Program

2002 - 2003

Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain

A whimsical fairy tale rendered in comic-book style from a vast palette of special effects, Amélie is an unabashed crowd-pleaser. This gentle brash bittersweet romantic comedy concerns the do-gooding deeds of a lonely ingénue in Montmartre who discovers a zen for creatively altering other people’s lives. When she finds a tin box of boyhood mementos in her bathroom wall, Amélie tracks down its owner and anonymously returns it. Witnessing incognito the middle-aged man’s reaction of joy and disbelief upon opening the box, Amélie makes it her mission to minister secretly to the lonely and unhappy and, on occasion, to teach the spiteful a lesson. In a series of inventive, amusing vignettes, full of telling details, Amélie plies her métier upon friends from the café where she works, acquaintances from her apartment block, and strangers in the street. But when she meets the man of her dreams, will she be able to transform her own life? Encouraged by her neighbor, an old man who sees into her heart, Amélie sets out to seek her own happiness, devising playful but tortuous trials for her newfound love. Although her success is a foregone conclusion, the film suggests with its digressive structure and stylistic bravura that the pleasure in life, as in film, is the journey.
Cast: Amélie Poulain: Audrey Tautou; Nino Quicampoix: Mathieu Kassovitz.
Directed by: Jean-Pierre Jeunet (2001)
Screening : October 23, 2002

Le pacte des loups

Between 1764 and 1767, with Louis XV on the throne, a savage monster known as the Beast of Gévaudan rampaged through a remote region of France, slaughtering over 100 people. The mysterious creature was never caught and the deaths never properly explained. Inspired by these strands of fact-cum-myth, the film embroiders its own diabolical theory. Dispatched to the region by the king, chevalier and naturalist de Fronsac and his spiritual, Iroquois-warrior sidekick, Mani, are charged with finding, killing and stuffing the extraordinary Beast. The mission should be a cinch for these wilderness-wise, martial arts experts, but the creature, it turns out, is only a part of the problem. The men discover a corrupt underworld of peasants, clergy and courtiers alike which feeds into a violent secret society centred around the devilish Beast. Juggling the costume drama, sci-fi, action-adventure, thriller and martial arts genres, as well as creative anachronisms and the historical backdrop of the impending Revolution, the film keeps all elements in the air, fashioning a unique world with an atmosphere of pervasive dread. Featuring digital special effects and first-rate fight scenes, an animatronics Beast and a star-studded cast, the film rivalled Amélie at the French box office..
Cast: Grégoire de Fronsac: Samuel Le Bihan; Jean-François: Vincent Cassel; Marianne: Emilie Dequenne; Sylvia: Monica Bellucci; Thomas d’Apcher: Jérémie Renier; Mani: Mark Dacascos.
Directed by: Christophe Gans (2001).
Screening: November 20, 2002

Le Placard

After his smash-hit comedy, The Dinner Game, Veber returns with this broadly funny, trenchant satire on political correctness in the corporate world. François Pignon, a nondescript heterosexual milquetoast accountant who has worked for a condom manufacturer for 20 years learns that the company is planning to fire him. Coming after his rejection at the hands of his wife, and the continual disdain of his teenage son, this final affront leaves François contemplating suicide. Fortunately, his new neighbor, Belone, takes him in hand and devises a strategy to save his job: giving him a gay makeover. Knowing that firing a gay man from a condom factory would be political suicide for the firm, Belone cleverly doctors some photographs, pasting François’ head to the body of a leather-clad clubber in a gay bar, and faxes the image to the firm’s offices where it circulates among the entire staff. Not only is management compelled to keep François, but they treat him with newfound respect, even giving him a promotion! On top of that, everyone at work, as well as his wife and son, suddenly see him in a new light. François does indeed “come out of the closet”: as people learn to see him as someone “other,” he emerges more confident, more virile, more “himself.”.
Cast: François Pignon: Daniel Auteuil; Félix Santini: Gérard Depardieu; Guillaume: Thierry Lhermitte; Miss Bertrand: Michèle Laroque; Belone: Michel Aumont; Kopel: Jean Rochefort; Christine: Alexandra Vandernoot.
Directed by: Francis Veber (2001)
Screening: January 22, 2003

Lumumba

The terrifying true story of passionate and principled Patrice Lumumba, his rise to power in the late 1950’s to become the first prime minister of the newly independent Congo, and his assassination a mere six months later. Raoul Peck, (director of the award-winning documentary, Lumumba--Death of a Prophet) lets the history and politics emerge naturally as the background and driving force of the eponymous hero. Lumumba, leader of his own party, the Congolese National Movement, preaches unity, independence and justice. He is imprisoned for inciting riots, then suddenly released in order to attend a conference on independence in Brussels as the single most popular Congolese politician. But in 1960, as soon as independence is declared and Lumumba made prime minister, the country slides into turmoil. The army mutinies in objection to its Belgian officers, the province of Katanga starts to secede (with the support of Belgium), and the United States, in a bid to protect its economic interests in the resource-rich Congo, lends its support to the leader of the Congolese army, Mobutu. The story reaches near tragic proportions as Lumumba’s political ideals are first hemmed in, then laid waste, destroyed along with the man himself.
Cast: Patrice Lumumba: Eriq Ebouaney; Joseph Mobutu: Alex Descas.
Directed by: Raoul Peck (2000)
Screening: February 19, 2003

L’anglaise et le duc

At 80, the ever-youthful Rohmer embraces digital technology and with boldly innovative (but also quaintly anachronistic) techniques recreates Paris during the Revolution. Using backdrops painted in the style of the period and superimposing the authentically-accoutred actors, Rohmer achieves a vibrant tension between period accuracy and the acknowledgement of our unavoidably limited perspective on that time. And as always in Rohmer the perception of events carries as much weight as the events themselves. Here the film cleaves to the point of view of its heroine, the “incorrigible royalist” Grace Elliott, a Scottish-born high-society woman living in Paris and mixing with citizens on both sides of the ideological divide. The film focuses on the events of 1792-93, known as the Terror, and their impact on Grace and her friends, especially the Duke of Orléans, a cousin of King Louis XVI but also a supporter of the Revolution. As the aristocrats come under increasing pressure from the revolutionaries, the courageous Grace refuses to compromise her principles, even at the risk of her life. The film sparked a furore in France where the details of the Terror have traditionally been overlooked in the interest of idealizing the democratic spirit of the common man.
Cast: Grace Elliott: Lucy Russell; Duke of Orléans: Jean-Claude Dreyfus; Dumouriez: François Marthouret.
Directed by: Eric Rohmer (2001)
Screening: April 23, 2003.