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French films Romance
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This film is a magnificent sortie for director Jacques Becker into the world of high fashion, in Paris, the centre of the universe of haute couture. One of Becker’s darkest and most poignant films, Falbalas contrasts the artificiality of the fashion world with the harsh tangibility of a tragic romance, which ultimately descends into insanity and self-destruction...
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With its unsettling mix of neo-realistic photography and fairy-tale like settings, La Fiancée des ténèbres is an impressive example of the fantasy genre in French cinema of the 1940s. Although little known, it is an extraordinary work of cinema, which employs techniques that make it feel and appear quite different to the majority of films from this period...
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Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is an unusual film for director Robert Bresson, primarily because it adheres, more than any of his other films, to the film-making conventions of the day. As a consequence, the film is more accessible than some of his subsequent works but, lacking Bresson’s idiosyncrasies and religious symbolism...
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Often rated as the greatest film ever made, and certainly a major triumph of French cinema, Les Enfants du paradis offers us a timeless tale of unrequited love, made under the most difficult of circumstances. It is the pinnacle of the astonishingly successful partnership of the director-writer team Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert and even today the film feels relevant and intensely...
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An exceptional cast, a well-honed script and some impressive production values make this one of the best screen adaptations of the celebrated Dostoyevsky novel "The Idiot". This was the first film to be directed by Georges Lampin, a French director of Russian birth, who made only a dozen films, the most famous of which is another Dostoyevsky adaptation...
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This is one of the most important films in the history of cinema. By pushing film technology to its creative limits and avoiding sentimentality, Jean Cocteau succeeds in creating a film that is both visually entrancing and emotionally rewarding, whilst re-telling a familiar tale in a fresh and innovative way. The most striking thing about this film is the visual imagery...
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Jean Delannoy’s interpretation of André Gide’s powerful and moving novel is an impressive and memorable piece of cinema. The pastor is treated sympathetically, although the contradiction with his position of authority is not evaded. We share Gertrude’s ambivalence when she recovers her sight and finds that her protector’s love is somewhat more than paternalistic...
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Les Portes de la nuit marked the beginning of a dramatic decline in the fortunes of its director Marcel Carné. Prior to and during World War II, Carné was one of the most respected and popular directors of his generation in France, responsible for such uncontested masterpieces as Hôtel du Nord (1938) and Les Enfants du paradis (1945)...
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After an unsuccessful attempt to break into Hollywood in the 1940s, actor Jean Gabin returned to French cinema in 1946 with this bleak film noir melodrama, which also starred his partner at the time, Marlene Dietrich. The couple had originally been slated to star together in Marcel Carne’s Les Portes de la nuit but instead opted for this film...
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An excellent cast (which includes some of the biggest French actors of the day) elevates this humdrum melodrama to something that just about passes for entertainment. Marc Allégret’s direction is competent but hardly inspired, and Marcel Achard’s screen adaptation of his own stage play is flat and unevenly paced...
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Despite being overlooked these days, Un Revenant is one of director Christian-Jacque’s finest films, with some impressive photography, good acting performances and well-conceived scenario. It is a perceptive analysis of the fragility of young love, and the destructive powers that it can unleash. The moving François-Karina subplot echoes or reinforces the distant love affair and...
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Les Jeux sont faits is one of a number of great French films made in the 1940s which have never really achieved the viewership and recognition they deserve. Admittedly the film is less technically accomplished than works such as Les Enfants du paradis or Les Visiteurs du soir, and the cast list is certainly less awe-inspiring (although Micheline Presle is stunning in this film)...
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The film that marked René Clair’s long-awaited return to French cinema after his brief "exile" in the United States, Le silence est d’or is widely regarded as one of his best works, and probably his most touching. The conflict between the stirrings of the heart and the constraints of loyalty, the age-old dilemma of love versus friendship...
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One of the most ambitious film productions of Tolstoy’s celebrated novel is this version starring the iconic actress Vivien Leigh and directed by the great French film director Julien Duvivier. This was Duvivier’s only British film, although he also made several other...
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Simone Signoret gives a notable performance in this atmospheric French film noir, which was directed by her husband at the time, Yves Allégret. The seemingly vulnerable woman with a hard interior and a nasty streak of malice is the character that Signoret plays particularly well, here as in so many subsequent films (notably Couzot’s Les Diaboliques)...
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Political intrigue and 19th century romanticism form the basis for this haunting tale of love from one of France’s greatest creative talents, Jean Cocteau. The film was adapted from a successful stage play of the same name which Cocteau staged in 1946 with the same cast. The story was inspired by the mysterious death of King Louis II of Bavaria...
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La Belle meunière is Marcel Pagnol’s heartfelt tribute to the work of Franz Schubert, a composer he greatly admired. It has not only the distinction of being Pagnol’s sole colour film but also the only film made with the revolutionary Roux Color system, invented by the brothers Lucien and Armand Roux...
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Les Dernières vacances was the first of only two full-length films to be directed by the writer and critic Roger Leenhardt (the other being the 1961 film Le Rendez-vous de minuit). An auteur in the truest sense of the word, Leenhardt has an approach to film-making which is very suggestive of the French New Wave of the late 1950s...
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Whilst Jean Cocteau is generally best remembered for his extraordinary artistic flights of fancy (amply illustrated by his 1946 film La Belle et la bête), he was also remarkably adept at handling more down-to-earth subjects, particularly those involving the darker side of human experience. His most notable success in the latter was his play “Les parents terribles” which...
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Au-delà des grilles was an early international success for René Clément, who had previously distinguished himself in his native France with La Bataille du rail (1946), and who would achieve further success with films such as Jeux interdits (1951), Gervaise (1956) and Plein Soleil (1960). The film won an Oscar in the Best Foreign Film category in 1950...
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