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Alain Resnais: Directors
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French director Alain Resnais paired with American writer Jules Feiffer (Carnal Knowledge) for this satire of French and Yankee culture. An American cartoonist (Adolph Green) travels to Paris to attend a comic-strip exhibition, but the trip is actually an excuse for him to reconcile with his estranged daughter, a student at the Sorbonne. Experiencing immense culture shock, the American wants to go home until he meets his daughter's professor (Gerard Depardieu). A fan of the cartoonist's work, the professor invites them all to his mother's country house where hilarity results. Also stars Linda Lavin and Laura Benson. In French with English subtitles.
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The lives of six middle-class Parisians are placed under the microscope in this intimate drama from director Alain Resnais. Adapted from an Alan Ayckbourn play, the story--told in theatrical vignettes--centers on the romantic travails of a real estate agent (Andre Dussollier) with a crush on his religious co-worker (Sabine Azema), and the others to whom they are related by chance or design. Lambert Wilson, Laura Morante ... star. 121 min. Widescreen; Soundtrack: French; Subtitles: English. In French with English subtitles.
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With Same Old Song, the great French director Alain Resnais made one of the most playful films of his career, but one that is no less striking or thought-provoking than his more overtly serious work. Paying tribute to Dennis Potter (The Singing Detective), this musical comedy has characters lip-synch to recordings of famous French pop songs as they become caught in a web of romantic confusion, "Light and vivacious on the surface, but with a subtle undercurrent of melancholy...The City of Light has never seemed more illusional, as the rise and fall of apartment blocks and whole neighborhoods parallel the amorous entanglements of these characters" (New York Film Festival Program). In French with English subtitles. France, 1997, 120 mins.
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Resnais's early films, which were shot in black and white on 16mm film, are short documentaries dealing with art and artists. In 1948, for example, he made the film Van Gogh, which was followed by another filmed in 1950 and titled Gauguin. During the 1950s he ... shot and edited scenes for other directors. Resnais's own early films fore-shadow certain themes that the filmmaker would take up in the 1960s: including time, memory, post-capitalist imperialism, and the role of the artist. He remained concerned with the role of the artist in society throughout much of his career.
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Often crowned the theoretician of the French New Wave, Resnais was in fact the most schooled in actual film production. While his cohorts –Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, et al. – were busy raving about their favorite directors for Cahiers du Cinema, Resnais had been working as an actor, editor, screenwriter and assistant director on industrials and occasional features throughout the ’40s and ’50s. And his early films were odd 16mm, black-and-white documentary shorts focusing on art and artists, such as Van Gogh, Guernica and Gauguin.
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Synopsis: The first English-language film from Alain Resnais, this drama about a spiteful, alcoholic novelist contains the French director's typically playful surrealist touches and recurring use of characters shackled by memory. Read More
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