In the unbearable heat provoked by the Halley’s Comet passing, two rival gangs argue about the control of the vaccine that will enable to fight against the virus striking those who have sex without love. Two of the gangsters ask Alex to help them. He falls in love with Anna, the girlfriend of one of them.

If in the 70’s French cinema was readily political (from Yves Boisset movies to Going Places by Bertrand Blier), the next decade saw the emergence of many formalist filmmakers, such as Jean-Jacques Beineix with Diva, Luc Besson with Subway, Andrzej Zulawski with L’amour Braque or Leos Carax whose The Lovers on the Bridge, released in 1991 after an endless shooting, marked the end of an era.
Mauvais sang, directed in 1986, is maybe the climax of the director’s work who will make Pola X later. Like Godard, Carax neglects his film noir plot to turn the film into a poem -a poem of love and a poem of faith in the strength of expression of cinema. In every word and every shot, the absolute mastery of the direction rejects any idea of realism in order to suck the spectator up a space and a time belonging to the film only. Don’t expect to find in Mauvais Sang an omniscient analytical viewpoint: on the contrary, Carax fervently makes his film like a sorcerer’s apprentice -amazed by his new spell, with the naive first degree from the one who falls in love. Carried away by the animal glow of Denis Lavant and the autistic grace of Juliette Binoche, Mauvais sang is an ode to cinema, in which the filmmaker makes tribute to the great old ones.
Seeing Mauvais sang again today brings back a time when everything seemed possible, when cinema hadn’t been swallowed up by this will to put away everything into boxes, a time when it still seemed possible to experiment through a popular cinema, a time when image was still as important as words.

It’s maybe because he’s very -even too much- intimately linked to its time, and therefore liable to expiration, that this kind of cinema has been progressively abandoned by French authors. Yet, it’s what make its value today and what actually makes it ageless.

Available again on DVD in a French edition.

Francis Chérasse

More information about Mauvais sang

Emblematic director of the Japanese new wave Koji Wakamatsu made himself famous with his Stakhanov style shooting rhythm, his stylish direction and his total commitment to the subjects he deals with. This second set dedicated to his work highlights four new black and white (and pink of course) gems directed between 1969 and 1972, which mix eroticism, violence and revolt and produces as surprising an outcome as forty years ago.
All of the films are taking their roots in the contestation movements of their time: The Season of Terror, clinical in camera film, shows a repentant revolutionary placed under surveillance and living in idleness, Running in Madness, Dying in Love follows the wandering of two lovers -a young protester and his sister in law- after the accidental murder of the young man’s brother by his sister in law -the victim’s wife!-, a passion enlightened by Wakamatsu’s camera, who films the bodies as close as possible and the beautiful landscapes of rural Japan, far away from the concrete jungle of his other films; Sex Jack is an acid critic of the so-called revolutionary movements, which underlines endless talks more than action, whereas Ecstasy of the Angels, one of Wakamatsu’s most famous films, sets its plot in the very heart of an extremist group that is about to implode due to inner tensions and treachery, with a free jazz soundtrack and sequences that flirt with experimental cinema, mixing colours and black and white, dream and reality. Even though shooting several films a year, Koji Wakamatsu never forgot to take a special care to their aesthetics. From The Season of Terror to Ecstasy of the Angels, we can only praise for such an insolent consistency.

The Koji Wakamatsu Boxset Vol.2 (4(disc set) is now available and each film can also be purchased individually here:
Buy The Season of Terror
Buy Sex Jack
Buy Running in Madness, Dying in Love
Buy Ecstasy of the Angels

The films are introduced by directors Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, Gaspar Noé, Danielle Arbid and André S. Labarthe.

Also available: the Koji Wakamatsu Set Vol.1 (4 DVD) which contains : Secrets Behind the Wall, The Violated Angels, The Embryo Hunts in Secret and Go Go Second Time Virgin.

The Koji Wakamatsu Boxset Vol.3 (4-disc set) will be released on November 2, 2010 and will include: Violence Without a Cause, Shinjuku Mad, Naked Bullet and The Violent Virgin.

In Alone with War and On Borders, Lebanese director Danielle Arbid gives us her vision of the Middle East with frailty and bitterness. Two documentary features linked by the same desire to go meeting people and give a voice to those who never had the chance to speak out. The origin of Alone with War rests upon the need to struggle against the oblivion of a conflict between Christians and Muslims, which have reaped countless lives in Lebanon from 1975 to 1990. Ten years later, the wounds are still deep. Within Beirut, a city that is still rebuilding, the director and her cameraman go to the major places of the Lebanese capital, where the gunshots and the screams of the victims still resonate -a recent slice of History that everyone would rather forget. In a country ruled by silence, Danielle Arbid questions, disturbs and raises sensitive questions buried under the rubble of past wars. The film fastens to put a face on the executioners and let them talk about their acts. Haunted by the crimes they committed, contaminated by the violence to the point where it’s impossible for them to go out unarmed -metaphor of an addiction to combat or merely an inability to fit in a world without war (but not in peace). To the point where one of them can’t stop going to the places of the slaughters he took part to, in order not to forget.

More appeased, but only above the ground, On Borders shows us, as a road movie, a region of which the unusual beauty would almost make us forget the dull and latent violence dwelling it. Around a country which, years after years, remains the center of attention of the modern world, a maelstrom of conflicting emotions and feelings evolves from love to hate, from hate to sadness. Everyone has his own opinion about the name it must bears: Israel or Palestine? From those young people amused by the idea of throwing rocks over the barbed wires to that man going to work everyday through that man from the Hezbollah -with a radical opinion of course-, who claims the word ‘Israel’ is banned from the language of the movement. A story of encounters, whichever the roads take the director, who has adopted the principle never to cross the limits of the Hebrew state, preferring to roam Lebanon, Syria, Jordan up until Egypt.
Sequences in Super 8 give rhythm to the two documentaries with their peculiar grain. The images seem out of time, almost unreal, showing sometimes scenes of everyday life, sometimes the director herself wandering in a Middle-East she doesn’t recognize anymore. A fancy aesthetic emphasizing even more these fascinating films.

Mathieu Col

Buy the DVD, get more information about Alone With War
Buy the DVD, get more information about On Borders

Michel Vaujour is one of the most famous convicts in France. A former bank robber, he spent twenty seven years in prison over a period of thirty years, including seventeen years in high security jails. He escaped three times in the single year 1975 and he also escaped from high security by taking his judge hostage with a soap gun. Yes, just like Woody Allen in Take the Money and Run. In 1986, he escaped in a helicopter driven by his wife Nadine. This part gave birth to a film in 1992 directed by Maroun Bagdadi with Beatrice Dalle playing Nadine. Four months later, Michel Vaujour took a bullet in the head during a bank robbery and went back to prison, now hemiplegic. In 2003, he is free again after being granted a sixteen years reduction of his sentence, standing on his two legs.

Psycho-sociologist Fabienne Godet filmed Michel Vaujour. The film could be the exemplary journey of a young man in the school of vices, it is much more. The village bully who fell into criminality to “escape the path that leads to the factory, the path of our fathers” first goes to jail for stealing a car and learns a lot in prison (”for me it was Harvard”), then, to survive his spiral of escapings, he started to rob banks. But what the director is interested in is the special relationship Vaujour always had with prison.

Seen as an initiatory stage, prison was nevertheless seen as the place you have to escape from. Like it was it’s main function. Entirely focused on this task, Vaujour did all he could to succeed. Broken many times, he never gave up. But if this man was granted such a large reduction of his sentence, it’s because something happened. The director follows him, at home, with his mother, his cousin or his old friends and films him closely, very close. You can sometimes read on his face how tough he was but what strikes the most is the peacefulness he now emits. “My Greatest Escape”, the title could sound as a show-off. When you see the film, it takes a whole different meaning. Deep down the high security jails, Michel Vaujour always stood as a free man and the rebirth he talks about is one of a man now freed from his inner demons and from the spiral he was in. The last escape of Michel Vaujour was probably the most difficult to achieve.

On a second DVD in the 2-disc set, you can find more than two hours of extra interviews with Michel Vaujour, three of his lawyers, the director, the editor and the producer. The whole set has optional English subtitles.

Francis Chérasse

Buy the DVD of My Greatest Escape.

After his studies of art history and a diploma from pretigious French films school IDHEC (now called Fémis), Vincent Dieutre directs his first feature film Desolate Rome in 1995. Since then he became a teacher in film schools and university and directed a dozen of films including the four ones (Entering Indifference, Bonne Nouvelle, Bologna Centrale and Despuès de la Revolucion) that are available now on DVD in a 4-disc boxset.

Though parts of different projects (trilogy of cities or European trilogy), the films gathered here explore the same manner to create cinema. Images picked in the locations they took place on -Chicago, Paris, Bologna or Buenos Aires-, wisely chosen, and through a voice-over, a text read by the director, cut by a second speaker. By the direct relationship between the director and the places he visits, through the souvenirs of his experiences and his memories, one can feel the inner substance of the locations he stops in. Through impressionist strokes confronted with road axis he gives a real perception of those alien places. The alien cities you visit never are a collection of monuments, they are buses rides and ordinary dead-end streets. The places of Vincent Dieutre are concrete and the 8mm or video images give them the blury aspect of memories. The places of Vincent Dieutre are inhabited by ghosts -those of friends, those of lovers. He films memory -his own memory, the individual’s one, and the collective one. The author tells a lot about himself, he tells about drugs, love, sex he also captures in a particular frontal way. What could have been an intellectual pretentious work is a tremendous moving poetical experience, which reaches his aim, right to the heart.

The cinema of Vincent Dieutre is unique, unclassifiable, disturbing the spectators’ habits. It’s sometimes called abstruse but it really never is. By joining apparently unconnected images and sounds, Dieutre manages to reproduce the subjective perception and the work of the memory better than anyone else. This cinema “that costs twenty times more to be shown in cinema than to be shot”, is stood up for by Dieutre and other filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman or Arnaud des Pallières within the artists’ group Point Ligne Plan. The DVD boxset does unfortunately not have any subtitles but if you ever have the chance to come across the films of Vincent Dieutre, don’t miss this opportunity to experience this fascinating different cinema.

Francis Chérasse

Visit Point Ligne Plan website

More information about Bonne Nouvelle
More information about Bologna Centrale
More information about Despuès de la Revolucion

A phenomenon taking on an infinity of forms, addiction has never been so virulent than in our modern societies where, driven by pressure of everyday life, the human being throws himself into the consumption of various substances as the only way out to his malaise. Easy to get, existing anywhere in our lives, alcohol is an easy access solution to any trouble which torments us, while keeping a festive aspect and therefore outwardly harmless. It’s interesting to notice that when cinema decides to lean over alcoholism, two of the most famous -and most successful- movies dealing with the subject are the work of filmmakers especially known for their comedies: Billy Wilder with The Lost Weekend and Blake Edwards with Days of Wine and Roses. As if being an expert in humor enabled them to put into perspective the darkness of man and to seize any dramatic topic without sinking into the most dripping pathos and whining effects. A Monkey on My Back avoids that reef too, Jacques Maillot (Our Happy Lives, 1999, and Rivals, 2008) remain ’sober’ when he depicts the portrait of an alcoholic on the path of recovery.

That man is named Francis, played by Gilles Lellouche, a skilled car seller, a devoted husband and a good father. By making the choice of a character, who is apparently not an outcast, the movie underlines the inner mechanism that leads a man to destroy his family as he destroys himself. From drinking parties to “one last drink for the road”, he gives way to an entire system, which will crush him and his circle. Helped by a deconstructed narrative based on flashbacks, the movie keeps confronting Francis’s past and present -a few shots are enough to understand the couple’s life before alcohol gets it out of hand. That’s what makes its strength and increases the power of the infernal path crossed by the character along with the different phases inherent to the will to get by his situation, such as weaning and acceptance. A painful way of the cross letting us to witness the heartbreaking Alcoholics Anonymous meetings where, openly and unrestricted, these people tell their experiences and intimate stories. During those fragile moments, deprived of any voyeurism, A Monkey on my Back unveils its full sensibility.

Mathieu Col

Buy or download A Monkey on my Back here

Watch the trailer:

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):