La Vie de château
1966 War / Comedy / Romance
Credits
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Summary
Normandy, 1944. Jérôme is the proud owner of a large
country estate, a man who is far more preoccupied with his orchards
than with the fate of his country. His wife Marie is young,
beautiful and bored with country living. She thinks only of
starting a new life in the busy hubbub of Paris, so the sudden
appearance of Julien, a captain in the Free French Forces, seems to her
like the answer to a prayer. Julien’s mission is to gather
information about the area so that an advance party can knock out a
German defence post ahead of the planned Allied Invasion.
Unfortunately, a division of German soldiers has chosen this moment to
requisition Jérôme’s house..
Review
Having worked as an assistant director and screenwriter on around half
a dozen films, Jean-Paul Rappeneau made his directorial début
with La Vie de château,
a big budget mainstream production which featured three major film
actors at the time – Catherine Deneuve, Pierre Brasseur and Philippe
Noiret. Although the film veers towards juvenile silliness in
several places and suffers from weak characterisation and an uneven
narrative, it is one of Rappeneau’s most entertaining and stylistically
inspired films, capturing something of the essence of the French New
Wave. The film won the Louis Delluc Prize in 1966, a controversial decision since many believed that Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou was a far more worthy recipient of the award. The reason for Rappeneau’s surprise win is believed to be because his film was the first which dared to broach one of the biggest taboos in French cinema at the time – a comic portrayal of the Nazi occupation. The film’s success cleared the way for a whole raft of similar films, notably La Grande vadrouille (1966), Le Mur de l’Atlantique (1970) and Papy fait de la résistance (1983). © James Travers 2008 Write a review for this film... User Comments
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