Thursday, October 15, 2009

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 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-France Pisier, Claude Jade, 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 semiautobiographical 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.

 

At Alliance Française on Friday, October 30:  La femme d'à côté / The Woman Next Door (1981) by François Truffaut – 106 mins – France, Drama/ Romance. English subtitles. Generally favorable reviews: 77 out of 100.

 

With Fanny Ardant, Gérard Dépardieu, Henri Garcin.

 

Bernard and Arlette live in the country with their young son. One day a couple comes to live next door. The wife turns out to be a woman with whom Bernard has had a passionate love affair in the past and she does everything she can to start things up again. But will their reunion be a happy one?

Alliance description

 

Rotten Tomatoes: Bernard Coudray has established a comfortable and settled existence near Grenoble with his wife and child. However, everything begins to disintegrate when the house next door to the Coudrays' is purchased by Mathilde and Philippe Bauchard. Many years ago, Bernard and Mathilde had a tortuous love affair, and when the two meet again, they can't help but renew their desire. As their spouses become aware of the infidelity, they do whatever possible to separate the lovers... even if it may lead to death.

 

No comments: