’s movie with no back reference, like any stranger in Japan : fascinated by the art, by the traditions shown little by little through the moves and the codes, a whole living world we just don’t know nothing about, or so few.
Not subtitling, is not continuing to propagate the idea of a strange Japan, ununderstandable, but it is a way to enter a culture by the most concrete and immediate path : moves, noises, intonations. It was the description of Roland Barthes in Empire of the signs, his famous essay about Japan : Orient must be discovered by its signs and its rustles, by groping, as a blind. We enter here in Japan by the trembling of the fluorescent trees that surrounds the house, by the creaking of the ropes that the master ties around the body of Nana-Chan – Shibari is the name of this as artistic as erotic art – by the focused look of Yukimura and the pleasure and effort masks of his model. Brillat films the work of the performance : a web is spined, a picture is drawn which will be shown in a final shot. Figures are done and undone, nothing lasts long, incomfort is temporary, attention focuses on knots, folds and links. These links which ties the audience to the object of his desire : elastic distance put by the device of Xavier Brillat which permits to breifly catch fragments of Japan.

Antoine Thirion

Buy the DVD or download the film here.