Word: french
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...King's advisers, suspecting foul play, defect to France before Hubert confesses to John that Arthur lives. When Arthur dies trying to escape, the nobles find his body outside the city gate and grow more incensed. The French invade England under the Dauphin's command, only to be beaten back. The nobles find it expedient to return to John's fold when they learn the Dauphin plans to kill them. By now the King is a broken man who dies of poison, the ever-loyal Phillip the Bastard by his side...
...many musical revues inhabit the House dining halls and common rooms every fall and every spring, and that also seems to be the only reason for this production of Brel. A modestly talented group of performers has taken on the challenge of resurrecting Brel's seedy, French-night-club spirit, and both cast and audiences seem mildly intrigued by the subject. But the production has no pretense of saying something new and provocative about Brel, or in fact saying anything about him at all; and the sparse attendance at last Saturday night's performance ought to suggest that there...
...humor, especially early on, is quite funny. When the characters first arrive in Paris, they seem as gauche as those prototypical U.S. tourists in Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad. Joel (Miles Chapin), a preppie who has come to Europe to dress up his college transcript, stretches his rudimentary French vocabulary into epic malapropisms. Alex (David Marshall Grant), an Oberlin aesthete, takes to reading Hemingway aloud and composing songs with lyrics like "Paris is a teacher who has lessons to give/ How to love, how to live." The lovesick Laura (Blanche Baker) turns sightseeing into a grim obsession by setting...
...Alex falls in love with his married teacher-a closet Americophile amusingly played by Marie-France Pisier- only to become the butt of silly sex gags. Laura veers into a nervous breakdown that gratuitously breaks the movie's antic mood. Joel's romance with a snippy French girl (Val erie Quennessen) is a hotbed of cliches; it moves us only because Chapin's likable innocence contrasts so well with Quennessen's robust, Moreau-like sexuality...
...audience without ever accelerating the film. The elaborate finale, involving a chaotic end-of-term school play, does not achieve its intended purpose of ty ing all the plot lines into a bittersweet cli max. What is missing is Lucas' fluent visual language. In cinematic terms, French Postcards sadly proves to be not so much American Graffiti as fractured Franglais. Rich