The Films of the Sarasota Film Festival

DESIRE
UNE FEMME FRANCAISE ("A FRENCH WOMAN")
L'ANNEE JULIETTE ("The Juliet Year")
ETAT DES LIEUX ("State of Things")
DIS-MOI OUI ("Say Yes")
GAZON MAUDIT ("Not on My Turf")
AU PETIT MARGUERY
SALE GOSSE ("Rotten Kid")
LA FILLE SEULE ("A Girl Alone")
EN AVOIR OU PAS ("To Have Some or Not)
LES APPRENTIS (The Apprentices)
LES ANGES GARDIENS (Guardian Angels)
ADULTERE (MODE D'EMPLOI) (Adultery, A User's Guide)
LES CAPRICES D'UN FLEUVE (A River's Whims)
JOURNAL D'UN SEDUCTEUR (A Seducer's Diary)?A>
LES RENDEZ-VOUS DE PARIS

CLOSING NIGHT
LES MILLES

TRIBUTE TO JACQUES TATI
MR. HULOT'S HOLIDAY
MY UNCLE
PLAYTIME

Back to Screening Room

DESIRE
Starring: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Fanny Ardant, Beatrice Dalle, Claude Rich
Director: Bernard Murat
Producer: Daniel Toscan du Plantier/Erato Films

An all-star ensemble performs this adaptation of a Sacha Guitry play, an upstairs-downstairs romantic comedy with a gallic twist. In Jean-Paul Belmondo's DesirÈ, a prospective butler brings to his interview with Odette [Fanny Ardant) both an obliging manner and a troubling lack of background references. When Odette threatens to show him the door, he admits that a romantic liaison with the lady of the house at his previous post led to his abrupt departure. His honesty carries the day. He is hired and becomes a great favorite with the maids and with Odette's lover, a Cabinet minister, played by Claude Rich. Trouble arises when in her sleep, Odette begins calling Desire's name. Her lover has to rush off to Paris to attend to the fall of the Cabinet while Madame dreams of her own fall. Guitry's wonderful mixture of the worldly and goofy reaches a comic climax in a hilarious dinner party scene. (World Premiere)

UNE FEMME FRANCAISE ("A FRENCH WOMAN")
Starring: Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Beart, Jean-Claude Brialy, Gabriel Barylli
Director: Regis Warnier
Producer: UGC/Yves Marmion
Time: 1 hour, 4O minutes

The director of "Indochine" reunites the stars of "Un Coeur en Hiver" in a romantic story of a woman (Emmanuelle Beart) who loves her husband (Daniel Auteuil, an infantry officer), but in his absence, turns to another man for the adoration she needs. Set during and after World War II, the film which won Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress in Moscow gives epic proportion to the family tensions created by war. Playing the sort of woman who only feels alive through the desire of a man, the gorgeous Beart (she was the stunning nude model in Jacques Rivette's "La Belle Noiseuse") gives an almost tragic dimension to the self-destructive erotic needs of the Frenchwoman.

L'ANNEE JULIETTE ("The Juliet Year")
Starring: Fabrice Luchini, Marine Delterme, Didier Flamand, Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, Valerie Stroh
Producer: Les Productions Lazennec/Alain Rocca, France & Cinema Glem Films
Time: 1 hour, 25 minutes

This hilarious, sharp-edged comedy about an anesthesiologist who has organized his love life to perfection by keeping it compartmentalized, stars one of France's most prodigious acting talents, the deliciously finicky Fabrice Luchini (who condescended to sneer at the glorious Judith Henry in "La Discrete") There's something up-to-date yet eternal in the character of Camellia, a charming man-of-the-world who has overnight encounters with women colleagues at medical conferences, while enjoying regular trysts back in Paris with his married lover: the available, but not TOO available, Clementine. When cornered by Clementine, he finds a way out--he thinks-- via a suitcase mix-up, and the pursuit of an imagined dream woman. But such fatal attractions leave their own liabilities. (U.S. Premiere)

ETAT DES LIEUX ("State of Things")
Starring: Patrick Dell'Isolat, Marc de Jonge, Stephane Ferrara, Francois Dyreck, Andree Domant
Director: Jean-FranÁois Richet
Producer: Actes et Octobre, la Sept Cinema
Time: 1 hour, 20 minutes

One of the best of the new wave of films about life in the Paris "banlieue" (the equivalent of our "projects."). This one deals not just with the violence and alienation that make the headlines, but with the whole spectrum of working class and out-of-work people, old and young, fits and misfits, those who clash with the cops, with each other and family, and those who get along, thus eluding the melodramatic schema constructed by the media. Writer/director Richet and his co-scenarist and actor, Patrick Dell'Isolat, have created a polished screenplay injecting generous doses of lovemaking, yet their movie has all the "verite" feeling - rawness and authenticity - suggesting that the best of the young directors coming out of these rough environments are able to gain control by distracting themselves without losing their empathy (North American Premiere)

DIS-MOI OUI ("Say Yes")
Starring: Jean-Hugues Anglade, Julia Maraval, Nadia Fares, Claude Rich, Valerie Kaprisky, Patrick
Braoude, Jean-FranÁois Stevenin, Anouk Aimee.
Producer: Alexandre Arcady/Alexandre Films, Robert Benmussa

One of the most charismatic and versatile of the generation of French actors now in their thirties is Jean-Hugues Anglade, the manic gangster in "Killing Zoe" and the murderer-king Charles in "Queen Margot." Changing tone and pace in Alexandre Arcady's romantic comedy, and with a supporting cast that includes Anouk Aimee, Valerie Kaprisky, Claude Rich and Patrick Braoude ("Nine Months" ), a genial Anglade emerges as a pediatrician with an active after-hours life and an inability to settle down. Returning home after an all-night poker session, he discovers a young girl on the staircase of his apartment. She turns out to be a twelve year-old with a critical illness and a determination to make him care for her, both professionally and emotionally. Although he becomes a Prince Charming in spite of himself, it is she who, in the reverse side of this Cinderella story, saves him from his own apathy. (North American Premiere)

ELISA
Starring: Vanessa Paradis, Gerard Depardieu, Clotilde Courau Director: Jean Becker
Producer: Films Christian Fechner/Henri Brichetti, Herve Truffaut, Didier Pain
Time: 1 hour, 53 minutes

In 1987, 14 year old Vanessa Paradis sang "Joe le Taxi" and became an overnight sensation, selling 3 million records. Since then, she has grown up in the spotlight; her every move recorded by the media. She is less well known here, but that should change soon, since "Elisa" confirms what her award-winning first film, "Noces Blanches" promised: camera sense and "star quality." Sensual, insolent, tough and streetsmart, she has survived the turmoil of adolescence. In this story of a daughter's quest for revenge, directed by Jean Becker, son of Jacques Becker ("Touchez Pas au Grisbi"), she plays a girl who has drifted in and out of institutions since infancy when her mother, bereft of hope, committed suicide. Resentment and a determination to find and kill her father drive her through a series of confrontations and metamorphoses to a surprising end. (U.S. Premiere)

GAZON MAUDIT ("Not on My Turf")
Starring: Josiane Balasko, Victora Abril, Alain Chabat
Producer: Claude Berri/Renn Productions, Pierre Grunstein
Time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

The French comedy of the year features a gender-bending triangle of love and lust played by an ensemble of actors with sensitivity for the raunchy, but often delicate material. Loli (Abril), housewife and mother of two in the south of France, has no idea of her husband's infidelities, but she feels sexually frustrated and lonely just the same. One day, all that changes when a van breaks down in her front yard, and its owner, an imposing take-charge type named Marijo (Balasko), appreciates Loli's charms and lingers a while.

Both the actor Balasko and writer-director Balasko have been in love triangle before: in Bertrand Blier's "Trop Belle pour Toi" she was the not-too-beautiful-but-comforting secretary who provided refuge for Gerard Depardieu from his super-perfect wife [Carole Bouquet). Victoria Abril, the French-speaking Spanish star of Almodovar's films ("Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down,") known to Sarasota audiences for last year's "Casque Bleu," gives Loli the right balance of spice, poignancy and humor. And in the tricky role of the cuckolded husband, Alain Chabat is a smoothly guileful roue until he loses his cool in the face of a female rival.

AU PETIT MARGUERY
Starring: Stephane Audran, Michel Aumont, Laurence Cole, Pierre-Loup Rajot
Director: Laurent Benegui
Producer: Telema/Charles Gassot
Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

For the closing of the restaurant that has been the center of their lives, Hippolyte and Josephine give a grand farewell dinner for their friends and neighbors. Hippolyte (Aumont), chef and proprietor, is in and out of the kitchen while his wife Josephine (Audran) takes orders and presides over the arrangements. In the midst of the merriment and nostalgia, their son Barnabe, who grew up in the restaurant, feels his childhood slipping away. The occasion brings forth not only a succulent array of mouth-watering dishes, but memories, revelations, little explosions, near break-ups, and reconciliations. In adapting his own novel to the screen, Benegul captures the way food and friendship form the interlocking nexus of French cuisine, and we understand why - with communal dinners to sort out problems and assuage their souls - the French have so little need of the analyst's couch. (North American Premiere)

SALE GOSSE ("Rotten Kid")
Starring: Anouk Grinberg, Axel Lingee, Alberto Gimignani
Director: Claude Mourieras
Producer: Alain Sarde, Philippe Godeau
Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Winner of the first Feature Film Prize at the San Sebastian Film festival (Maurieras' highly-praised "Montalvo et "Enfant" was a medium-length film on dance), "Sale Gosse" features two astonishing performances. The first is by Anouk Grinberg, star lately of Bertrand Blier's films, as a single mother engaged in a running battle with her desperately unhappy adolescent son. Playing the latter, Axel Lingee tests and defies her, resenting the youthful attractiveness that makes her still irresistible to men. She, caught up in his unceasing anger, is by turns furious, gentle, unstrung, pleading, and disconsolate, helpless to comfort him while he clings to a fairy tale about the father who waits for him. The predicament is universal, but rarely has one felt so intensely the anguish of both mother and son, struggling to reach other over the barrier of their internal wounds. (World Premiere)

LA FILLE SEULE ("A Girl Alone")
Starring: Virginie Ledoyen
Director: Benoit Jacquot
Producer: Philippe Carcassone
Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

A girl and her boyfriend meet in a cafe. She is pregnant. What will they do? They argue back and fourth. Immediately, in this relatively unexceptional scene, we feel tremendous tension. Benoit Jacquot, whose "La Desenchantee", another captivating portrait of a young woman, was shown at the first Sarasota French Film Festival, follows Ledoyen through a day of work as a breakfast waitress in a hotel. The whole procedure acquires an eerie fascination: We watch as this lovely but unfriendly girl puts on her uniform in the morning, interacts with fellow employees, interviews for a permanent job, calls her mother, fends off both generous and nasty advances, all the while feeling an ineffable sense of menace, of pent-up emotion. Her long walks up and down the corridor invoke unease: we're not sure whether it's a sense of the horror of the job itself, of having to invade the sanctity of hotel rooms early in the morning, or of this woman's stubborn inability to adapt. Though very little happens in the ordinary sense, Ledoyen is mesmerizing to watch, and the film radiates with the cinematic magic, as it captures without explaining, the opaque density of personality. (U.S. Premiere)

EN AVOIR OU PAS ("To Have Some or Not)
Starring: Sandrine Kiberlain, Arnaud Giovaninetti, Roschdy Zem, Didier Flamand, Lise Lametrie
Director: Laetitia Masson
Producer: Francais Cuel, Georges Benayoun

This first film by Laetitia Masson looks at one small town worn and, and through her, all women, who want to get out of wherever they grew up but haven't any clear idea of what they can do or where they can go. Sandrine Kiberlain, as the sometimes bold, sometimes tentative heroine, is a discovery: with her freckles, her eyes that can make her seem beautiful or plain, and the dubious singing voice she hopes to make a career on, she holds our interest as she makes her way from Boulogne-sur-Mer to Lyons, there to become attracted to a young man who is more in flight than she is. Funny with a real feeling for the joys and difficulties of escaping one's background and one's limitations, Masson's film is nothing more or less than the story of two young people re-inventing their lives. (U.S. Premiere)

LES APPRENTIS (The Apprentices)
Starring: Francois Cluzet, Guillaume Depardieu, Judith Henry, Marie Trintignant
Director: Pierre Salvadori
Producer: Les Films Pelleas
Time: 1 hour, 35 minutes

Like most buddy movies, this one begins with two guys who can barely tolerate each other. Antoine (Francois Cluzet) is a loafer with the occasional shady side affair. They find themselves sharing the apartment of a mutual acquaintance, and helping each other out. Fred becomes a photographer as a way of getting close to an actress he meets; Antoine, with Fred's help, plans to rob the magazine he works for; fortunately, the plan misfires. Salvadori is the young director whose "Cible Emouvante," also starring Guillaume Depardieu, played in Sarasota two years ago.
(North American Premiere)

LES ANGES GARDIENS (Guardian Angels)
Starring: Gerard Depardieu, Christian Clavier, Eva Grimaldi
Director: Jean-Marie Poire
Producer: Gaumont
Time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

In the latest comedy hit by the director of blockbuster "Les Visiteurs," Depardieu and Clavier play opposites whose paths and consciences cross. Depardieu is a sleazy night club owner who, at the request of a dying friend, flies to Hong Kong to look after the man's young son... and a stolen fortune. Clavier is an earnest priest whom by chance, temporarily inherits both, and finds himself being pursued by the Chinese mob. Then their Guardian Angels appear: Depardieu as his "good" conscience, dressed in white as a cricketer, and a malignant version of Clavier in a black cassock, harasses the good father. (North American Premiere)

ADULTERE (MODE D'EMPLOI) (Adultery, A User's Guide)
Starring: Richard Berry, Karin Viard, Vincent Cassel, Emmanuelle Malimi
Director: Christine Pascal
Producer: Robert Boner
Time: 1 hour, 35 minutes

Christine Pascal, whose stirring film "Le Petit Prince a dit" with Richard Berry played in Sarasota several years ago, once again subtly gets inside the ambitions and romantic needs of today's men and women. Bruno and Fabienne are married architects in love with each other and their work. While waiting to find out if they have won a major competition, their lives take off an unexpected directions. Each gets caught up in a wild situation, in big city violence, as well as in turbulent battles of the heart. They also seem to redefine that eternal misunderstanding between men and women, whereby one pursues sex, while the other is looking for love.

LES CAPRICES D'UN FLEUVE (A River's Whims)
Starring: Bernard Giraudeau, Richard Bohringer, Anna Galiena
Producer: Jean-Francois Lepetit (Flach Film)
Time: 1 hour, 55 minutes

This 18th century story of the slave trade and the beginning of the abolitionist movement, is one to which actor-director Giraudeau has been attached for years. The project marks the well-known film and stage actor's second feature film. Shot on the island of Goree, in the deserts of West Africa, the film stars Giraudeau as a young aristocrat sent into exile for fighting a duel. He finds himself, on the eve of the French Revolution, Governor of the Cap Saint Louis, and in the midst of an adventure in which love is torn apart by history.
(World Premiere)

LE JOURNAL D'UN SEDUCTEUR (A Seducer's Diary)
Starring: Chiara Mastroianni, Melvil Poupaud, Daniele Dubroux; Micheline Presle, Jean-Pierre Leaud
Director: Daniele Dubroux
Producer: Gemini Films
Time: 1 hour, 27 minutes

A young man, Gregoire, sits in a cafe drinking coffee, with Kierkegaard's "Dairy of a Seducer" on the table. It works. He snares the attention of a girl, Claire, and they begin seeing each other. Meanwhile, another young man spends the evening with Claire and her psychoanalyst mother, and finding that he is attracted to both of them, hangs around, polishing up his nonexistent technique. This funny, occasionally mordant story of a group of nutty Parisians, some with psychiatrists, some without, takes us into the strange dwelling of Gregoire and his mother, (the great Micheline Presle) not to mention a hilarious dinner party thrown by New-Wave veteran, Jean-Pierre Leaud. Festival-goers will remember Daniele Dubroux's "Border Line" from 1992.
(North American Premiere)

A LA VIE, A LA MORT (To Life, To Death!)
Starring: Ariane Ascaride, Gerard Meylan, Jacques Boudet, Jean-Pierre Darroussin
Director: Robert Guediguian
Producer: Agat Films et Cie
Time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

"When I am asked who I am, I answer: I am the son of a worker born in Estaque in the northern section of Marseilles (the section always comes first in this city). That's my identity, my culture and my morality. And my language." So says Robert Guediguian a director who has recently acquired critical acclaim for his colorful and precisely rendered films about his native Marseilles. He has made a cause celebre of his attachment to the city, and his films come out of his belief in a world where boundaries increasingly blur, in the distinctiveness of a locale - its colors and smells, the clothes people wear, their jobs and pleasures. (North American Premiere)

LES RENDEZ-VOUS DE PARIS
Starring: Clara Bellar, Antoine Balsa, Mathias Megard, Aurore, Serge Renko, Michel Kraft, Benedicte Loyen
Director: Eric Rohmer
Producer: Compagnie Eric Rohmer
Time: 1 hour, 35 minutes

Chance - "le hasard" - and human nature intertwine in three enchanting stories set in different parts of Paris. One woman suspects that her lover is seeing another girl regularly at the cafe, and ends up, through a bizarre chain of circumstances, confronting him. A pretty woman wandering with her lover through the parks, discussing with him the termination of her engagement, realizes that the lover is necessary only so long as she is sick with the other man. In the third episode a painter gets rid of one woman by sending her to the Picasso Museum, only to fall instantly in love with another woman, whom he sees studying a favorite painting. Justice is served, and the circle is complete, when he realizes she is totally unavailable to him. Eric Rohmer, the great chronicler of the perversities of love, continues to bring new twists and fresh faces to portraits of Parisians in the throes of love and self-justification.
(U.S. Premiere)

CLOSING NIGHT FILM, LES MILLES
Starring: Jean-Pierre Marielle, Ticky Holgado, Rudiger Vogler, Kristen Scott-Thomas, Philippe Noiret
Director: Sebastien Grail
Producer: Lew Rywin/Blue Films, Raymond Blumenthal
Time: 1 hour, 43 minutes

In the turmoil of 1940, an easy going, yet imposing general is assigned to oversee 'The Thousand', an internment camp that was formerly a brickyard. Here, two thousand civilians - Austrian, Czech and German, artists, communists and conscientious objectors - are incarcerated. The armistice approaches: the Vichy government presents Perrochon with a dilemma by asking him to turn the prisoners over to the Germans. This fascinating character - a career military man who is nevertheless a kind of ordinary guy - will in the course of the movie become a hero in suite of himself. At the head of a particularly fine cast is Jean-Pierre Marielle who was so marvelous in last year's "The Smile." He has said he was drawn to the role because of its interesting mixture of comedy and seriousness, seeing the movie which looks at a period that has been relatively unprecedented in French cinema, as a "comedy of manners in a confined space."
(U.S. Premiere)

MR. HULOT'S HOLIDAY
Starring: Jacques Tati
Director: Jacques Tati
Producer: Fred Orain
Time: 1 hour, 25 minutes

1952. Jacques Tati, the great comic actor-director is, of course, one of the presiding geniuses of modern cinema. His famous creation, the tall, loping M. Hulot, is the ordinary man confronting the absurdities of contemporary life. In this film, he hovers on the outside of a group of vacationers, and we tune in to the noises of laughter, conversations and the sea. The gags, like the muffled message of a loudspeaker, and the train that is always on the wrong side of the track, are both universal and eternal.

MY UNCLE
Starring: Jacques Tati, Jean-Pierre Zola, Adrienne Servantie, Alain Becourt
Director: Jacques Tati
Producer: Jacques Tati
Time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

1958. In this very stylized view of the modern world, Mr. Hulot is a man out of sync with the dehumanized environment in which he finds himself. In contrast to Mr. Hulot, his brother-in-law who is fascinated by all the chrome, aluminum and plastic gadgets of our mass-produced technology, M. Hulot keeps his distance, a graceful, balletic figure, hovering on the periphery.

Starring: Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek, Jacqueline Lecomte
Director: Jacques Tati
Producer: Jacques Tati
Time: 1 hour, 48 minutes

1968. In his most ambitious film, about a group of Americans ok a 36 hour took of Paris, Jacques Tati creates a world within a world, an extremely inventive use of sight gags and sound, Tati allows us to see, through M. Hulot's eyes, a between the new world and the old one. The laws of logic are capsized, and it is finally the humor and tolerance of the awkward, but ever-benign Mr. Hulot that saves the tourists from disaster.