Laissez-passer (Safe Conduct)

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Just watched this, Bertrand Tavernier's great big (I didn't realize when starting it that it'd clock over two-and-a-half-hours, but by the time I croseed the two hour mark I didn't care) film about the French movie industry under the occupation. Based on the recollections of director Jean Devaivre and screenwriter Jean Aurenche, who are the two central characters, the movie traces their morally questionable choice to work for Continental, a German studio.

It's a chaotic movie, in a way I really loved. The frame is almost always full, the camera just keeping up with the actors (there's tons of real-life characters--Tourneur, Clouzot etc). I didn't find it particularly hard to follow, though.

Has anyone seen this?

s1utsky (slutsky), Friday, 8 August 2003 04:32 (twenty-two years ago)

I also liked the way the movie captured the strangeness of filmmaking in a period of bombing, food shortages, film stock shortages, resistance activity, police raids etc. One scene near the beginning of the film shows Duvaivre, then an assistant director, rushing to the studio right after an air raid (buildings in flames), to shoot a scene before the set is struck. Of course, in the midst of such chaos there needs to be stillness & quiet on the set, the power has to be on, there has to be enough footage for the shot etc.

s1utsky (slutsky), Friday, 8 August 2003 04:36 (twenty-two years ago)

No one else saw it, eh?

s1utsky (slutsky), Friday, 8 August 2003 22:04 (twenty-two years ago)

two years pass...
i want to see this again!!

there's this one great sequence in the middle that i won't spoil but that i think about all the time, if you've seen it you know what i'm talking about

s1ocki (slutsky), Monday, 5 June 2006 19:32 (nineteen years ago)


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