fabrice luchini

Claire’s Knee

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Béatrice Romand as Laura

In many ways the perfect French movie, French-movie cliché even, 1970’s Claire’s Knee (Le genou de Claire) is one of Éric Rohmer’s most celebrated works and is a good place to start if you want to dig into his back catalogue. One of the key voices of the French New Wave, Rohmer regularly banged out films from the mid 1950s until, in 2007, old age forced him to step back. Unlike other old dogs of the New Wave (Godard springs to mind), right to the end Rohmer’s newest offerings were still consistently putting bums on seats. It’s the perfect and cliched – archetypal, if you like – French film because it has the elements … Read more

The Crime Is Mine aka Mon Crime

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Madeleine and Pauline

Mixing it up is writer/director François Ozon’s way. Mon Crime (aka The Crime Is Mine) sees him back on the comedic territory of 8 Femmes, Potiche and In the House, leaving his more serious, more recent movies, like Peter von Kant (a remake of a fraught Fassbinder film), Summer of 85 (a veiled autobiography) and Everything Went Fine (a drama about assisted dying) looking a little like aberrations. Farce and old-school screwball is the idea. The style borrowed from Lubitsch and Capra, the story looking like it’s borrowed from the 1926 play Chicago. Actually, it’s based on the 1934 play Mon Crime, which, it’s possible, might have leant on the same real-life source … Read more

Le Bossu

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Daniel Auteuil and Marie Gillain in Le Bossu

Daniel Auteuil, Jean Reno, Gerard Depardieu. Where are the barrel-chested Brit equivalents to these beefy action men of the French cinema? But then, Brits are all gay, aren’t we? Take this fine, roistering spectacle, a dashingly charming entertainment in which Auteuil plays a D’Artagnan-like figure, all flashing swords and teeth. The story has been made into a film five times before, and is in the tradition of the Count of Monte Cristo – revenge is its beating heart – as it follows 18th century swordsman the Chevalier de Lagardère (Auteuil) through long patient years, disguise as a hunchback, political intrigue, love from an unexpected quarter, until he finally faces down the dastardly Gonzague (played … Read more

In the House

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Claude and Esther

If you’ve seen 5X2, you’ll already know that François Ozon makes immensely clever and highly entertaining films, and that there’s a point to the cleverness; he’s not just showing off. In the House, aka Dans La Maison, is Ozon to the bone, another very clever piece of work. This time, however, the point he’s making is far less immediately obvious. 5X2 was a love story played out backwards, the point being that, “forearmed” as we were with the knowledge that the relationship would crumble, we saw the couple in question’s first stirrings of love, courtship, marriage, honeymoon and so on through entirely different eyes. Here Ozon plays a similar trick, taking a Cuckoo … Read more