VTIFF will be screening these French-language films at its upcoming festival. For more information, please visit the VTIFF website.
After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
Directed by Bertrand Mandico
France | 2022 | Fiction | 127 min | French w/ subtitles
Sponsored by: Alliance Française of the Lake Champlain Region
Showtimes:
Saturday, October 29 | 9:00 PM | Film House, Main Street Landing, Burlington
Reviewer’s comment:
After Blue (Dirty Paradise) aspires for instant cult status. On a post-Earth planet pocked with crystals and smeared with goop, a mother and daughter (Elina Löwensohn and Paula-Luna Breitenfelder) are on a mission to find and kill a criminal named Kate Bush (Agata Buzek). This future alternative world is devoid of men and machines, but hallmarks of earthly culture still linger, such as guns named after high-end fashion designers. The elaborate sets of alien foliage in Bertrand Mandico’s film have a handcrafted ‘80’s sensibility, as do the barrage of practical in-camera effects that swirl across the screen in a kaleidoscope of rear projections, colored filters, and superimpositions. With unhinged creativity seeping through every nook and cranny of the production, this adult fairy tale is a hallucinatory odyssey across strange lands, amid strange folks and strange creatures. —TW
Breathless (À bout de souffle)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
France | 1960 | Fiction | 90 min | French w/ subtitles
Sponsored By: Main Street Landing
Showtimes:
Sunday, October 30 | 11:15 AM | Film House, Main Street Landing, Burlington
Reviewer’s comment:
Special tribute to Jean-Luc Godard: The film, a 4K restoration, will be introduced by film critic, author, and scholar David Sterritt. Sterritt is chair of the National Society of Film Critics, editor-in-chief of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and a contributing writer at Cineaste. He is the author of The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible and editor of Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews. On September 13 of this year, filmmaking pioneer Jean-Luc Godard passed away by assisted suicide. Prolific, inventive, politically radical, and aesthetically uncompromising until the very end (his final film, The Image Book, was released in 2018), there is no overstating Godard’s profound influence on the shape and style of modern cinema. His debut feature, Breathless (1960), was a watershed moment. Even more so than fellow French New Wave auteur Francois Truffaut’s Palme d’Or-winning The 400 Blows from the previous year, Breathless announced a cinematic language steeped in the iconography of classic Hollywood but disassembled into something far more angular and vivid. With seemingly unmotivated jump cuts inserted into scenes and long discursive conversations vacant of typical plot mechanics, Godard created a film with the dynamism of free jazz and the wit of puckish youth. The now legendary performances from Jean-Paul Belmondo, who plays a rakish Humphrey Bogart type, and Jean Seberg, in her iconic pixie crop barking “New York Herald Tribune” down the Champs-Élysées, present a picture of Hollywood romance made new through changing sexual mores, improvisatory acting, and self-conscious awareness of their cinematic antecedents. Even today, this crime caper feels buoyant and alive, a celluloid testament to art as rebellion. —TW
Full time (À plein temps)
Directed by Eric Gravel
France | 2021 | Fiction | 88 min | French w/ subtitles
Sponsored by: Bridget and Nick Meyer; Alliance Française of the Lake Champlain Region
Showtimes:
Tuesday, October 25 | 1:45 PM | Film House, Main Street Landing, Burlington
Thursday, October 27 | 7:00 PM | Film House, Main Street Landing, Burlington
Reviewer’s comment:
A superb exercise in everyday suspense, Full Time is based on the simple premise of a divorced mother trying to get to work on time while raising two kids and attempting to squeeze in the exhausting and dehumanizing ordeal of the corporate interview process. And though there’s not a mask in sight, the added monkeywrench of a national transit strike perfectly distills the chaos and dysfunction of the Covid era. Tautly paced, with a pulsing electronic score and a magnetic performance by Laure Calamy as the single mom with a degree in economics working as a hotel housekeeper to make ends meet, Full Time will hit home for anyone who has been at the end of their rope during a desperate job search. —LB
Happening (L’événement)
Directed by Audrey Diwan
France | 2021 | Fiction | 100 min | French w/ subtitles
Sponsored by: Alliance Française of the Lake Champlain Region; Community support by Planned Parenthood of Northern New England
Showtimes:
Thursday, October 27 | 4:15 PM | Black Box Theater, Main Street Landing, Burlington
Saturday, October 29 | 6:45 PM | Black Box Theater, Main Street Landing, Burlington
Reviewer’s comment:
Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice film festival. Audrey Diwan’s film is set in France in 1963 and captures the panic of an unwanted pregnancy before the legalization of abortion in provincial France. Adapted from Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel, Happening recounts the journey of a young woman’s physical and emotional battle to access illegal abortion in a desperate race against the clock. Anne is pregnant. With mounting suppressed panic, she waits for her period and repeatedly writes rien in her diary. Her future is about to be destroyed, but even asking for an abortion is to risk a jail sentence for you and anyone else who helps—or fails to denounce you. Diwan structures the film so that at first we don’t know who the father is, nor do we witness the moment of conception, mirroring Anne’s own sense of denial. The extended duration of the film’s long takes builds suspense like a thriller. Happening is a powerful and gripping drama set in a society that condemned female desire and sexual liberty. Despite being set sixty years ago, it has a disorienting and timeless feel that reinforces the idea that women’s reproductive rights are perennially fragile. —OY
De Humani Corporis Fabrica
Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel
France | 2022 | Documentary | 115 min | French w/ subtitles
Sponsored by: John Bisson and Judy Gerber; Alliance Française of the Lake Champlain Region
Showtimes:
Wednesday, October 26 | 3:45 PM | Black Box Theater, Main Street Landing, Burlington
Reviewer’s comment:
Lucien Castaing-Taylor, director of Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, and his colleague Véréna Paravel recognize the integral role of image-making in modern medical science. With their unparalleled feel for immersive editing, which they first exhibited in the 2012 fishing industry documentary Leviathan, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel stitch together fragments of footage from a handful of hospitals in France, exploring the insides and outside of the human body and offering a privileged perspective into the professional spaces that make the body their business. The result is a transportive journey into the smallest recesses that a camera can access, revealing both the fragility and the robustness of the matter that makes us mortal. —TW
Roaring ‘20s (Les années 20)
Directed by Elisabeth Vogler
France | 2021 | Fiction | 85 min | French w/ subtitles
Sponsored by: Lyric Theatre; Alliance Française of the Lake Champlain Region
Showtimes:
Sunday, October 23 | 1:30 PM | Film House, Main Street Landing, Burlington
Virtual, October 24-28
Reviewer’s comment:
For nearly ninety minutes straight, the camera never stops rolling. It bounces from conversation to conversation, traverses sidewalks and subways, hops aboard motorcycles and bicycles, settles at esplanades and park benches. In one continuous shot, Roaring ‘20s ping-pongs through the streets of Paris just as the city heaves a huge sigh of relief emerging from the spring of 2020 pandemic lockdown. The film’s diverse cast of characters provides a cross-section of Parisian life during this young century. As one character says, “a century only really starts in the ‘20s.” Discussions of race, art, class, anxiety, the Internet, masks, love, and loneliness fill the air—a discursive symphony for our times. The director goes by a pseudonym, Elisabeth Vogler, which suits a film so grounded in the tension between revelation and anonymity. —TW
Rode
Directed by Lola Quivoron
France | 2022 | Fiction | 110 min | French w/ subtitles
Sponsored by: Alliance Française of the Lake Champlain Region
Showtimes:
Tuesday, October 25 | 3:45 PM | Film House, Main Street Landing, Burlington
Reviewer’s comment:
Rodeo takes viewers inside the cacophonous, adrenaline-fueled world of France’s underground motocross scene. Hot-tempered Julia (Julie Ledrue) steals everything she has, including the high-end dirt bikes that gain her entry into the B-Mores, an exclusive gang of riders who specialize in full-throttle acrobatics. Julia’s welcome is fraught. She constantly has to prove herself to the more experienced male riders, but her deft hand at stealing has a way of smoothing things over—until it doesn’t. Director Lola Quivoron spent four years embedded in groups of “urban rodeo” riders as a documentarian and photojournalist. Now her low-budget verité filmmaking meets death-defying stunt work in this gritty thriller that is just as much a heist caper as it is a coming-of-age story. Winner of the special jury prize in Cannes’s 2022 Un Certain Regard section, Rodeo brings a clandestine subculture to the screen with startling vivacity. —TW
The Velvet Queen (La panthère des neiges)
Directed by Vincent Munier and Marie Amiguet
France | 2022 | Documentary | 92 min | French w/ subtitles
Sponsored by: Jane Kramer; The Nature Conservancy Vermont Chapter; Alliance Française of the Lake Champlain Region
Showtimes:
Saturday, October 29 | 2:30 PM | Film House, Main Street Landing, Burlington
Virtual, October 30–November 1
Reviewer’s comment:
Few films are as unabashedly gorgeous as The Velvet Queen, yet the film is less about the spectacle before our eyes than about the act of looking itself and appreciating what appears. The documentary follows celebrated wildlife photographer Vincent Munier and adventurer Sylvain Tesson as they trek the Tibetan Highlands for a glimpse of the ever-elusive snow leopard and whatever else happens to grace their sightline. While hiking, Munier and Tesson share a philosophy of patience and privation, seeking unobtrusive harmony with the landscape in order to behold the wonders it has to reveal. It’s a film as much about a way of being as it is about capturing glimpses of rare beauties in an exotic terrain. —TW