Nouvelle Vague [2025]

 Richard Linklater composed Nouvelle Vague as a love letter to the eponymous French movement and Jean-Luc Godard’s trailblazing genius through a quirky, breezy and enjoyable “behind-the-scenes” making of JLG’s seminal debut feature Breathless. The latter film, with the way it embodied radical creative freedom – in its conception, making, expression and all-round irreverence – became the movement’s most emblematic work, and Linklater’s ode was therefore also a gushing celebration of movies itself. Shaped like a picaresque caper, it began with The 400 Blows’ rapturous Cannes screening, the unforgettable debut of Godard’s friend and fellow Cahiers du Cinéma critic Truffaut. With most others belonging to Cahiers’ pioneering cohort having made feature debuts already, Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) decides it’s high time for him to jump from theory to action. He hustles a meagre budget from producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst), somehow lures Hollywood starlet Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) – fresh out of her success with Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse – into the cast, and pulls in his friend Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), largely unknown at that time, as the Bogart-admiring anti-hero. Former war photographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), who’d become a Nouvelle Vague legend himself, joins the crew, and thus begins a whirlwind and hilariously unpredictable 20-day shoot when Godard fought with Beauregard, annoyed Seberg, broke every cinematic grammar, charmed everyone and created history, while proving to be alternately mercurial, infuriating, enigmatic, wryly funny and inspired, uttering pithy philosophies and advised by his zen gurus Rosellini, Melville and Bresson. Despite its fleeting qualities, playfulness and verisimilitude – gorgeous B/W photography on 35mm film, digital recreation of 1960s Paris, and made fully in French – Linklater’s approach, ironically, stood at odds with Godard’s guerrilla, improvisational and political filmmaking.

Director: Richard Linklater

Genre: Comedy/Docudrama

Language: French

Country: France

The Piano Accident [2025]

 In a hyperconnected digital world overstuffed with vacuous “influencers” spewing inane garbage in the name of content, and their rabid “followers” ravenously consuming them, one can only be bemused by this weirdly symbiotic relationship. Quentin Dupieux’s The Piano Accident is a pungent and jaundiced satire that ferociously interrogates this greasy and desolate state of affair. It’s, in other words, a rather savage little film that goes for the jugular and takes no prisoners. It begins with a teasing shot of a piano suspended midair before seemingly crashing down. We then see Magalie (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a cantankerous young woman with a fractured arm – ostensibly injured by the said incident – being driven to a luxurious getaway by her servile factotum Patrick (Jérôme Commandeur). As we gradually learn, she’s an insanely popular and super-wealthy social media sensation who creates bizarre content – freely milking her congenital insensitivity to pain for masochistic reels – that her fans consume like a drug, and that she’s currently escaping from a shocking turn of events which can permanently ruin her. This is a curiously minimalist work in terms of its cast; aside from the incorrigible Magalie – whose utterly repulsive behaviour is a defence against her rotten and empty core, and delightfully hammed up by Exarchopoulos – we have the middle-aged Patrick, who satisfies all her churlish demands while secretly despising her as he’s unlikely get such a well-paying job elsewhere; Simone (Sandrine Kiberlain), a desperate journalist who blackmails her way into a candid interview with the notoriously media averse celeb; and a salivating idiot (Karim Leklou) representing toxic, dim-witted fandom. The film gleefully deals in unrestrained excesses with a sense of humour that’s equal parts grotesque, horrifying and unhinged.

Director: Quentin Dupieux

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire

Language: French

Country: France

I… for Icarus [1979]

 JFK’s assassination has formed a recurring thread within political conspiracy thrillers, while among French left-wing political cinema in particular, films starring Yves Montand represented a sub-genre in itself. Directed by Henri Verneuil, best known internationally for the stylistic crime movie The Sicilian Clan, I… for Icarus ticked both boxes. Beginning with the cheekily framed disclaimer, “this story is entirely true since I’ve imagined it from start to finish”, this captivating, fatalist and irony-laden interpretation of the intrigue behind the American President’s death provided a delectably cynical expression of how, in modern nation-states, “truth” is diffused under convenient falsehoods, and that curiosity can have fatal consequences. Set in an unnamed country, a fearless, non-conformist President keen on challenging the status quo is shot dead, and the commission investigating into it returns with the verdict that it was the act of a lone assassin. Senior prosecutor Henri Volney (Montand), however, dissents the commission’s finding, and as a result is given the responsibility for leading a fresh inquiry. As he starts digging along with his team, he finds a continuously repeating pattern of ignoring, suppressing, bending and tampering with evidences, the disturbing discovery that multiple witnesses have been liquidated, and the growing realization that shadowy forces and senior state operatives are behind the conspiracy. Montand brought in his customary blend of charisma, intelligence and weariness in this film laced with distinctive French sensibilities and accompanied by Ennio Morricone’s riveting, self-reflexively used score. In an unsettling aside, the “Milgram obedience experience” is recreated, underscoring how, as Volney summarizes, “even in a country that’s civilized, democratic and liberal, two-thirds of the population are capable of carrying out any order coming from a higher authority.”

Director: Henri Verneuil

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Conspiracy Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

The Sorrow and the Pity [1969]

 Few films have so powerfully combatted collective historical amnesia like Marcel Ophüls’ monumental 4-½-hour-long documentary did by dismantling the carefully established Gaullist myth – much to everyone’s chagrin – that the French populace had resisted the Nazi Occupation en masse and were tragically martyred by it. No wonder, he had to secure funding from German and Swiss television after the French network refused to support an exercise as unpalatable as this, and a French release was made finally possible at a small left bank theatre thanks to Truffaut. This engrossing work – its colossal runtime notwithstanding – was a complex, multi-perspective investigation into the puppet, autocratic and collaborationist regime that was helmed by Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, which made France the sole occupied country during WW2 that had a functioning government that actively cooperated with German occupiers. Ophüls documented this dark chapter through an assemblage of diverse personal testimonies, memories and reflections – perpetrators, apologists and bystanders, as well as heroes, dissidents, and those who realized their folly on hindsight; fascists and antifascists; French people, of course, but also former Wehrmacht officers and British agents – which made this a simultaneously lucid, desolate and devastating oral history. Broken into two halves – “The Collapse” covered France’s rapid surrender, armistice, the disgraceful Vichy government, and how most people were okay with it; “The Choice” focussed on the active and passive collaborators, fearless members of Resistance groups, and the murky liberation process – its most unforgettable section comprised of a freewheeling conversation with working-class former Resistance fighters who melancholically share how easily everyone had embraced virulent racism, anti-Communism and xenophobia, the associated moral rot, the futility of seeking revenge against informants, and the eventual whitewashing of wartime culpability.

Director: Marcel Ophuls

Genre: Documentary/War

Language: French/German/English

Country: France

Secret Défense [1998]

 Jacques Rivette, in a rare foray into genre cinema with Secret Défense, made the narrative both freer and more expansive while also retaining the brooding atmosphere that one associates with slow-burn crime movies. The resulting work was a compelling exercise in psychological suspense that succeeded, over a generous runtime of nearly three hours, in being a taut thriller as well as a meditation on secrets, obsessions, modernity and solitude. Rivette’s smouldering emphasis on the moments and spaces between actions made the film particularly intriguing, and that was exhibited through the near-real-time sequences involving Paris metro rides, and – in perhaps the film’s most riveting segment – an anxiety-ridden 20-minute train ride sequence. Sylvie (Sandrine Bonnaire), a research scientist still getting over her father’s death five years back, gets an unanticipated visit from her troubled younger brother Paul (Grégoire Colin) – they haven’t spoken since the funeral – who tells her that their dad’s death wasn’t accidental; he’s convinced their dad’s former business partner Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), who’s taken over his company, stays in the sprawling mansion where they’d grown up, and maintains a discomfiting proximity with their mother (Françoise Fabian), has murdered their dad, and he therefore intends to exact a bloody revenge. Sylvie isn’t fully convinced but jolted enough, and decides to do the job herself so that Paul is spared the agony. Things, however, become messy when she accidentally kills Walser’s stunning young secretary/lover (Laure Marsac), only for her sister (also played by Marsac) to start looking for her missing sister. The formally rigorous work was marked by visual interplay between technological modernity of life in Paris vis-à-vis ominous serenity of the country, and excellent turns by both Bonnaire and Radziwilowicz.

Director: Jacques Rivette

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Mystery

Language: French

Country: France

F for Fake [1973]

 Orson Welles’ delightfully irreverent, discursive and playful film F for Fake – through its impish and exuberant celebration of fakery, chicanery and double bluffs – was one final act of wily chutzpah by the man who loved subverting boundaries. Conjoined with Abbas Kiarostami’s late-career masterpiece Certified Copy in their shared admiration for fakes and teasing questions on authenticity, while ironically being ravishingly original works themselves, it operated in the intersection of documentary, essay and hybrid – as it often blurred the lines separating non-fiction from fiction. It primarily focused on two fascinating charlatans who drew Welles to this film in the first place (François Reichenbach had initially planned to direct it, but happily became its producer instead). On one hand there was Elmyr de Hory, a master art forger who fooled renowned art galleries with his fakes thanks to his insouciance and brilliance; now retired, he’s settled at Ibiza where he regales his guests with wry anecdotes. Joining him was Clifford Irving, de Hory’s biographer, who then insolently walked in his subject’s footsteps by writing a fake “authorized autobiography” of Howard Hughes. Along with his infectious portraits on the two men – who he treated with undisguised fondness as fellow journeymen – Welles freely deployed the canvas for musings on how art, like magic, is an amalgamation of truth, lies, illusions and sleight of hand, and then proceeded to self-deprecatory reflections on his own journey as an artist – using false identities and fake stories, and even fictionalizing Howard Hughes in Citizen Kane – and, in arguably its most irresistible sections, amusing meditations and “stories” on Picasso. Captivatingly shot in grainy colours, it extensively featured his muse Oja Kodar in a series of sultry, shape-shifting personas.

Director: Orson Welles

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Social Satire

Language: English

Country: France

Certified Copy (Copie Conforme) [2010]

 With Certified Copy, the great Abbas Kiarostami joined an exclusive group of non-francophone filmmakers like Buñuel, Kieślowski and Losey who made cinematic masterpieces in French. At once deliciously beguiling, seductively beautiful and disarmingly ingenious, this breathtaking exercise subtly channelled Rosellini’s Journey to Italy, the distinctive flavours of archetypal European arthouse cinema and his own marital disintegration, and echoed the futility of authenticity and originality, while ironically being a ravishingly original piece of work. It began like a dry essay – a form that Kiarostami had extensively partook in since his earliest days – with British writer James Miller (English opera singer William Shimell in a fine acting debut) introducing, at a gathering in Tuscany, the Italian translation of his eponymously titled book which posits the relevance of reproductions. After the lecture he meets the unnamed “Elle” (Juliette Binoche in an effortlessly triumphant turn) – a French woman and single mom who runs an antiques store selling replicas – and the two strangers decide to chat while exploring the charming locales. They initially drive and then stroll around, with their freewheeling and intelligent conversations bearing edgy undertones. The gently ambling narrative underwent a stunning pivot at a trattoria where they’ve stopped for coffee. The café’s matronly owner assumes that they’re a married couple, and they seemingly decide to participate in this charade. However, one soon starts wondering if they’re playacting or they’re indeed an estranged couple carrying years of differences, disappointments and bitterness. Magnificently shot in fluid long takes – a sequence where they’re driving with the gorgeous surroundings reflected on the windshield was especially captivating – this enigmatic and richly textured film delivered sharp reflections on both art and relationships over one sumptuous Tuscan afternoon.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of the film can be found here.

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Romantic Drama/Marital Drama/Avant-Garde

Language: French/English/Italian

Country: France

The War Is Over (La Guerre est Finie) [1966]

 The War Is Over – the (translated) phrase with which Franco had declared the end of the Spanish Civil War – was as much its ‘Left Bank’ auteur Alain Resnais’ as it was screenwriter Jorge Semprún’s and actor Yves Montand’s. This landmark film, which comprised of a remarkable interplay of political discourse and actions with existential and moral enquiries, alternated between arresting 1960s zeitgeist and introspective memories. Resnais portrayed these contrapuntal elements by juxtaposing a classically structured narrative thrillingly laced with the here-and-now of the present, reflective voiceovers and dazzling montage sequences – including a nod to Godard’s magnificent A Married Woman – that fragmented the past while suffusing it with impressions, premonitions and déjà vu. Semprún, who wrote the nuanced screenplay, composed the film’s protagonist Diego Mora – an ageing Spanish Communist, anti-Franco resistance, career revolutionary and exile – based on himself. Montand, in one of his most celebrated performances, imbued the character – a person of many identities, no permanent home, and bouncing between his ideals and dilemmas – with such profound weariness that it exuded from the screen. Set over the course of a few days in Paris – he’s just about escaped getting caught while leaving Spain, but is determined to go back prior to a massive general strike being planned – he finds himself vacillating between his girlfriend Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), who he always returns to, and Nadine (Geneviève Bujold), a young leftist woman who’s part of an extremist group with political views radically different from his own; meanwhile, he also senses growing differences with his own party comrades. Shot in sensuous B/W by Sacha Vierny, this moody, poetic, understated and formally exhilarating work was therefore as politically engaging as it was profoundly personal.

Director: Alain Resnais

Genre: Drama/Political Drama

Language: French

Country: France

The Color of Lies [1999]

 A sleepy, closely-knit provincial town in Brittany – a place that Chabrol has returned to multiple times across his career – is a bubbling hotbed of secrets, suspicions, deceit, intrigue and criminal tendencies in Chabrol’s smouldering, deftly underplayed and excellent thriller The Colour of Lies. The deliberately paced narrative is bookended by two violent events – the rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl, and a death by falling that could either be accidental or not – while there’re other misdemeanours that’re underway in parallel. The film’s languid atmosphere, however, belied these, as Chabrol was more interested in portraying the moral rot, the societal malaise and the psychological repercussions as opposed to making a regular crime and mystery movie. When the body of the girl is discovered, the cops – led by the new, young and gently tenacious chief of police Frédérique (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), who’s also an outsider – immediately consider the embittered painter and art teacher René (Jacques Gamblin) as the primary suspect, as he was the last person to see her alive. Once a promising artist whose career crashed upon being wounded in the 1980s, he earns a pittance by teaching local kids and is largely dependent on the earnings from his vivacious wife Vivianne (Sandrine Bonnaire), who’s a professional physiotherapist. While she loves him and defends him against the growing rumours, she gets drawn into a sly affair with Desmot (Antoine de Caulnes), a slick, shady and highly successful writer who glibly collaborates with both left and right-wing establishments. Beautifully chiselled turns by the actors led by Gamblin and Bonnaire, the sultry restraint of its images, the gossipy amoral community, and the understated finale all added to the film’s sordid charm.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Mystery

Language: French

Country: France

La Rupture (The Breach) [1970]

 Claude Chabrol’s stunning ‘Hélène cycle’ – La Femme Infidèle, Que la Bête Meure, Le Boucher, La Rupture and Juste Avant la Nuit – delivered barbed interrogations into the bourgeoisie through chilling crime thrillers, with all featuring the luminous Stéphane Audran as the eponymous heroine. The series’ penultimate film was among the darkest and definitely the most bonkers of the lot, operating simultaneously as fiendish psychological thriller, exploration into the rotten core of social entitlement, and black comedy veering towards absurdism and even surrealism. Its violent opening – Charles (Jean-Claude Drouot), the drug-addled and mentally disturbed husband of Hélène (Audran), injuring their kid son Michel in a moment of frenzy, which makes her retaliate by beating Charles with a frying pan – set the tone for what followed. She leaves home with Michel, admits him in a hospital, takes refuge at a nearby boarding house, and files for divorce. Her affluent father-in-law Ludovic (Michel Bouquet), insidiously drunk in his power and privilege, had always despised her for her “disreputable” past as former strip dancer; and now, intent on seizing custody of his prized “male heir”, he employs the sleazy Paul (Jean-Pierre Cassel) to tarnish her image. With no ploy – howsoever vile or grotesque – beneath him, he goes about doing just that with the help of his deliriously raunchy girlfriend (Catherine Rouvel). Audran was sublime as the unflappably moral and quietly defiant woman who refuses to bow down; Bouquet, Cassel and Rouvel were captivating in their varying shades of villainy; and the vividly bright photography accentuated the nasty undercurrents, in this nightmarish adaptation of Charlotte Armstrong’s novel, who he’d adapt again 3 decades later for the terrific Merci pour le Chocolat.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Marital Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

Les Biches [1968]

 Claude Chabrol decided to take inspiration from Patricia Highsmith’s legendary and fabulous novel The Talented Mr. Ripley for Les Biches. He, however, went for a saucy gender reversal and delectably ambiguous interpretation of the book, and using it as a launchpad instead for his caustic examinations of existential ennui, class and sexual power games, and mutually destructive ménage à trois among the bourgeoisie, while retaining the book’s languid atmosphere and amorality. Stéphane Audran was captivating as Frédérique, a bored, wealthy, attractive and therefore the archetypal Chabrol woman. She picks up the oddly named Why (Jacqueline Sassard), a young street artist and hustler, in Paris, and they embark on a casual affair. Frédérique brings Why along to her villa in Saint Tropez, and the story’s delicious amorality takes full bloom in the enchanting, lazy environs of the Riviera. Both, incidentally, are bisexual, as the young Why first has a short fling with the handsome architect Paul (Jean Louis Trintignant), and the older Frédérique then swoops down on him and they begin a steadier relationship. That sparks the unravelling of Why’s repressed jealousies and vengeful sociopathy, and she starts reimagining herself as her mistress’s doppelgänger; before long, she wants to usurp the latter’s place. There were clear parallels that Chabrol drew with Bergman’s Persona in how the two women engage in a dangerous game of interchangeability and one-upmanship, reminiscent of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in the celebrated Bergman classic. Shot in muted colours, and with a dash of silly irreverence thrown in thanks to the two goofy gay friends housed by Frédérique (Henri Attal and Dominique Zardi), this remains a strangely fascinating if decidedly weird entry in Chabrol’s rebellious canon.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Romantic Thriller/Psychological Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

La Cérémonie [1995]

 Claude Chabrol had impishly quipped that La Cérémonie – one of his greatest accomplishments, and which I’d been craving to revisit ever since I read A Judgement in Stone, the terrific source novel by Ruth Rendell – that it’s a “Marxist film”. This deliciously insidious tour de force work wasn’t just a cutting dissection of class structures, dynamics and conflicts, it literally culminated into a violent class war. He transplanted the novel from the British to the French countryside, retaining the unnerving interplay between a provincial locale’s overly tranquil environs and its sordid undercurrents with sinister possibilities, while replacing the author’s faux-reportage prose with a venomously ironic tone that made this an icily controlled domestic thriller. The malevolent tale is spearheaded with stunning aplomb by two of the most fabulous French actresses – Sandrine Bonnaire, as the taciturn, eerily withdrawn and inscrutable Sophie who’s pathologically ashamed of her illiteracy, and Isabelle Huppert, as the chirpy, eccentric, borderline unhinged and devilishly volatile Jeanne. A ticking bomb is planted the day the wealthy, cultured and deeply snobbish Lelièvres – comprising of the ravishingly beautiful Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset), her quietly arrogant second husband Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel), his gently condescending college-going daughter Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen), and her gauche adolescent son – hire Sophie as resident maid in their isolated mansion, and the fuse gets lit when the latter ends up befriending Jeanne, an impetuous postmistress who loves prying into people’s secrets and holds a smouldering grudge against the family for their privilege and indifference. Further, the feral pair are subconsciously craving for delayed vendetta against the social order for their disreputable pasts, and their roiling resentments erupt into a shockingly manic climax that Chabrol must’ve especially relished filming.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Crime Thriller/Black Comedy

Language: French

Country: France

Nada [1974]

 Nada, the ferocious, fatalist and brilliant political thriller by Jean-Patrick Manchette, was a book tailor-made for adaptation by Costa-Gavras; the case for that appears especially stronger when one realizes that the Greek-French director made the magnificent State of Siege – which too featured the abduction and assassination of an American official by a left-wing guerrilla outfit, albeit in Uruguay instead of France – a year prior to the book’s publication. Though Chabrol was also a political filmmaker with strong leftist affiliations and made multiple subversive thrillers over his fecund career, his political expressions were often aimed at the bourgeoisie rather than the state, while his thrillers were distinctive for their sultry inaction and comeuppances that may never arrive. He was, therefore, an uncharacteristic person to adapt a violent and explosive book like this. However, he possibly sensed the cool, the cynicism and the dark irony underlying the tale of a ragtag group of anarchists kidnapping the US ambassador in France, even while the reader/viewer knows from get-go that this is a spectacularly suicidal mission. It ends in an ugly massacre as the vicious and reactionary cop tasked with hunting them down, and the ham-fisted governmental machinery backing him, don’t want it to end in any other way. The ensuing work, consequently, possessed the filmmaker’s sardonic and seditious jabs – and an arresting showdown that mirrored the book’s deep nihilism – while also appearing rough and uneven on various occasions. The eponymous Nada groupuscule comprised of a Catalonian partisan (Fabio Testi), a weary middle-aged revolutionary-for-hire (Maurice Garrel) and a dipsomaniac (Lou Castel) among others, while the carnage against them is spearheaded by a ruthless cop (Michel Aumont) and a Machiavellian Interior Minister (André Falcon).

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

The Substance [2024]

 What happens when you mix a cocktail that’s equal parts grotesque body horror, caustic showbiz satire, deliriously lurid and grisly B-movie, and fierce feminist critique on male gaze, shallow beauty standards and institutionalized ageism? You get a brash, deliciously nasty, wickedly funny and intensely polarizing film like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, that’s unapologetically in-your-face and dripping with chutzpah. However, for the same reasons, it also felt overdone and unwieldy at times, with its lofty ideological ambitions lacking in complex undertones, even if – admittedly – Fargeat was probably never aiming for nuance or subtlety. This, incidentally, is also a rare body horror film directed by a woman, thereby pairing it with fellow French filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s Titane. The titular “substance” is an experimental black-market drug that spawns a younger and more beautiful self of oneself; the only catch being, the two alternate versions must co-exist symbiotically to avoid horrific repercussions to both. Elisabeth (Demi Morre), once a fabled Hollywood goddess but now leading aerobics shows for the TV, is summarily fired by the network’s boorish and lascivious boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) – a deliberately noxious caricature given the name – as she’s just turned 50. Faced with anonymity and irrelevance, she falls into the trap and takes the sinister drug, and thus emerges – through a literally spine-crushing process – her young, saucy and sexy doppelgänger Sue (Margaret Qualley). Soon enough a mutually destructive battle develops between them, as they spitefully start treating one another as rivals. Moore and Qualley weren’t just excellent in their respective roles, they also complemented each other as psychedelic variants of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The garish colours and trippy visuals, meanwhile, were reminiscent of De Palma and Verhoeven.

Director: Coralie Fargeat

Genre: Sci-Fi/Body Horror/Showbiz Satire/Black Comedy

Language: English

Country: France

Miséricorde (Misericordia) [2024]

 Alain Guiraudie channelled Claude Chabrol – the latter’s recurring love for delivering cutting and subversive social critiques through tales of passion and crime in provincial France – in his delectably teasing pastoral noir Miséricorde. The film also possessed a morbid sense of humour – that was at its most darkly funny in a sequence where the protagonist is served mushrooms for dinner that’ve grown at the site of a murdered man’s corpse, recalling Imamura’s penchant for macabre fun – and an increasingly absurdist streak, interlaced with charged homoerotic overtones. It began on a creepily banal note, as the protagonist – shot from his POV – drives through winding country roads in near silence; one can already sense that unseemly developments await at his destination. He’s Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), a soft-spoken baker presently out-of-work, who’s returned to his bucolic hometown of Saint-Martial to attend the funeral of his former boss who he admired. Things take uncomfortable turns from get-go as the middle-aged widow (Catherine Frot), who figured Jérémie was in love with her deceased husband, offers him an extended stay at her place and is poker-faced about the ensuing intimacy, while her volatile and aggressive son (Jean-Baptiste Durand) – possibly triggered by some repressed memories – is increasingly hostile to Jérémie as he thinks that the latter is planning to seduce his mom, which rapidly escalates into violence. Jérémie, meanwhile, has a soft-corner for an unemployed pot-bellied loner, while an impish local priest (Jacques Develay), who’s also an avid forager of mushrooms, is attracted to Jérémie. The tranquil environs of this sleepy village evidently mask a saucy core rippling with delicious amorality and sizzling carnality, and this duality found sly accompaniments in this droll, playful and earthy work.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Alain Guiraudie

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Black Comedy

Language: French

Country: France

The Trout (La Truite) [1982]

 Joseph Losey’s penultimate film, The Trout, was a more ambiguous, formalist and “arthouse” – but no less amoral or outré – revisiting of his terrific earlier film Eva. Like the latter, it was boldly invested in the provocative yet ambivalent sexuality of women raring to burst out of their social classes but without giving themselves in, and besotted men taking self-destructive plunges in the futile hopes of possessing them; both were visually exquisite; and, incidentally, both remain underrated in his filmography. Furthermore, this too starred Jeanne Moreau – the irresistible femme fatale from the earlier film – in a supporting role, who, as Lou, is now older, entrenched in her enhanced social class, and ostensibly settled in a lavish house through her marriage to a philandering businessman (Jean-Pierre Cassel). She therefore demonstrates suspicion and hostility towards Frédérique (Isabelle Huppert), seeing how her husband and his business associate (Daniel Olbrychski) are immediately entranced by her, while also detecting a younger version of herself in her. Frédérique, who’s grown up in a trout firm in a small Swiss village, is married to a closet homosexual, is well aware of the electrifying effects that she has on men (while harbouring a profound disdain for them), and loves luring them just enough to fulfil her desires. Tokyo – with its neon lights, high-rises, bustling streets, decadent interiors and traditions – formed the playground for the ploys that this ravishing and inscrutable seductress saucily indulges in, portrayed by Huppert with customary brilliance, teasing enticements, magnetic allure, and feral ruthlessness. Losey’s love for games – from hide-and-seek in The Servant to cricket in The Go-Between – was expressed here in a memorable bowling alley sequence that deliciously established the film’s tone and dynamics.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Marriage Drama

Language: French

Country: France

Eva [1962]

In Eva, Joseph Losey had one foot into the underpinnings of American genre movies from his past and the other in the vocabulary of European arthouse cinema which he was headed to. These parallel facets strikingly informed his decision to adapt James Hadley Chase’s novel Eve – a compulsive, racy and gleefully lurid tale – into an unabashedly European film, with the setting transplanted from LA to Venice, and the story’s bleak and seedy fatalism – which it mirrored – counterpointed with a style that was modernist, baroque and dazzling. The latter aspect thereby flamboyantly foreshadowed the expressionistic palette of The Servant which he made next year. The resulting film, which was cut by the producers without Losey’s permission, was as manic, delirious and exhilarating a work as Michel Legrand’s thrilling jazz score that flamboyantly accompanied nearly its entire length. At its core, of course, was Jeanne Moreau – at the pinnacle of her beauty, glamour and fame, and at her most irresistible and magnetic – as the titular Eva, a bewitching, coldly seductive and unapologetically promiscuous femme fatale who’s addicted in equal measures to money, gambling and Billie Holiday. Tyvian (Stanley Baker), an embittered Welsh author from working-class background, who’s suddenly become rich and famous with his bestselling first novel – albeit one harbouring a shameful secret – is attracted to her like a suicidal moth to a blazing fire. In the process, he alienates his loving fiancée (Virna Lisi), squanders his wealth, and irrevocably damages his shaky reputation. Venice, with its decadence and dilapidation, provided a poetic setting, and which – along with the self-destructive tale – was stunningly photographed in B/W by Gianni Di Venanzo through a mix of compelling single-takes and bold Dutch angle shots.

Director: Joseph Losey

Genre: Drama/Romantic Noir

Language: English/Italian

Country: France

Z [1969]

 The most fascinating thing about Z is how Costa-Gavras effortlessly counterpoised heft with panache. Being based on the 1963 assassination of pacifist left-wing Greek leader Grigoris Lambrakis by reactionary state forces, and the advent of military dictatorship in the country, it was radical cinema at its purest – unambiguously anti-fascist; scathing in its uncovering of the military and police’s rotten mindsets and their underhanded use of far-right factions and lumpen-proletariat for their dirty deeds; crafting it with a left-wing cast and crew comprising of celebrated French actor Yves Montand, renowned Spanish writer Jorge Semprún, legendary Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, etc.; and filming it mostly in Algiers, which was then a haven for international left-wing fugitives. Despite its incendiary fury, it was also stunningly hip, cool and thrilling, being filled with riveting set-pieces, kinetic sequences, glorious colour photography by Raoul Coutard, a pulsating score defiantly lent by Theodorakis (who was in house arrest at that time), and counterpointing of Kafkaesque undercurrents and solemn moments with gripping genre elements, subversive humour and pulpy depictions. No wonder, it remains such an extraordinary political thriller that marvellously captured the 1960s zeitgeist while transcending both place and time in its frightening relevance. Adapted from Vassilis Vassilikos’s book, it chronicled the public murder of a prominent politician (Montand) – while on a visit to give a speech advocating nuclear disarmament – by two sleazy henchmen (Marcel Bozzuffi and Renato Salvatori) and engineered by the virulently anti-communist military; and, thereafter, the investigation into it by an unflappable magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant), with assistance from a relentless photojournalist (Jacques Perrin). The complex sifting of objective truth from contradictory accounts, precipitated by subterfuge and witness manipulations, imbued it with compelling procedural elements.

p.s. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Director: Costa-Gavras

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Film a Clef

Language: French

Country: France/Algeria

The Third Lover [1962]

 Chabrol’s renowned ‘Hélène Cycle’ of films – murky, morally complex and spellbinding investigations into bourgeois social structures and familial setups, made between 1968-72, and with Stéphane Audran starring in most of them as the icy and ambiguous Hélène – is considered to have started with the brilliant examination of fractured relationships in La Femme Infidele. The Third Lover – made 6 years before that – could however be considered as a compelling precursor. Shot in brooding B/W by Chabrol’s frequent collaborator Jean Rabier – which provided an aesthetic departure from the afore-mentioned cycle made in lusty colours – it zoomed in on a ménage à trois involving an eerily happy couple and a shifty stranger who gets himself inserted into their private space, and which eventually progresses into darker impulses and rips everything apart. Albin (Jacques Charrier, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Alain Delon’s devious personification in the riveting Plein Soleil) is a mediocre, frustrated and self-destructive French journalist who’s been sent to Germany by the newspaper he’s employed with. While stationed at a small village near Munich, he befriends Andreas (Walther Reyer), a wealthy and respected German novelist, and his beautiful French wife Hélène (Audran, in a role that she’d make her own during her extraordinary tryst as muse for Chabrol, who she’d get married to a couple of years later). As Albin starts getting invited to their luxurious villa quite frequently, he becomes increasingly besotted with their contented conjugal life in general and with Hélène in particular. Before long he’s mired with sexual jealousy and murderous obsessions, especially when he realizes she’s uninterested in responding to his infatuated overtures, and starts following her like a manic prowler intending to blackmail her into acquiescence.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Marital Thriller/Romantic Noir

Language: French

Country: France

Les Bonnes Femmes [1960]

 The most striking quality of Les Bonnes Femmes – Chabrol’s fourth feature and one of his personal favourites – is the way it so fluidly segued from bouncy and vibrant to sardonic and astringent to menacing and nihilistic. These, combined with Chabrol’s clinical dismantling of bourgeois, paternalistic and heteronormative tendencies that the society is so inherently filled with, and bitter lamentations on how naïve and sentimental dreams are casually exploited and quashed, made this a surprisingly pessimistic work. The film’s jaundiced themes, nevertheless, were counterpointed with a freewheeling style, jazzy score, sparkling B/W photography, exuberant splashes and love letter to Paris – it was shot on location in a mix of public and private spaces – which made it such a vivacious work, despite its caustic undercurrents. These contrasting flavours, in turn, made it a key Nouvelle Vague film on hindsight, despite being largely unsuccessful during its release. It’s a remarkably zeitgeisty portrait of four young Parisian women who’re co-workers at a store – the flirtatious Jane (Bernadette Lafont), who loves unrestraint abandon and one-night-stands; the reserved Ginette (Stéphane Audran, in her first major role and second of her twenty-five film collaboration with Chabrol), who copes with the drudgery of her job by secretly singing at a decrepit cabaret during the night; the hopeful Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon), who’s engaged with a guy patronizingly moulding her into his social class; and the naive and starry-eyed Jacqueline (Clotilde Joano), the most heartbreakingly tragic of the lot, who becomes enamoured with a mysterious man obsessively stalking her, which eventually takes an ominous turn. The men in the film were either predatory or lecherous or uncouth or tiresome, which unambiguously indicated who the filmmaker’s radical empathies were with.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Comedy/Buddy Film

Language: French

Country: France