This year’s True/False Film Fest will hopefully be remembered as Claire Simon’s coming out party. The master French director received a rare three-film retrospective at the Columbia, Missouri festival that collectively highlighted her endless curiosity for life’s spectrum of emotions and anxieties. Within the tight confines of a playground or classroom her inquisitive camera never stops searching for something new, all the while quietly dissecting hierarchies of power and judgment. Comparisons to the great Frederick Wiseman are natural, but Simon’s films always leave room for bits of humor that help transcend the coldness of institutional mechanisms.During a post-screening Q&A for The Graduation, Simon’s latest documentary that examines the intense admittance process for France’s prestigious film school La Fémis, the director described each student’s struggle as “a really big fight to be in the castle.” Dreams of prestige and success validate...
- 3/16/2017
- MUBI
Jacques Doillon’s most recent film—known in English, if it is known at all, as either The Three-Way Wedding or In the Four Winds—has never, to my knowledge, been shown in the States since its release in France in the spring of 2010. According to Jordan Montzer in Variety, Doillon’s “oeuvre reaches new heights of faux-kinky gobbledygook in [this] low-budget chamber piece.... With a pitch that could have provoked untold laughter in the hands of a Larry David, pic somberly reveals the ego-tripping, backstabbing and, well, butt-slapping that occurs when two thesps spend a day at the country home of a misanthropic playwright. What ensues is far from enjoyable, and adequate perfs won’t carry Doillon’s pretentious banter further than French ears.”
That last part may have proved to be right, but I’ve always loved the highly unusual and borderline grotesque poster for the film. I had...
That last part may have proved to be right, but I’ve always loved the highly unusual and borderline grotesque poster for the film. I had...
- 12/16/2011
- MUBI
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