Cinema St. Louis’ CLASSIC FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL Continues This Weekend with L’ARGENT and More at Washington University

Cinema St. Louis presents the 11th Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival which takes place  March 8-10, 15-17, and 22-24, 2019. The location this year is Washington University’s Brown Hall Auditorium, Forsyth & Skinker boulevards. 

The 11th Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — presented by TV5MONDE and produced by Cinema St. Louis — celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1930s through the 1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema. The fest annually includes significant restorations, and this year features seven such works: Pierre Schoendoerffer “The 317th Platoon,” Marcel Pagnol’s “The Baker’s Wife,” Olivier Assayas’ “Cold Water,” Jacques Becker’s “The Hole,” Jacques Rivette’s “The Nun,” Agnés Varda’s “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t,” and   Diane Kurys’ “Peppermint Soda.” The schedule is rounded out by Robert Bresson’s final film, “L’argent,” and two 1969 films celebrating their 50th anniversaries: Luis Buñuel’s “The Milky Way” and Eric Rohmer’s “My Night at Maud’s.” This year’s edition of the fest is held at Washington University’s Brown Hall Auditorium.

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

TV5MONDE serves as the presenting sponsor. The global French-language entertainment network, TV5MONDE presents up to 300 films and dramas every year. Title-sponsor support is provided by the Jane M. & Bruce P. Robert Charitable Foundation, and additional support is provided by Arts & Education Council, American Association of Teachers of French, Alliance Française de Saint Louis, Centre Francophone at Webster University, Les Amis, Missouri Arts Council, Regional Arts Commission, Ann Repetto, Washington University’s Film & Media Studies, and Whitaker Foundation.

The fest continues this Friday March 22nd with L’ARGENT at 7:30. With an introduction and post-film discussion by Colin Burnett, interim chair and associate professor of Film & Media Studies at Washington U. and author of “The Invention of Robert Bresson: The Auteur and His Market” (2017). Ticket information can be found HERE.

In his ruthlessly clear-eyed final film, French master Robert Bresson pushed his unique blend of spiritual rumination and formal rigor to a new level of astringency. Transposing a Tolstoy novella to contemporary Paris, “L’argent” follows a counterfeit bill as it originates as a prop in a schoolboy prank, then circulates among the corrupt and the virtuous alike before landing with a young truck driver and leading him to incarceration and violence. With brutal economy, Bresson constructs his unforgiving vision of original sin out of starkly perceived details, rooting his characters in a dehumanizing material world that withholds any hope of transcendence.

The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane says of “L’argent”: “It is as swift and wintry as a sudden frost. As often with Bresson, the actors are mostly nonprofessionals, and they move through the series of terrible events like stoics and sleepwalkers, lacking the will to fight fate. A schoolboy pays for a picture frame with a forged note, which enters the social system as if it were a virus, and leads in the end to a feverish killing spree, in which not even the saintly are spared. Yet Bresson — who was eighty-two years old when the film came out, and clearly in no mood for mellowing — frames the acts of wickedness, both great and small, with a terrifying calm. Prepare to be haunted by his closeups of objects: a wallet, a ladle, a bowl of hot coffee, an axe. They might almost be guilty themselves.”

The Series continues Saturday March 23rd with PEPPERMINT SODA at 5:00pm. With an introduction and post-film discussion by Jean-Louis Pautrot, professor of French and international studies at Saint Louis University.  Ticket information can be found HERE

In the vein of such classic coming-of-age classics as François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” Diane Kurys’ “Peppermint Soda” captures a particular moment in the tumultuous life and development of young people. Anne (Eléonore Klarwein) and Frederique (Odile Michel) are sisters entering their teen years in 1963 France, torn between divorced parents and struggling with the confines of their strict school. Along the way, they undergo an awakening both political and romantic. Kurys’ celebrated film revels in the comedy and tragedy of the seemingly mundane, weaving a complex tapestry of everyday existence that also touches on the universal.

Robert Abele in the LA Times writes: “Aspiring filmmakers struggling with how to be specific yet universal — especially when it comes to material steeped in autobiography — should do themselves a favor and get to know French filmmaker Diane Kurys’ wonderfully unsentimental, captivating 1977 debut, ‘Peppermint Soda,’ which chronicles a year in the life of two teenage sisters, children of divorce, and was drawn from Kurys’ own girlhood…. The film is a kinetic slideshow of incipient maturity’s roiling promise that Kurys makes both era-vivid (hello early ’60s) and timelessly appealing (hello grades, teachers, parents, boys, freedom and politics). Especially for audiences who took to Bo Burnham’s summer indie hit ‘Eighth Grade,’ a heart-stopping time capsule about an outcast middle schooler, the tart, clear-eyed observations and swerving realities in Kurys’ coming-of-age classic make for a fitting hands-across-the-generations companion piece.”

The Series continues Saturday March 23rd with COLD WATER at 7:300pm. With an introduction and post-film discussion by Diane Carson, professor emerita of film at St. Louis Community College at Meramec and film critic for KDHX (88.1 FM). Ticket information can be found HERE.

An acclaimed early work by Olivier Assayas that has long remained unavailable, the deeply felt coming-of-age drama “Cold Water” at long last makes its way to U.S. theaters. Drawing from his own youthful experiences, Assayas revisits the outskirts of Paris in the early 1970s, telling the story of teenage lovers Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet) and Christine (Virginie Ledoyen), whose open rebellion against family and society threatens to tear them apart, as Christine is sent to an institution by her parents and Gilles faces an uncertain future after running into trouble at school. With a rock soundtrack that vividly evokes the period — and provides the backdrop for one of the most memorable party sequences ever committed to film — “Cold Water” is a heartbreaking immersion into the emotional tumult of adolescence.

In the New York Review of Books, Geoffrey O’Brien enthuses: “Olivier Assayas’s ‘Cold Water’ arrives belatedly to administer a jolt as bracing as its title. Originally made for French television in 1994, as part of a series of hour-long films, it was released in France at feature length the same year. The TV series, ‘Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge’ (the title plays on Françoise Hardy’s famous ballad of teenage loneliness), enlisted a roster of directors that also included Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, Cédric Kahn, and André Téchiné to address the theme of adolescence at any point between the 1960s and the 1990s, with only a few stipulations: to shoot in 16mm on a minimal budget, to include a party scene, and to make use of the pop music of the chosen period. That last constraint contributed both to the power of ‘Cold Water’s’ most memorable episode and to the long delay in distributing it here. A quarter of a century later, with rights finally cleared for Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Nico, Alice Cooper, Donovan, and the others whose music provides not merely flavor but structure, ‘Cold Water’ can finally be recognized as a singular masterpiece on the most familiar of themes, the sufferings and misfortunes of youthful passion.”

The Series concludes Sunrday March 24th with MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S at 7:00pm. With an introduction and post-film discussion by Robert Garrick, attorney, board member of the French-preservation nonprofit Les Amis, and former contributor to the davekehr.com film blog.Ticket information can be found HERE

In the brilliantly accomplished centerpiece of Eric Rohmer’s “Moral Tales” series, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Jean-Louis, one of the great conflicted figures of ’60s cinema. A pious Catholic engineer in his early 30s, he lives by a strict moral code in order to rationalize his world, drowning himself in mathematics and the philosophy of Pascal. After spotting the delicate, blond Françoise at Mass, he vows to make her his wife, although when he unwittingly spends the night at the apartment of the bold, brunette divorcée Maud, his rigid ethical standards are challenged. A breakout hit in the United States, “My Night at Maud’s” was one of the most influential and talked-about films of the decade.

Roger Ebert declares: “Eric Rohmer’s ‘My Night at Maud’s’ is about love, being a Roman Catholic, body language and the games people play. It is just about the best movie I’ve seen on all four subjects. It is also a refreshingly intelligent movie: not that it’s ideological or academic (far from it) but that it is thoughtful, and reveals a deep knowledge of human nature…. It is so good to see a movie where the characters have beliefs, and articulate them, and talk to each other (instead of at each other). It is so good, in fact, that you realize how hungry you’ve been for this sort of thing.”