French films are shit. Porquoi?

And don't even think of mentioning Blue Fucking Velvet.

French films were popular in the 80s because people were simple and thought that dead-classy French birds having emotional traumas = art. The the forerunners of ILE came along an said 'errgh - you idiots'. Is Scandinavian arthouse the new French arthouse?

Rogue agent, over and out.

In a total class of his own, geniuswise, pretention-wise, boringness-wise = Godard.

Grate Gilbert Adair story (which he tells against himself, I shd add). GA arrives at a screening late, asks bloke seated next to him what's happened. Bloke obliges with plot so far. Afterwards GA goes off on one as to why is to that, when asking what one has missed so far, you always get narrative, and no one ever obliges with the MISE EN SCENE? All critics and reviews present to hear this rant fall about, and NEVER STOP TEASING HIM about it.

Mmm, Les Nuits Fauves: French nymphs running through the woods, etc? The reference to J.Hughes is a bit alarming though.

Anyway, it should also be mentioned that when Fr. cinema tries not to be Fr. cinema and go for that mainstream-appeal thing it gets much worse i.e. Les Visiteurs, Asterix movies, any 'French action movie' etc.

I actually have a soft spot for a lot of French films, despite lack of dinosaurs and robots, though i do think they can sometimes settle into the similar problem of a lot of American indie films. Too much pointless and possibly substandard dialogue. Of course my only knowledge of dialogue is from the subtitles which will not get across the nuances. Films like Les Dinner De Cons actually do the dinner party thing well, whilst other French stuff I have enjoyed thoroughly over the last few years include The Girl On The Bridge, A La Place Du Couer and Resources Humaine.

I really dislike Claire Denis though.

"Stegosaurus? Je ne comprends pas. Il y a L'Éstegousauron.... Etc."

I feel that I have failed, as I cannot find any other ones.

Enter a word or words to search for: dinosaur

Notes: Searches are case insensitive. You can use a * as a wildcard. Boolean searches are allowed.

Result of search for "dinosaur":

No matching entries found.

= proof by science that French films are rubbish

Godard is champ, of course, the silly sexist old Maoist. Some of his recent work - esp. his video 'histories of cinema' - as brilliant and downright barmy as any of his 'classic' Nouvelle Vague stuff. Have sort've been taken aback by the anti-art flavour of some of the posts - we can have rockets and rayguns AND chin-scratching pseudery, we can have it ALL! Ok maybe we only get the 'cream' of French cinema - but what cream! And I haven't even mentioned Vigo, Renoir, Truffaut, Betrand Blier, etc etc.

Rivette also made OUT ONE (which is 12 hours long), which = a film I must see before I die (tho won't). The cut version, OUT ONE: SPECTRE is a mere four hours long. I keep meaning to go see some of the Godards at the Lux or the NFT, but can find no one to go with!!

Huh ? Dinosaures, brontosaures, tyrannosaures, etc. etc. What, do all other languages use the exact english words for dinosaurs? One translation thing that does get embarrassing is english movie titles turned into cutesy France slang, which never fails to sound incredibly dorky to Québec ears. Or worse, bad France translations of US TV shows where all the cultural references are turned into French ones - Family Ties in French is an all-time landmark of unspeakableness (unspeakability ?). However, translations of the Flintstones and The Simpsons = made in Québec, and they totally rox0r.

French film seen at young age and stuck with me permanently: "L'Atalante"

Aren't you making some awfully sweeping generalizations?

I am not an idiot, I am a dolt - as I explained somewhere else.

This is like..

Is that like the French version of Porky's?

you hate melies = you hate me

I watched a dodgy rip from some dodgy Russian website, but I guess I'm no film purist!

She was wonderful in Passages. I have a forgiving heart.

tbc it's not her performance that I think is the issue with that film!

it's a rubbish list, which is tautological i guess

hating this list

I dunno, there are things on here that are new to me, which is all I think you can really ask from a (stupid, pointless) list.

Surprised at how high Les Valseuses placed. I watched it this year, and it has dated very poorly, including the woeful rape-that-turns-into-pleasure trope.

That and Blue/Warmest are examples of what the French call "le doubling down"

le merde

I've not seen 39 but tbh there are a few things I just don't give a fuck about. Is Rozier any good? MUBI is hosting a couple of films of his and can't say I cared.

If I really had to include one of his films, it would probably be Code Unknown.

― birdistheword, Tuesday, 17 October 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I love Haneke a lot (none of his films were on the S&S poll, which rankled), but CU was the one I wanted to see here.

Yes, Code Unknown above all else, though I liked Cache and Time of the Wolf too.

I think probably a lot of the stuff on the list that ILXors haven't seen is French postwar popular cinema, there's a lot of films that are huge within France but have next to no exposure outside of it. Stuff like Le Pere Noel Est Une Ordure, La Classe Americaine, L'Homme de Rio...and La Grande Vadrouille, which features two comedians that are viewed as Gods in France (De Funès and Bourvil) and was the highest grossing movie ever in the country until Titanic took its spot (I've seen it - it's one of those 60's caper comedies that are best watched in an alcoholic haze over the holidays. Terry-Thomas is in it!).

Yeah, there's some o_0 titles littered throughout this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films_in_France

No desire whatsoever to see the films of the Asterix & Obelix series

Code Unknown
The Piano Teacher
Caché
Amour

^^ all the Haneke I need

I don't know if it's that o_0 really, every nation has its equivalents - not like Japanese box office is all Naruse or Italian box office all Antonioni.

One of those Asterix movies is good but I don't remember which one.

True, every national cinema has its own terrible, unfunny comedies

Carry on Films hello

Yep, which reminds me that someone voted Holiday on the Buses the best movie of all time in the Morbsies

From the o_0 list above, Le Diner de Cons still holds a special place in my heart

God I love to see people sharing my love of Code Unknown, one of my favourite movies and certainly my favourite Haneke

we need to decide who the french martin scorsese is and get him to express mild disdain for the asterix/obelix franchise

mild exasperation in fact

I once was hanging out with a guy who’d just spent several days with Haneke for the purpose of writing a profile, and said it was very funny to hear Haneke speak at length against bourgeois conceit and aesthetic, while his extremely lovely wife produced an endless supply of homemade delectables from the kitchen. Him: “we must reject everything the bourgeois stands for”, her: “who wants some pie?”

Both are true. We must reject it all, and we must have pie

that's funny but we must not allow the bourgeoisie to appropriate pie

let's have our pie and eat it too

"who wants pie" is really not a bourgeois conceit

I once was hanging out with a guy who’d just spent several days with Haneke for the purpose of writing a profile, and said it was very funny to hear Haneke speak at length against bourgeois conceit and aesthetic, while his extremely lovely wife produced an endless supply of homemade delectables from the kitchen. Him: “we must reject everything the bourgeois stands for”, her: “who wants some pie?”

― Preach The Crapen (flamboyant goon tie included),

Buñuel understood.

Just to be clear, this house is both anti-bourgeois and pro-pie

the discreet charm of the bourpiesie.

Yep, which reminds me that someone voted Holiday on the Buses the best movie of all time in the Morbsies

This genuinely made me laugh - and I really can't remember if that was my vote or not. After all, it is a Hammer film.

The website for the above table lists La Grande Illusion (1937) with an estimated 12.5 million admissions but the actual admissions are unknown.[3]

really, Renoir outsold Star Wars?

Haneke is like Cronenberg and Greenaway for me - all over the map in terms of quality. The more the films open up, the better he is, and I'd recommend 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance as one of his most interesting and least didactic.

Very nice to see Buffet Froid and Le Feu Follet represented, the former is like if the 70s Buñuel films were actually funny. I was also under the impression that Je t’aime, je t’aime was basically forgotten, it's a strange choice for a Resnais.

Sorry not to see any André Téchiné, is he too bourgeois even for the French? Or too many good movies with no major standout to collect votes?

even here only Armond White, in his only moment of sanity, gets Téchiné.

No Assayas either?

So I saw the Eustache features this weekend. And right now I am so pissed off at male sexual entitlement I'm beginning to think Valerie Solanas had a point. But I'll listen to arguments otherwise.

Hmmm. I've only seen The Mother & The Whore, but felt v much like the Leaud character is supposed to be seen as an irredeemable prick? Not that that's a get out of jail free card or anything.

I agree with you that Leaud is supposed to be a chauvinist (who happens to have come through the events of 1968 with some very retrograde ideas about sexuality). But do viewers recognize that? Or that Veronika is less a whore or slut, but rather a target of men's sexual opportunism?

As for My Little Loves, it's overwhelmingly a coming-of-age piece--and coming of age defined very much in terms of accessing females, with no consideration of consent on their part. French society, either before or in the immediate wake of 1968, probably didn't think too much about recognizing a woman's right to say no, but sitting through these films was exhausting.,

The Mother and the Whore (1973)
Holiday on the Buses (1973)
Do you see?

"(who happens to have come through the events of 1968 with some very retrograde ideas about sexuality)"

The film is very much about the failures of '68.

But I say this as a man xp

Didn't just happen in France either.

But do viewers recognize that? Or that Veronika is less a whore or slut, but rather a target of men's sexual opportunism?

Is "some do, some don't" too flippant an answer? I try not to think much about what audiences might think, as the internet has shown me ppl can be super dense even about the clearest of messages. Which is not to say feeling the vibe of ppl reacting in certain ways doesn't sometimes affect me negatively in the cinema - grimmest example of this was some old chuckling appreciatively as the protagonist of "Thunder Road" berated the corpse of his drug addict ex-wife.

https://www.criterion.com/films/33280-the-mother-and-the-whore

From the ILF Criterion thread:

JANUARY: Winchester '73; The Grifters; Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling; The Mother and The Whore; and a 4K Upgrade of the Yojimbo/Sanjuro set.

All January Titles are also available on 4K.

Also: The Mother... release <does not> contain any of Eustache's other films.

― Charlie Hair (C. Grisso/McCain), Tuesday, October 15, 2024 11:27 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Well all those people who complained for years about Eustache not being available in Region 1 needed something else to complain about?

I'm not completely joking....

― Infanta Terrible (j.lu), Tuesday, October 15, 2024 12:38 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I see you've been lurking in the Criterion forum too!

I'm figuring they decided a full set wasn't feasible due to $$$ list price, and that they could bundle all the shorts as a second disc to an edition of The Little Loves, which itself is pretty obscure and could use the boost if sold separately from TMATW.

― Charlie Hair (C. Grisso/McCain), Tuesday, October 15, 2024 2:41 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I imagine there's going to be a ton of issues from now on since it looks like every new mainline title is getting a 4K edition, which of course limits what <they can> release.

One of the umpteen things that held back the Eustache releases were that the original 00s restorations were done in standard-def literally right before the HD-Blu wars and 1080p becoming the new industry standard.

― Charlie Hair (C. Grisso/McCain), Tuesday, October 15, 2024 2:51 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Another issue is that most of Eustache's short films aren't really that short, with a number of them clocking in at around 50 minutes (or more) apiece, and that his other feature, the documentary Numero zero weighs in at just under 2 hours.

Putting everything together would have resulted in perhaps a $100 MSRP 4K set, so this was purely a cost thing.

― Charlie Hair (C. Grisso/McCain), Tuesday, October 15, 2024 4:14 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

xhttps://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8694-the-mother-and-the-whore-lovers-of-paris

Just checked the DVD of The Mother and the Whore out of the library.

I rep the library system to all my friends. Not only the physical media, but Hoopla and Kanopy have good rosters of foreign / art films. Watching Purple Noon this week, after watching Je t'aime mon non plus Monday. I donate yearly, and pleased to do so.

Radiance put out a double feature of Claude Miller films: Garde À Vue and Mortelle Randomnée. Both feature the great Michel Serrault.

In Garde À Vue, he plays a wealthy man accused of having sexually assaulted and killed two young girls. Lino Ventura is the cop trying to break him down, Romy Schneider plays his wife. It's basically a bottle film, in that almost the entirety of the action takes place in the interrogation room, via dialogue. It's also set at New Year's Eve, which is a fun touch.

Mortelle Randomnée though truly blew me away. Serrault plays a sad sack private eye charged with finding out who a wealthy playboy is hooking up with, on the command of the guy's parents. This turns out to be a mysterious woman played by Isabelle Adjani. When she promotly dispatches her boyfriend, Sertault starts following her as she goes on a murderous spree across Europe. As the film progresses we go lower and lower on the social scale - spas and fancy restaurants giving way to miserable little towns and horrid suburbs. It is a film about grief, though I cannnot say much more without spoiling.

Through the extras I found out the shoot was pretty disastrous and Miller himself hated the final film. It is likened by some of the talking heads to the whole "cinéma du look" thing - which I can't confidently dismiss but I dunno, didn't feel too amazed when I saw Diva and as for that Luc Besson guy, he pretty much sucks, no? Mortelle is def a very stylish film but it is as interested in its character's psychology and the world it's depicting as any shallow "look".

I am quite surprised though that this film isn't bigger in contemporary internet cinephile discourse, considering how much people adore Adjani. There's a bounty of shots of her looking unbearably stylish.

Part of me is like "cool I should check out more by this guy", but I do also find him troubling - Mortelle being after all an account of a middle aged man stalking a younger woman, while in Garde it is revealed that (TURBO SPOILERS AHEAD) Schneider's character caught Serrault being inappropriate with her child niecce...but then it turns out he didn't kill the girls, the real culprit confesses. Serrault is unapologetic about his actual behaviour, and the film does not comment on it. Add to that some mentions in the booklet about other Miller films featuring "dated gallic attitudes" towards age gap relationships and...I dunno, makes me less interested in checking out more of his films, bit afraid of what I might find.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/10-great-french-horror-films

Maurice Pialat’s magnum opus gets restored in the new trailer for 'La maison des bois,' opening at @FilmLinc next month.

Watch: https://t.co/sZTY8wc4MU pic.twitter.com/l6CAPuqCMW

— The Film Stage 📽 (@TheFilmStage) March 19, 2026

fwiw, i loved the new digital print of Le Quai des Brumes, too, but i'm afraid the Enfants du Paradis revival bored me shitless, and i bailed at the halfway point.

Nilmar is right to suggest that it is very 'theatrical' in terms of both performance and staging - 'all the world's a stage' etc etc. it also seems to me to be a film that's quite hard to disentangle from its heroic production backstory.

to love it like gukbe, i think you wld maybe have to great affection for the central clown character, whereas i found him p insufferable.

― Ward Fowler, Friday, 7 December 2012 bookmarkflaglink

Got round to Les Enfants and this, really. But might finish part two.