Reviews

It is not easy to be in awe about short films. They can present interesting ideas or speculations, but they are not long enough to prepare one to feel deep emotions. But "Dream of Aces" is the exception. Very powerful, it is a film about love: for the mentor, for the audience and for the art. The story is poignant, the acting from Jansenson playing himself is most touching, and everything in this film is simple, without bells and whistles. Of course, there is the card trick, but that isn't the star. The star is the story. The whole film fells like poetry. Congratulations to film director Emir Kumova.

This film is a precursor in court drama and suspense. It is also a clever criticism of French bourgeois society as symbolised by the gatherings of the city notables at the local pub or the main protagonist's wife.

It has been a long time since I had so much good simple fun watching a film. Aline is the story of a simple nice girl who is catapulted into fame and riches, thanks to her voice, her hard work, her determination, her capacity to endure pressure, her astute manager and later husband, and her dedicated mother. From the get-go, we are warned that artistic licence has been taken to inject humoristic elements into the narrative. So, instead of a stale documentary about Céline Dion, we are entertained with a funny biography of fictional Aline Dieu. Unless secondary humour eludes you, you are bound to have a good time. I give high marks to this film, not for its cinematography that is well conducted but not exceptional, but for its skilfulness to elicit positive feelings about the heroin. You will never think the same way about Céline after watching Aline, you might even love her.

On the plus side, it's a good film, entertaining and well acted. But it is not remarkable. The plot is meant to be a kind of Sherlock Holmes story, with an eccentric private detective, a murder, multiple suspects, an apparently insolvable mystery and its necessarily brilliant solution. I like the genre, I am a Columbo fan and a reader of Conan Doyle's books. What disappoints me is that the detective is much, much too clever, like spectacularly perspicacious in a short time to figure out who did it. Deus ex machina all over again! With Columbo, you can see the detective building his knowledge of the case and getting to a solution such as an intelligent, instinctive detective would figure it out. In Knives Out, the private detective does a superhuman feat of deductive reasoning. That is Marvel applied to a Sherlock Holmes film.

Most IMDB reviews about this film having been written the same year or so after its release, I have the luxury of a 22 years distance to appreciate it. And so, I am not as enthusiastic. The acting is competent, although Karine Vanasse's, 16 at the time and with little experience, is not flawless in tone. The father is a caricature of an impotent dead-ender and an insensitive figure with his children, while the mother is over her head in work to provide for the family as her husband is unreliable, and thus, with problems of her own, she is unavailable for her maturing daughter. Hannah (Karine Vanasse) is growing up in that context, like millions of teens of any nationality did before her and millions more will, trying to anchor herself to some delusion while it lasts. As such, nothing is new under the sun and a film has to be remarkable to make us believe otherwise.

That said, I agree with MarioB's review. The society depicted in the film is a modern one by all means. Quebec society in 1963 was much more dogmatic. I don't know what school Hannah went to, but at the time, people were very conformist and the norms were Catholics. A Jew (they killed Christ, didn't they?) living unmarried with a Catholic woman = bad, the children were the product of sin and they had to be made aware of that in no polite terms in school by schoolmates and teachers alike. In addition the mother was probably working at 60 % a man's salary as it was usual since she didn't need so much income as she had a husband. He was not working? Then he was a lazy bum and the family got what it deserved. I know all this because I was there and I remember. That is one of the reasons why the Catholic Church has been having a bad rap in Quebec since the 60s; those who remember are still mad about it as I am.

To answer imdb1's and grand_schuttz's reviews: for the reasons said above, it is not a typical French portrait of a Quebec family. Indeed, it is very atypical.

Conclusion: the story is unremarkable and the historical context is wrong. It's a fine film for a dull Sunday afternoon.

This film is about a 45 years old marriage that is turning on its head when the wife becomes aware that there was another woman with the same surname before her and becomes convinced that her husband tries to hide that relationship. As spectators, we associate with the wife's increasing emotional anguish, parallel to the husband's ineptitude to reach to her and to reassure her of her fundamental place in his life, especially after 45 years of married life. It is a simple but rich story around a mystery and a perceived treason.

Pieces of a Woman is about a couple losing their newborn child within five minutes of birth. They were helped by a midwife; we are invited to believe that she may have been criminally negligent, although, as we have witnessed the whole birth, it is not clear why. The couple, in love before the birth, grows progressively apart as each one grieves the loss in a his own way, without support of any kind from the other. The family of the mother is of no help, unresponsive to the mother and grieving in its own way. Nobody is trained to be a parent; even less, nobody is trained to be the parent, or grandparent, of a deceased child. That is the premise of a good story.

Except that it stopped being good from there. Here is a former loving couple that falls apart like a card castle after a traumatic incident and no attempt whatsoever is been made by each to prevent that crash. It is the main plot hole. And as communication is already very poor between every character, we are to guess what the motivations for their actions are.

Finally, in order to bring a feel-good conclusion to this film, we are given a piece of implausible court theatrics like can be seen in so many other films and TV series. An opportunity for learning to cope with terrible grief is being missed. Dommage!

This film is a "peinture d'époque" of French middle-class society, from 1865 to 1874. Berthe Morisot, born in 1841, is an adult women, yet still a minor for all significant purposes in that society and thus dependant on her parents who will encourage her to pursue painting, but little other activities that can easily become scandalous in that period. If only she would marry, but she's stubborn about choosing her painting over marriage as the latter would oblige her to abandon painting.

And that is about as far a dramatic story as can be gotten from this film. The acting is adequate, no complain there, and so is the filming. It's just that there isn't much happening, unless one is curious about the very prudent relationship between Morisot and Édouard Manet. The fault in the film is in the psychological development of the characters: there is none, no exploration of feelings, no explanation about the constraining mores of the time, nothing. Too bad, because Berthe Morisot was a great painter who deserved a better exposure.

Les ogres is about a traveling theatre company playing Chekhov. We can see clever theatre production and beautiful singing. But the drama is more about exacerbated personalities that gave away any semblance of material security to invest themselves into their passion. For them, beside the theatre, there are the never ending difficulty of sharing existence with coworkers and their relatives, the amorous or irate feelings for members of the company and the complications that follow. It is the eternal contradiction of human existence: the longing for being free from human society and at the same time, the need of others to assure personal survival and live another day. There is no escaping it.

Antigone is a naive teen, a good high school student, who idealizes and loves her two older brothers. Their family is a refugee from some violent middle-east area, arriving to Canada as small kids with their grandmother for sole support. Unbeknown to Antigone, her brothers are now small time criminals instrumental in the death of some other youth. During a police operation, one brother dies and the other can expect expulsion to his former country.

And that is intolerable to Antigone. No matter what her brothers could have done, one is dead and the other is to be repatriated. So she takes it onto herself to defy the justice and prison systems, to organise her remaining brother's escape and to take whatever rap happens. Her mind is now set, no matter what, to pursue its dramatic logic.

She could be defended in court like any other misguided juvenile delinquent. However her clever lawyer devises a crusader defence to shore up popular support. And the issue becomes should she follow the law of loyalty to her family members and those of society. Antigone makes her choice irrevocably, not acknowledging that it is the laws of her host society that have protected, fed, schooled and medically cared for her family from the moment they set foot in Canada. But the film doesn't make that acknowledgement either; it rather makes it look like cold white society set against poor migrants. And so, Sophocles' masterpiece is recuperated to advance the victimisation rhetoric of the time.

Sophocles' Antigone was a discussion of the dilemma between the necessity of applying laws to protect society versus the duty that one senses to accomplish another duty (family, religious, moral, etc.). This film is less interested in Sophocles' issues and more in showing how someone can lose all senses, and everything else, to pursue a noble if misguided aim. No service is paid to the idea that individuals make decisions that can destroy their families, not to mention their lives, and therefore they should act carefully and responsibly. And so, the film is mostly (good) show and little substance.

A good sitcom. The characters are well developed, the scripts are original and the comic situations are funny, often hilarious. Every episode is definitely worth to watch.

I am from Canada and I was out, for some years, with a newly arrived Arab immigrant. It was striking that for her first four years in the country, she was comparing the nice things she saw in her adopted country with what was missing in her native country. Then for some years, she complained about what was wrong or missing in her adopted country with what was present in her native country. Afterwards, she ceased paying attention and stopped complaining!

In this film, the protagonist, Yoav, is escaping from his native Israel, for reason of some oppression exerted on him, although we have to wonder if it were real or imaginary. Wanting to obliterate his former existence and create a new one in France, he adopts the clothes, the language, the national anthem, a French woman and the nationality as if they were sufficient to cross over. Will they be? Or isn't the issue more in the person himself, in his sense of his own identity, than in the difficulties of integrating a new country, particularly one as opened and welcoming as republican France?

The film does a competent job at exploring that problematic, although not in a Hollywood simplistic and obvious way; the viewer has to fill little gaps left intentionally for his imagination. The cast is excellent and Tom Mercier, playing Yoav, is a skilled and courageous actor. A good film!

Outstanding cast! Good story! This film reminds of a Jim Jarmusch film, i.e. : "Ghost Dog", with archetypical characters, married to episodic, psychopatic, uncompromising violence, like David Cronenberg's "A History of Violence". And Mel Gibson, what a talented actor!

Although the philosophical issues behind the plot are interesting and the acting is good, the characters are one-dimensional. For instance, the husband is the sombre socialist enmeshed in class-guilt, his wife is the jovial, understanding and strong spouse, the criminal's brothers are picture perfect children and the criminal is pretty articulate for a low-life sociopath; the other characters are as predictable. None of the characters are real, in the sense that it is very unlikely that you will meet such stereotyped people in your life. It is all black and white, like in a children film.

The story is gripping, the acting is flawless, the humour is funny, the ending is worth the wait, but... the transitions between the main character's life periods are confusing, especially between adolescence and young adulthood, if you are not paying close attention. In addition, you are not sure what the main character is feeling and you remain a spectator throughout. A good film though, I am glad to have seen it.

Claude Sautet's films are always rich in introspective thought, whether the subject is the fragility of existence (Les choses de la vie), the unconditional love of a man toward a woman that wants out of a relationship (César et Rosalie) or the everyday struggles to make it through ordinary existences (Vincent, François, Paul et les autres). In Un mauvais fils, Patrick Dewaere is paradoxely a good person who has made very bad decisions, but now wants to make amends and get a better life, all the while his father is still grieving the death of his wife.

Remarkably, while being usually casted in loser roles, Dewaere redeems himself from loser status to become a good son, a reliable worker and a strong support of his addicted girlfriend. It's too bad that we lost this prodigious actor too early, struggling himself with addiction and depression.

Avant-guard film before the Avant-guard even existed, this film shows homosexual love and fantasm. Pretty mundane stuff in the cyberporn age, but scandalous at the time and the decades after. Had Jean Genet lived 20 more years, his vindication would have been complete.

François "The Boss" Brochu is 55, he has Parkinson's disease, he cares for his three sons, good youths who have their respective maturity problems, and he modestly earns a living by running a gas station, or "gas bar", of a species that is going the way of the dodo. That gas bar is where a few misfits spend their days, like the pillars in a tavern. Will the sons continue the business when their father is too ill to carry on? Every character's future is at the end of the present day, unless... It could have been a bland film, a minor soap opera, but it is not. The actors' direction is superb, and the story is sensible. The misfits could have been caricatured, but they were not; they are all sympathetic and flawed human beings, which gives an interesting look into the mystery of humanity. People like that exist, they are real, I have met them in poor neighbourhoods. The Boss is a decent person for his sons and everyone else. He knows his end is coming, and that his sons are still unprepared. Having lost all illusions, what is he to do?

A year ago, I saw Un homme et une femme, 20 ans déjà (1986), a sequel of Un homme et une femme (1966). As much as the latter film was a masterpiece, so much the former was frankly disappointing, bad, never to be looked at to not destroy the magic of A man and a woman. I was therefore very apprehensive about this new sequel.

Fortunately, with Les plus belles années d'une vie (2019), Claude Lelouch did not miss his shot. We quickly fall under the spell felt by viewing A man and a woman. Trintignant and Aimée are now 88 and 86 respectively. Trintignant's character is impotent, body and mind. Aimée's character is vibrant and wants to remain so. The characters are rejuvenated by frequent flashbacks, just enough, not too much. They make little escapades that are sometimes dreams, sometimes real outings; it's an existence in the context of a retirement home. But the warmth of their love pierces the screen. If they were 20, maybe 10 years younger, they would relive their embrace in room 26 of a certain hotel in Deauville. Old, they have the chance to relive their love for the last segment of their existence.

We loved A man and a woman because in that film done with no budget and with a single hand-held camera, we were deeply attached to characters who lived a love story that was simple and sublime at the same time. We love The Best Years of a Life because, with emotion, we remember that attachment.

And we realize with equal emotion that Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée are probably playing in their ultimate film, on a twilight background. Jean-Louis and Anouk, we love you.

The story revolves around four elderly people, three men and a woman, joined by two secondary characters. One of the men dies at the very beginning of the film, but his spiritual presence is nonetheless felt. Each main character is surviving a difficult past and takes refuge in an individual cabin in the woods, near a lake. Friendships and amorous relationships are formed in idyllic settings, during a beautiful summer without rain and mosquitoes. In the meantime, a forest fire is approaching. What is the meaning of existence for each of the main characters? What will be their future?

These premises are interesting, but unfortunately the film lacks rhythm and lags. One feels that for some scenes, the film director refused to leave images on the floor of the editing room, notably with regards to an erotic scene that brings nothing to the story and whose object was probably aesthetic. 10-20 minutes of film should have been cut to accelerate the pace and generate more curiosity than waiting time. As for the acting, while Gilbert Sicotte and the extras are very good, most others have difficulty adopting the right tone, thus making them less convincing, which I would fault on insufficient actor direction. Finally, the action takes place in a sanitized version of nature; no mosquitoes, no black flies, no dirt, no rain and no preparation for the coming winter. You buy this if you live in the city; you don't otherwise.

But this is the director's third full length film, after Familia (2005) and Gabrielle (2013), the latter being much more engaging and convincing. She is learning the hard way, but she is promising.

This film tells the story of a 14-year-old girl, Aïcha, who does not meet friends her age and who becomes infatuated by a man twice as old. This man is decent, eager to help her in a seemingly toxic social environment, and does not respond to her insistent invitations. Aïcha's mother, a lone parent, is overwhelmed by the situation as her job prevents her from seeing her distress and obsession. It is one of those tragedies that parents fear for their children, and here, with Aïcha's whimsical tales about what happened, we can see various tangents that the story could have taken before ending tragically.

The acting is excellent. The story is well filmed. It is a opportunity for the spectator to fell lucky if his children have not engaged themselves in dangerous paths.

This film is a jewel of simplicity, beauty and sensitivity.

Arthur Rimbaud is in the Pantheon of the best French poets, along with Verlaine, Ronsard, Beaudelaire and Lamartine. His talent was as precocious as his temperament was tormented. He was a political idealist and a prodigious poet, until the destruction of La Commune de Paris and the recuperation of Parisian society by bourgeois values lead him to disillusionment, to abandoning poetry altogether and to going into overseas adventures and ultimately, death.

There is no music in this film. It is spiced with Rimbaud's letters and poetry and entirely told by characters who knew him, including Verlaine whose friendship turned into a love that lead to abandon wife, child and bourgeois comfort to follow Rimbaud in London and in ultimate destitution. The pace is unimposing. Each scene is relevant to paint a man teared apart between a domineering but loving mother living in a too quiet country town, and his exalted emotions surging from his unease with existence and society. And for once, the narrative is exact, with no invention added to the plot for dramatization purposes.