Alliance Française schedule

At Alliance Française on Fridays at 8 pm

 

October continues the François Truffaut series at Alliance Française.

 

At Alliance Française on Friday, October 9:  Les deux anglaises et le continent / Two English Girls (1971) by François Truffaut – 118 mins – France, Romance/ Drama. English subtitles. Generally favorable reviews: 74 out of 100.

With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Kika Markham, Staccy Tendeter, Sylvia Marriott, Philippe Léotard.

 

In 1899, Anne, a sensitive, wilful and dark-haired English girl, is dabbling at sculpture in Paris. She meets Claude, an idealist Frenchman, fresh from College. Within herself, Anne matches Claude to her twenty-year sister Muriel a puritan, red-haired and versatile girl. The three of them soon stick together. Cupid is going to shoot his darts of love.

– Alliance description

 

Rotten Tomatoes: A never-ending visual feast of strikingly beautiful images – from a stone chateau looking over the ocean in the English countryside to the grand art ateliers and beautifully decorated parlors of Paris -- François Truffaut’s Two English Girls is the story of the lovely Anne (Kika Markham) and her intriguing little sister, Muriel (Stacey Tendeter), who invite their Parisian friend Claude (Jean-Pierre Léaud) to spend one summer with them in England and then spend the rest of their lives wrapped up in their changing relationships with him. That first summer, while painting canvases by the sea, playing lawn tennis, having lively games of charades in front of a majestic fireplace, the threesome becomes quite close. Despite Muriel's weak emotional and physical health (including damaged eyes that cause her to sometimes wear a macabre bandage across her face) and Anne's over protectiveness, the banal scenario becomes rather interesting as the randy trio becomes more and more engrossed in their romantic games, leading to numerous turns in the story. An analytic narrator keeps the action on track, while the majority of the tale is told in voice-overs by the characters, who are constantly writing personal letters to each other or pouring their hearts out in their diaries. The narrative style of Two English Girls follows the traditional format of a Jane Austen period piece, while its emotionally complex story line, symbolically loaded cinematography, and attention to famous works of art -- especially Rodin -- give it an intellectual sophistication and a seductive sheen. Like the similarly themed Jules et Jim, Truffaut's film is once again based on a novel by Henri-PierreRoch้. 

 

 

At Alliance Française on Friday, October 16:  L'amour en fuite / Love on the Run (1979) by François Truffaut – 91 mins – France, Drama/ Comedy/ Romance. English subtitles. Generally favorable reviews: 63 out of 100.

 

With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Marie-FrancePisier,ClaudeJade, Rosy Varte, Dani, Dorothée.

 

After living together for five years, Antoine and Christine decide to divorce. Antoine is in love with Sabine who is a vendor in a record shop. One day, while accompanying is son Alphonse to the train station, he meets up with Colette, a young lady he was in love with in the past...

– Alliance description

 

Rotten Tomatoes:François Truffaut'sLove on the Run finds the director's alter ego, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), in his mid-30s. Relatively content with his young, beautiful lover, Sabine (Dorothée), Antoine still runs from woman to woman, looking to fill the gap in his life--a void that exists because of his inability to commit in relationships and because of his mother's recent death. As Antoine gains self-awareness, slowly comprehending the reasons for his emptiness, he reflects back on his various relationships. These experiences are related in part through black-and-white flashbacks dictated by the pages of his semi-autobiographical book, Les salades de l'amour and also in his current life as Antoine actively seeks out people and places from his past and attempts to reinvent them in the present. This process involves his first love, Collette (Marie-France Pisier); his second love, Christine (Claude Jade), who eventually became his wife and birthed his son, Alfonse; and his wife's violin student, Liliane (Dani). With a mixture of frank dialogues about fidelity, love, and scholarship (Antoine works in a book printing house to which he is, occasionally, quite committed) and brilliant camerawork that combines deliberate framing--panes of glass, windows, mirrors, doorways, and gates that communicate the way Antoine distances himself from things--with smooth transitions to flashbacks, future events, and dream sequences, the viewer gets a direct line into Antoine's subconscious. In this manner of reflecting back and then inching forward chapter by chapter, Love on the Run concludes the five-film Antoine Doinel saga in the same playfully endearing fashion that is signature of Truffaut's entire body of work.

 

At Alliance Française on Friday, October 23:  Holiday! Chulalongkorn Memorial Day (Rama V Day). No showing.