Jean-Louis Trintignant

Il Sorpasso

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Bruno and Roberto looking backwards from the front seat of a car

Google Translate suggests The Overtaking as a translation of Il Sorpasso. It’s not perfect – the less elegant “overtaking manoeuvre” is more precise – but it knocks the English-language title of the film, The Easy Life, out of the park. Maybe, in 1962, when the film came out, international distributors were trying to cash in on the success of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (which translates as The Sweet Life) from two years earlier. Any port in a storm, I suppose. Foreign-language movies have always been a tough sell in countries where English is the first language. Though both films are in black and white, the comparisons pretty much stop there. Il Sorpasso is a … Read more

The Great Silence

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Jean-Louis Trintignant as Silence

One of the great puzzles about Sergio Corbucci’s 1968 spaghetti western The Great Silence (Il Grande Silenzio) is how shakily it starts. In one gruesomely unsteady shot after another, using lenses that are way too long, cinematographer Silvano Ippoliti appears to be putting on a demonstration of the genre’s technical shortcomings. Distant figures swing wildly all over the frame, rendering action almost impossible to follow. Stick with it, it settles down. By the end, as events build towards a climax that’s satisfying because it’s so unexpected, Ippoliti and Corbucci have relaxed into a groove and are delivering cinematic storytelling at its finest. Scenes play out in as much time as feels necessary, minor … Read more

Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train

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Bruno Todeschini and Vincent Perez in Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train

A bunch of reasonably familiar French faces (Charles Berling, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi among them) all get together in a talky French Big Chill sort of affair, concerned with the interaction of lots of individuals, as was director Patrice Chéreau’s recent Queen Margot. Though here we’re in the present day and Chéreau’s characters are  heading off to the funeral of one of their number, a bisexual painter (Trintignant, who also plays his own brother) who’s had them all, one way or another. And they’re on the train, as his will commanded – he’s controlling them in death as he did in life. En route they expose themselves and each other, to their discomfort and … Read more