Cinema St. Louis’ CLASSIC FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL Kicks Off Friday with AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS

The Ninth Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series starts this Friday, March 10th. — The Classic French Film Festival celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the mid-1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema.

All films are screened at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 East Lockwood).

The fest is annually highlighted by significant restorations, which this year includes films by two New Wave masters: Jacques Rivette’s first feature, “Paris Belongs to Us,” and François Truffaut’s cinephilic love letter, “Day for Night.” The fest also provides one of the few opportunities available in St. Louis to see films projected the old-school, time-honored way, with both Alain Resnais’ “Last Year at Marienbad” and Robert Bresson’s “Au hasard Balthazar” screening from 35mm prints. Even more traditional, we also offer a silent film with live music, and audiences are sure to delight in the Poor People of Paris’ accompaniment for Jean Renoir’s classic “Nana.” The schedule is rounded out by such diverse but enduring works as “Au revoir les enfants,” “Blue,” “Cleo from 5 to 7” and “Eyes Without a Face.”

Every program features introductions and discussions by film scholars and critics. The discussions will place the works in the contexts of both film and French history and provide close analyses.

All films are in French with English subtitles.

Here’s the schedule for The Classic French Film Festival’s opening weekend:

Friday, March 10th at 7:30 – AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS

AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss concerning two boys living in Nazi-occupied France. At a provincial Catholic boarding school, the precocious youth enjoy true camaraderie — until a secret is revealed. Based on events from writer/director Louis Malle’s own childhood, the film is a subtle, precisely observed tale of courage, cowardice, and tragic awakening.

Calling the film “Louis Malle’s quasi-autobiographical masterpiece,” the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw writes that the film “remains breathtakingly good. There is a miraculous, unforced ease and naturalness in the acting and direction; it is classic movie storytelling in the service of important themes. As an evocation of childhood it is superb, comparable to Jean Vigo’s ‘Zéro de Conduite’ and François Truffaut’s ‘The 400 Blows’ — perhaps better. Every line, every scene, every shot, is composed with mastery. It has to be seen.” The New York Times is equally laudatory: “It has taken Mr. Malle more than 40 years to make ‘Au revoir les enfants.’ Every film that Mr. Malle made in those intervening years has been preparation for ‘Au revoir les enfants.’ Like ‘The Dead,’ which it resembles in no other way, it’s a work that has the kind of simplicity, ease and density of detail that only a filmmaker in total command of his craft can bring off, and then only rarely.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Jean-Louis Pautrot, professor of French and international studies at Saint Louis University.

Saturday, March 11 at 7:30pm – THREE COLORS – BLUE

In the moving first film of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy — each part tells a stand-alone story — Juliette Binoche gives a tour-de-force performance as Julie, a woman reeling from the tragic death of her husband and young daughter. But “Blue” is more than just a blistering study of grief; it’s also a tale of liberation, as Julie attempts to free herself from the past while confronting truths about the life of her late husband, a composer. Shot in sapphire tones by Sławomir Idziak, and set to an extraordinary operatic score by Zbigniew Preisner, “Blue” is an overwhelming sensory experience.

In the LA Times, Kenneth Turan observes: “It is a mark of the virtuosity with which director Krzysztof Kieślowski has made ‘Blue’ that it is possible to envision its intensely emotional story of a woman’s search for meaning after tragedy unhinges her life becoming, with slight tinkering, the plot for a standard-issue Bette Davis ‘women’s picture’ of the 1940s.” But he quickly adds that there is “nothing ordinary or banal” about Kieslowski’s film: “Though he starts with conventional story elements, he conveys them with a striking combination of focused acting, unexpected images, music strong enough to be a physical presence, and a sensitivity to light, color (blue, not surprisingly, is a visual leitmotif) and textures.” Of actress Binoche, the critic writes: “It is always startling to re-experience the glass-shattering honesty and intensity of her performance. The idea of simply walking through a scene is alien to her, and in that sense she is perfect for this artfully made film, dense with feeling, in which no shot is ordinary and no moment taken for granted.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Calvin Wilson, film, jazz, art, and dance critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Sunday, March 11 at 7:30pm – NANA (1926)

Elsie Parker and the Poor People of Paris provide live musical accompaniment to Jean Renoir’s silent “Nana,” the famed director’s second feature. A condensed but largely faithful adaptation of the classic novel by Emile Zola (the author’s daughter, Denise Leblond-Zola, was even hired to write the titles), the film stars Renoir’s wife, Catherine Hessling, as the flawed title character, a middling stage actress who becomes the kept woman of a married man, the hopelessly infatuated Count Muffat. Influenced by the extravagant work of Erich von Stroheim (“Foolish Wives,” “Greed”) — whom Renoir greatly admired — the film features a pair of grand set-pieces, at a horse race and an open-air ball.

Reviewing a restoration of the film that screened at the 1976 New York Film Festival, Times critic Vincent Canby described “Nana” as “an extraordinary achievement that now seems to fit perfectly into the Renoir oeuvre, though at the time of its release in France it was a financial and critical disaster. For us today, with hindsight illuminated by all the remarkable Renoir films that came after, seeing ‘Nana’ is like discovering a long-lost diary. It’s not difficult to understand why early audiences were confused and turned off by this immensely elaborate screen incarnation of the Zola novel about the Second Empire bit actress who became the most famous courtesan of her day. It moves from realism to expressionism to romanticism, all the while being somewhat comic and cool.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Lionel Cuillé, the Jane and Bruce Robert professor of French and Francophone studies at Webster University.

Be sure to check back here at We Are Movie Geeks for more coverage of The Classic French Film Festival