Category Archives: Imaginary French Cinema

Drama, Imaginary French Cinema

#143 – Oeil Intérieur de L’Esprit, L’ (Eye Inside the Mind, The)

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(1983, Fr, 101 min) Dir Roland Sacher. Cast Alain Delon, Philippe Léotard, Claude Jade.

Based on his controversial memoir, L’Oeil Intérieur de L’Esprit tells the story of Paul Dumas, an ex-soldier who claimed to work for the French Army as part of a psychic cell in North Africa and French Indochina, a little like The Men Who Stare at Goats but even less funny. The film begins in 1970 and Dumas is working as a vegetable delivery man with no recollection of his top-secret army service. An accident when he’s unloading his truck causes a knock on the head from a crate of cabbages and suddenly it all comes back. His wife Anne (Jade) doesn’t know what to do but call his old army buddy Pip (Léotard) who talks him through his memories of pinpointing terrorist cells with the power of his mind and prognosticating enemy attacks. At this point the film departs from Dumas’ book, dramatizing the process of writing the book itself and his disastrous television appearances to publicise it, including his infamous appearance on TV ’73 with Serge Gainsbourg who mocked him, saying “If you’re such a good psychic then why did we lose both wars you fought in?” The film tries to have its cake and eat it too – it obviously doubts Dumas’ story but still insists on framing him by the end as some sort of hero. The effects at youngifying Delon for the flashbacks are distractingly bad too. Sacher’s first film after the debacle of The Pass to Heaven’s Arms, it would be another couple of films before he got back into his stride.

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Comedy, Imaginary French Cinema, Romance, Science Fiction

#139 – Monsieur B dans l’Univers (Mister B In Space)

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(1963, Fr, 98 min) Dir Albert. Cast Albert, Mimi X, Oscar de la Vana.

A grayed up Albert is stuffy aged bachelor Monsieur B, the company man is chosen to travel to the distant planet of French Andromeda where he will act as accountant for the colony there. His  faster than light journey out is a wonderfully sustained piece of physical humour in faux zero gravity – like the Blue Danube sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey remade by Jacques Tati. French Andromeda too is a fantastic visual creation – the best that early Sixties film money could buy, all purple rocky landscapes and blue plants. When he’s out there he makes contact with one of the green-haired alien locals (as played by his real life wife Mimi X) and falls in love. Of course it all goes downhill from there with the colonists set against the natives. Albert found himself in the middle of a political storm at the time with both left and right agreed that his film was an allegory for the colonial enterprises of French Indochina and North Africa but neither side agreed on whether the film was pro or con. Albert, for his part, simply shrugged and claimed no responsibility for their interpretations. thankfully, now that more than fifty years have passed we can appreciate this sweet, sad film for its beautiful colour photography, balletic slapstick and romance.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Black and White, Comedy, Drama, Imaginary French Cinema

#133 – Roi Du Canard, Le (King of the Ducks, The)

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(1954, Fr, 65 min, b/w) Dir Albert. Cast Albert, Romy Pice, Joseph M.

A young man (deadpan director/performer Albert) is found in his pyjamas on the early morning streets of Paris, walking to and fro with his hands behind his back, stopping occasionally to bob his head. A passing milkman stops to ask if he is okay but in response the man just quacks. The milkman eventually takes him to a nearby police station where he is jokingly named Donald by the officers. A massive campaign to identify him is launched with no luck but in the meantime a local doctor offers to take Donald in where he befriends the doctor’s daughter. All is well until a mix up with the shifty groundskeeper one night leads to the young man being incarcerated in a local asylum where, during a midnight ceremony, he is crowned the King of the Ducks by his fellow inmates, complete with cardboard crown. The film ends with the downcast Donald sitting on the grass outside wearing his crown, looking up and smiling at a V of ducks passing overhead and off into the distance, calling after them with proud quacks of his own. Though it starts as a comedy it ends firmly in the realm of the classic weepy and any public screening I’ve attended has been awash in hot salty tears by the end.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Art Film, Imaginary French Cinema

#128 – Crystal Heaven Death Alarm

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(1973, Fr, 72 min) Dir Jean Anno. Cast Jean Publique, Fanny Fanny, Hors Bicche.

In 1968 Jean Anno put his finger to the pulse of the nation and produced Dans la Vallée Ouverte avec le Soleil (In the Open Valley, with the Sun), a mostly drippy hippy wander through some bleached out celluloid with a spurt of totally uncool violence from The Man at the end. In 1973 he took the pulse once again and, inspired by the likes of the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Brigade and so on, came up with Crystal Heaven Death Alarm in which he stripped the politics from current events, totally dug the aesthetic and made a flick where the hippies get their revenge. Okay, so Anno’s still not getting it and Crystal Heaven Death Alarm isn’t a ‘good’ film but it’s a totally Seventies film and because of that probably a better indicator of the confusion of the times than his previous effort. The plot’s thin stuff – beautiful hippies blow up a couple of banks and shoot some judges and stuff before the pigs get involved and gun the groovy terrorists down. If nothing else the fetishising of the gang’s death is something to behold, like a slow motion sex scene full of blood. Le Mog return with their most atonal music yet to accompany all this and if you’ve heard any of Le Mog’s albums (Death to Birds and Mice for example) you’ll know that that’s saying something.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Black and White, Drama, Imaginary French Cinema, Silent

#120 – Cuisine du Diable, La (Devil’s Kitchen, The)

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(1918, Fr, 68 min, b/w) Dir B.F. Lebo. Cast Monica Lozange, Frederico de Pascal, Andreas Levant.

A pretty standard potboiler set in the fictional Parisian district of the title and about the people who call it home, The Devil’s Kitchen would be of little interest today as a film were it not for its historical import as the first feature of future star Frederico Francis St. Stephen de Pascal Paolo, AKA Francis de Pascal, who was popularly known in his heyday as the French Firebomb. He’s got a mid-level role in this as the dashing cad who lures Monica Lozange to the titular disreputable arrondissement where her innocence can be abused by its shady residents. Her beau, played by Andreas Levant in his usual white knight role, soon springs to her rescue and comeuppance is duly dealt out. The Devil’s Kitchen was a modest hit at the time but it got de Pascal noticed and it took only two further features before his name was changed and the film industry of France had become too small for him – Hollywood beckoned with his breakout role in the 1920 epic Love in the Shadows.

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Drama, Erotic, Imaginary French Cinema

#116 – Love is the Death

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(1990, Fr, 94 min) Dir Catherine Dominique. Cast Amanda Pan, Joseph DiMatt, Jean Fillet.

When a director steps away from the camera for years, maybe decades, it can’t help but induce longing in their fans. Will they ever come back? What kind of films will they make if they do? News of projects possibly incoming, possibly abandoned, float to the surface every once in a while and the appetite is whetted once again. Generally – not always but generally – when a long MIA director returns to the fray it’s a disappointment. Alas it is my sad duty to reveal that Catherine Dominique’s energence from obsurity is exactly that – a disappointment. I’m not going to even bother with a synopsis or even to deliniate the disappointments that litter the film merely to say that the decade she spent away from the camera living did much to dull her once unimpeachable instincts with the resulting film almost indistinguishable from the standard straight to video softcore product. At a recent retrospective Catherine herself was sanguine about this, her last film to date: “Maybe one day I will try I again, who knows? I remember halfway through this, you know, and I look across at everyone working away, so serious, and I think to myself – who gives a fuck? Not to offend to anybody but I thought, well, that I’d said all that I needed to say and that was that.”

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Drama, Erotic, Imaginary French Cinema

#115 – Falling Blossom

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(1981, Fr, 101 min) Dir Catherine Dominique. Cast Allegra Biscotti, Serge de Foy, Jean Fillet.

The peak of the latter half of Dominique’s career and the last film she would make until 1990’s Love is the Death, Falling Blossom would also, if you removed all of the sex (which, sensitively handled and beautifully shot though it might be, is still pretty filthy), be a perfectly heartbreaking coming of age story. Allegra Biscotti, here in her first film role, confirms Dominique’s unerring eye for a beautiful lead actress as the titular Blossom, growing up in her family’s country house in the French countryside of the 1930’s. She becomes besotted with a local artist called Phillipe (de Foy, of Claude Claude fame) and through a campaign of borderline stalking manages to snare him, the two of them falling into passionate love over the course of this one hot, sweaty summer. Alas once summer is done Blossom must return to the city and Phillipe, staying behind, gives in to the ghosts of the old war he fought not so long ago while simultaneously fighting the premonitions of a new one looming on the horizon. Everything came together for Dominique here, perhaps now that the greater excesses of her work have been purged. Not that she would agree: “This is me,” she has said, “And so is that. There is no difference.”

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Erotic, Horror, Imaginary French Cinema, Imaginary Spanish Cinema

#114 – Baroness Lesbos

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(1978, Fr/Sp, 99 min) Dir Catherine Dominique. Cast Ewa Rohm, Adrianna Belle, Hans, Peter Allison.

Originally titled The Mother of All Sin this is the one film of Dominique’s she seems incapable of standing behind, despite what even she admits are some moments of beauty studded throughout. “It was taken away from me by the bastard producers,” she told me at a 2010 retrospective in Berlin, “They cut it and take out what they don’t like. They film more things and put them in too. Even they take it’s name. I find it hard to look at still, you know?” As you might expect what was taken out was atmosphere and what was added was sex, but that’s not what upset Dominique: “The actors – Adrianna and Hans and Peter – they all work with me before so they refuse to not work with me. All they have then is Ewa, who I never wanted anyway.” That’s not all they had – they also had another woman in a blonde wig pretending to be Adrianna Belle but who looks so unlike her it completely sinks the back half of the film which is a shame as the first half is as strong as anything she has made with fantastic use made of the sunsets along the Spanish coast. Dominique would be back on solid ground three years later with the crown jewel of the sexploitation half of her career – the beautiful and romantic Falling Blossom.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Art Film, Erotic, Horror, Imaginary French Cinema

#113 – Bête érotique avec quatre jambes, La (Four Legged Sex Beast)

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(1974, Fr, 88 min) Dir Catherine Dominique. Cast Beau Modeste, Jean Fillet, Peter Allison.

A midway film from Dominique, straddling her earlier art house efforts and her later sexploitation work, the amusingly titled Four Legged Sex Beast concerns the porcelain Modeste as the powdered and perfumed Lady Pea who is being transported to the home of the man that she is being married off to by her father when one of the carriage wheels breaks on the rutted country road, stranding them in the dark woods. As night falls first the coach driver is taken screaming into the night and then her father too. It’s only a matter of time before whatever it is that’s out there returns for Pea. Of course the beast wants something more than meat from her too – the last twenty minutes of the film form the notorious extended sex scene that saw the film quietly banned in a lot of places. But what is the nature of the beast? Is it a real life Sasquatch type or is it the physical manifestation of Pea’s suppressed sexuality? Who knows! The only film starring the beautiful Modeste, filmed as she rested on the cusp of fame after the one-two hits Je Suis un Tracteur and Petit Chat de Fourrure stormed the French charts and before the suspicious snorkelling accident that took her life. Her performance is limited to be sure but the camera just can’t take it’s eye off her.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Art Film, Imaginary British Cinema, Imaginary French Cinema, Imaginary US Cinema

#108 – Death in the West

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(2005, US/GB/Fr, 95min) Dir Larry Clarke, Matthew Barney, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Julian Schnabel Gaspar Noe. Cast Pascal Biscuit, the Baltimore Opera Group, Eddie Izzard, Monica Bellucci, Johnny Depp,  Alain de Monet.

Portmanteau on the theme ‘the decline of Western civilisation’ and like portmanteau since time immemorial the quality is variable in the extreme. Clarke interviews (surprise surprise) attractive young girls and boys about their lives and the future and gains occasional insight and more regular inadvertent humour. Barney organises a marching band that tips a crowd of horned opera singers into a pit with twelve foot pikes, the enjoyment of which will depend on one’s tolerance for Barney’s aesthetic. Julian Schnabel follows Johnny Depp on a Mexican trash heap and that’s about all that happens there. Some are interesting but all fail in their remit with none have anything particularly insightful to say our world as it is now, where it’s going or why, sacrificing the opportunity to engage in content for cheap shocks. Noe, who swings his camera around a gang of violent skinheads as they look for and find Jewish victims in the Paris night before going home for a gay orgy, scores copious points for his technical skill even if these points are immediately taken back for philosophical simplicity.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms