Word: jeane
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Over the decades, French films have meant different things to the American audience. For a long time they were ooh-la-la, saucier, more worldly than their robust but prim Hollywood counterparts. Then, when movies became films, they were the heart (François Truffaut) and the brains (Jean-Luc Godard) of international cinema in its glory days. Then there were the boulevard comedies, like La Cage aux Folles and Three Men and a Baby, that got remade by Hollywood. After that they retreated into austerity, into the perfunctory embrace of minimalism. And now... well, frankly, now French films...
...this month as well, but, entre nous, you can skip them.) Based on Joseph Conrad's story The Return, the film, written by Chéreau and Anne-Louise Trividic, concentrates the anguish and ego-busting of marital life into a few days in the lives of two people: Jean (Pascal Greggory) and Gabrielle (Isabelle Huppert...
...Jean, a bourgeois gent in early 20th century Paris, has just returned to his baronial home from a business trip. He is satisfied with his position in society and with himself: "Friends say I have the cold stare of achievement." (Jeez, what do his enemies say?) He has been married for 10 years to a woman "well bred and intelligent." She has won the approval of his circle. "Friends said I was very much in love, and I said so myself." (He enjoys hearing other people talk about him nearly as much as he enjoys talking about himself...
...astonished. There was no hint of her restlessness, none that he could detect. The stiff elegance with which he has carried himself droops in defeat. Jean's belief in his ownership of Gabrielle was the foundation of his comfortable view of life, his complacency and, as he perhaps now realizes, his self-deception. (Which makes the viewer question the acuity of his observations about friends and status...
...Simply being Zinedine Zidane, in fact, requires navigating a political minefield. He is at once at war with the leaders of the French far right like Jean-Marie Le Pen who deny his Frenchness; with Algerians who question his Algerianness, and perhaps also with partisans of a view of Arab-Islamic identity to whom the fact that he is both a Berber (Algeria's non-Arab minority) and a self-proclaimed "non-practicing Muslim" may be anathema...