Alliance Française schedule

At Alliance Française on Fridays at 8 pm

At Alliance Française on Friday, November 28: À Tout De Suite / Right Now (2004) by Benoît Jacquot – 95 mins – France, Crime/ Romance/ Drama. In black and white. English subtitles. Generally favorable reviews: 63/66 out of 100.

With Isild Le Besco, Ouassini Embarek, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Laurence Cordier.

When she hangs up the phone after hearing her lover say, “We’re coming right now,” she knows in her heart of hearts what she hadn’t faced up to before: that this man she loves, this “prince” from nowhere, is a hoodlum. He has just robbed a bank and a man got killed. It’s the mid-1970s. She’s nineteen years old. Right now, as if in a waking dream, she falls headlong from the tight, narrow space of her father’s uptown apartment into a weaving world of escape — Spain, Morocco, Greece — and from being an almost well-behaved girl into the life she’s always wanted, for better or worse.

– Alliance description

A school girl falls for a charming young man. After news about a botched bank robbery in which a guard is killed, she learns that her boyfriend was one of the robbers. She decides to hide him and his friends and then they all sneak out of the country. After hiding out and spending all the money, tempers rise and the group splits up. This forces the girl to work her own way back home and deal with her actions and her separation from her boyfriend. A stylish, erotically charged thriller, and visually stunning,

At Alliance Française on Friday, December 5: No film shown. Holiday!

At Alliance Française on Friday, December 12: Les Brigades du Tigre / The Tiger Brigades (2006) by Jérôme Cornuau – 125 mins – France, Action/ Adventure. English subtitles.

With Clovis Cornillac, Diane Kruger, Edouard Baer, Jacques Gamblin, Thierry Frémont, Léa Drucker, Aleksandr Medvedev, Gérard Jugnot.

In 1907, an unprecedented crime wave strikes Belle Epoque France. To counter the criminals of the new-born century, the Interior Minister, George Clemenceau, nicknamed "the Tiger,” creates modern special police force called "les Brigades Mobiles.” The French call them "les Brigades du Tigre.”

– Alliance description

The film, set in 1912, is about the exploits of France's first motorized police brigade. IMDb viewer: a lavish and rather enjoyable French movie spin off of a much-loved TV series, a sort of “Les Untouchables” about an elite quartet of crime fighters taking on Russian anarchists, crooked politicians and embezzlers in 1912 in the run-up to the signing of the Triple Entente between Russia, France and Britain that would make the First World War an inevitability. The film suffers from the lack of a memorable Al Capone-like opponent and there are no shootouts at train stations (though it does all revolve around a coded ledger) but there is a particularly good one at a farmhouse that draws a crowd of approving visiting aristocrats to watch as if it were a grouse shoot and a rather spectacular assassination at a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's “Ivan the Terrible”. But rather than a straight-out gangster movie, this is a period conspiracy thriller that naturally takes a slightly leftist leaning despite the heroes being the mobile brigades who tended to lean more to the right, and there is a sense of the film trying to have its moral cake and eat it at times with the characters' divided political sympathies occasionally seeming more like demographic-appeasing on behalf of the producers: Clovis Cornillac's cop even delivers a speech about what standup guys anarchists are just to reassure the modern target audience in the banlieues that these cochons are cool anti-establishment types.