Jules and Jim (François Truffaut)

WED 5 Aug/ 04:30 pm/ The Regent 1

Paris; the Belle Époque; two young Bohemians, one French, the other an Austrian writer; and a beautiful older woman-the ingredients for what is probably cinema's most famous and enjoyable ménage à trois when both Jules and Jim fall in love with Catherine. Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, Truffaut's third film, still fresh and charming forty-seven years on, traces the permutations of the relationship through the ensuing war and two decades. Catherine chooses to marry Austrian Jules, but when Jim comes to Austria Catherine falls for him. Her changing affections, however, do not affect Jules and Jim's friendship.

Moreau embodies the nouvelle vague actress in her role as Catherine, described by Jules as 'a force of nature' and by Truffaut as 'a luminous presence, and a turn-of-the-century bitch who slept around'.

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The Lovers (Louis Malle)

Friday 7 Aug/5:00 pm/ The Regent 1

The beautiful Jeanne (Jeanne Moreau) punctuates her unhappy marriage to a wealthy provincial newspaper owner with frequent visits to Paris, her best friend and her lover, polo matches, and cocktail parties. But her husband, who adores her, tires of her frequent absences and insists on her inviting her friends home to Dijon. They are joined unexpectedly by a stranger for the night, and there's a sudden shift. Based loosely on an eighteenth-century short story, The Lovers, Moreau's second collaboration with Louis Malle, 'established [her] screen persona-commanding, willful, sultry' (Time Off). The film won the Special Jury prize at Venice and was popular on release in France. But elsewhere it was considered scandalous in depicting a married woman walking out for a younger man and was banned in several American states. Justice Potter Stewart of Ohio said on banning The Lovers, 'I shall not here today attempt further to define [obscenity] . . . But I know it when I see it.'

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Mademoiselle (Tony Richardson)

SAT 8 Aug/ 2:00 pm/The Regent 1

A work of pure cinema, a return in some ways to the visual artistry of the silent era in which the real story unfolds as a stream of potent images- MovieMorlocks.com.

The well-known novelist Marguerite Duras adapted Mademoiselle, a taut psychological drama, from a screenplay by Jean Genet, who was reputedly not pleased that Moreau was the lead.

The film is set in a provincial French village where Moreau has just been posted as a teacher. Although the villagers look up to the well-bred 'Mademoiselle', as she is known, they are deeply suspicious of the other outsiders, the itinerant Italian woodcutters. Mademoiselle, however, develops an unfulfilled obsession with one of the Italians and adds arson to her unsuspected set of fetishistic rituals. A notoriously difficult shoot with an international cast (Brando was initially to have played the woodcutter), Mademoiselle was filmed consecutively with The Sailor from Gibraltar, another collaboration between Richardson, Moreau, and Duras. Although Richardson was savaged at the time for his use of overt symbolism-portrayed in spectacular widescreen cinematography-some now consider Mademoiselle his best film. Moreau's performance was always considered flawless.

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Viva Maria! (Louis Malle)

THU 6 Aug/4:50 pm/The Regent 1

Moreau's third collaboration with Louis Malle saw her team up with Brigitte Bardot in a lavish, bawdy period comedy when both women were at the height of their international careers. Maria Fitzgerald O'Malley (Brigitte Bardot) suddenly finds herself alone in South America after her activist father is killed in a terrorist strike against the British Empire. Maria joins a troupe of entertainers in a songand-dance act with another Maria (Jeanne Moreau). In all innocence she performs a kind of striptease on her first evening, which the two Marias then develop into a popular routine. But old habits die hard; in the dangerous world of South America they encounter another revolutionary and somehow manage to combine showbiz with revolutionary activities.

Viva Maria! is a fabulous piece of escapist fun with some very funny visual jokes, and the Marias' fabulous stage act is reminiscent of Moulin Rouge gigs. Although both actresses were nominated for awards, it was Moreau who earned the BAFTA for Best Foreign Actress.

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Eden Is West (Constantin Costa-Gavras)

FRI 7 Aug/7:30 pm/The Regent 3

Gentle-natured Elias, an illegal alien from an unidentified country, survives a swim to shore from a human-cargo carrier to wake on a nudist beach of a Mediterranean resort catering to the privileged. With limited language skills, he scrambles to hide his identity and with arresting good looks is soon negotiating sexual advances.

This is a more lighthearted look at the problem of illegal immigrants than the usual dire portraits. It raises questions about identity, racism, relationships, and how we survive and coexist in fractured societies where the many have far less than the lucky few. It is about survival instincts and the unjust barriers that exist for those forgotten people who desire to live a better life at all costs. In Eden Is West, Paris offers the lure of magic and the realisation of dreams.

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35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)

THU 6 Aug/2:50 pm/The Regent 1

SAT 8 Aug/ 05:10 pm/The Regent 3

SPARKS AT BIFF 14+

Writer-director Claire Denis returns again to the continuing French colonial legacy in this gentle Parisian tale of the loving relationship between a train-driving father and his student daughter. Alex Descas draws the eye as the nearly silent father. A slightly melancholy mood foreshadows his knowledge that his daughter will soon leave him. Denis pays attention to the objects and the rituals of their everyday life and to the movements between the companionship of (after)work life and the apartment block where the central characters all live. It leads us to feel we really know these people, but then Denis keeps introducing new information, which, though rarely eventful, enriches our understanding of them. Denis has acknowledged 35 Shots of Rum as her Ozu-influenced film, and the mood and attention to the daily ups and downs are fully in tune with that master’s work.

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Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat)

FRI 31 Jul/04:15 pm/The Regent 1

MON 3 Aug/12:10 pm/GoMA Cinema A

The story of Bluebeard originated as a fairy-tale in Charles Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales of 1679, with lots of possible real-life models for the serial wife-killer. The tale of female curiousity and male violence now seems a little extreme for children, but it has long been a favourite for composers, filmmakers, and feminist reworkers. Now Catherine Breillat retells it as a parallel tale of two very young mid-twentieth-century sisters reading the story and two somewhat older ones living it in a theatrical fairy-tale rendering of seventeenth-century France. Viewers familiar with Breillat’s work, or with talk of it, will wonder how she will resolve this non-naturalist version of the well-worn tale. The gem here is the role and the performance of the annoying but determined younger modern sister, who Breillat has admitted is her alter ego.

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The Beaches of Agnès (Agnès Varda's)

FRI 7 Aug/04:20 pm/GoMA Cinema A

SUN 9 Aug/11:30 pm/GoMA Cinema A

Agnès Varda's most recent autobiographical documentary opens with a shot of her walking backwards on a beach and into her past. Given the spirit of humility that imbues the film, anyone unfamiliar with her work might be surprised to learn of her importance as a director-starting with the French New Wave-of fiction and documentary, her films imbued with feminist issues; her fame as a photographer and an installation artist; and her giving Gerard Depardieu his first break. But this is just part of the story in The Beaches of Agnès: she also revisits her childhood home in Belgium, now inhabited by an eccentric toy-train collector; shares her feelings about the loss of her husband, Jacques Demy (also the subject of one of her films); and talks about memory through one of her photographs. Long-term BIFFsters will remember her sitting on the floor in the foyer of the George cinema talking to students in 1992.

This charming and breezy film is a must for Varda fans.

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