french – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – My Night at Maud’s

My Night at Maud’s (1969)
Written and directed by Éric Rohmer

Eric Rohmer is considered the last of the French New Wave directors to be established as such. He was known to be secretive about his personal life, with his name being a mash-up of two people he respected: Eric from director Eric von Stroheim (Sunset Boulevard) and author Sax Rohmer. The filmmaker worked as a teacher in the French Alps but quit in the mid-1940s to move to Paris. Rohmer started attending film screenings where he met Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, and others. This led to a career as a journalist for the many popular film magazines at the time. When he began to get into filmmaking, he invented his pseudonym to keep his parents from learning he was working in the industry.

Movie Review – The Double Life of Veronique

The Double Life of Veronique (1991)
Written by Krzysztof Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz
Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve found the idea that people shouldn’t have regrets incredibly strange. I know that on my deathbed, there will be things I look back on with shame or think about what I could have done differently. I do these things now, and I believe I have quite a while before I pass. In my opinion, to live and never regret is to have never lived. It means you avoided the tough choices, one thing that lets us know we are alive. So many of those choices aren’t even up to us; they remain in the hands of chance. Why did I end up living where I do, married to this partner, and working this job? If I could go back in time, I would certainly change some things, but I would want other things to remain the same. Yet, those changes would make me a different person living a different life, right? Is our existence just a series of possible realities collapsing into a single material reality as we encounter each moment?

Movie Review – Celine and Julie Go Boating

Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
Written by Jacques Rivette, Dominique Labourier, Juliet Berto, Eduardo de Gregorio, Bulle Ogier, and Marie-France Pisier
Directed by Jacques Rivette

I’ve noticed certain films rising in popularity, likely due to a recent restoration release. After decades of only existing in poor copies, we now have cleaned-up versions, so the films can be appreciated how their creators intended. Celine and Julie Go Boating is one of those films I see coming across MovieTok or being discussed online. I added it to this list because I was curious about what drew people to the picture. Jacques Rivette is a filmmaker whose work I am fairly unfamiliar with, but he came up with the New Wave filmmakers as a writer/critic at La Cahiers du Cinéma. I knew very little about this film other than it was very improvisational.

Movie Review – The Battle of Algiers

The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Written by Franco Solinas and Gillo Pontecorvo
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo

From 1954 to 1962, the French government was at war with the Algerian people. Algeria had been a French colony since 1830 when King Charles X decided to take the land. They blamed pirates on the Barbary Coast and their ransoming of French captives. In reality, French sentiments towards their increasingly authoritarian king led Charles and his advisors to dream up a foreign conquest to calm the people. In the first thirty years of French occupation, it is estimated that up to one million Algerians were killed, nearly a ⅓ of the entire population.

PopCult Podcast – The Apprentice/Last Summer

Well, that was a…week. One of our films purports to tell the story of a contemporary despot and the mid-century ghoul that helped to shape him. The second film is a French picture about a woman who takes a risk that could destroy her life.

Movie Review – Vampyr

Vampyr (1932)
Written by Christen Jul and Carl Theodor Dreyer
Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer

Vampyr is a strange, troubled movie. It was Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dryer’s follow-up to The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of the great silent masterpieces. Vampyr came about at a time of transition in films. Dreyer conceived of the film, based on a collection of ghost stories, as a silent picture. That DNA is still very present in the sparse spoken dialogue and the film’s emphasis on movement and camerawork. The end result is a mixed bag. There’s not enough story here to say it’s a compelling horror narrative. It feels more like an interesting mood piece that evokes the spooky tone of Halloween and creepy old houses.

Movie Review – Pierrot Le Fou

Pierrot Le Fou (1965)
Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Will I ever watch all of Godard’s films? I’m not sure. Since my college days, I’ve watched them sporadically and never chronologically. Breathless. Masculin Feminin. Alphaville. Week-end. Contempt. Some I absolutely love, others I’m just confused by and probably need to revisit or read up on. This picture, made in the middle of Godard’s most productive period, was an adaptation of a recent crime novel, Obsession. Godard described the book as “the story of a guy who leaves his family to follow a girl much younger than he is. She is in cahoots with slightly shady people, and it leads to a series of adventures.” Casting ended up reuniting Godard with Jean-Paul Belmondo, his star from Breathless, and Godard’s wife at the time, Anna Karina, who took the lead female role.

Movie Review – L’Atalante

L’Atalante (1934)
Written by Jean Vigo and Albert Riéra
Directed by Jean Vigo

Jean Vigo was born to parents on the run. His father was a militant anarchist, and so much of his early life involved hiding from authorities with his parents. When Vigo was 12 years old, his father was murdered in prison, but the officials tried to pass it off as a suicide. Vigo would spend his teenage years in a boarding school under an assumed name for his protection. He got married at 26, had a daughter, and died at 29 from tuberculosis, which he’d had for eight years. As a filmmaker, he’s seen as establishing poetic realism in cinema and would inspire many of the French New Wave directors nearly thirty years after his death. Despite not living for that long, Vigo’s work exudes life and a rich understanding of the human experience.

Movie Review – The Earrings of Madame De…

The Earrings of Madame De… (1953)
Written by Max Ophüls, Annette Wademant, and Marcel Achard
Directed by Max Ophüls

As with so many artists in Europe during the 1930s, Max Ophüls could see the rise of the Nazis and fled to France following the Reichstag Fire. He would continue his odyssey across the continent, attempting to stay ahead of the Nazis, making films along the way before reaching Portugal and heading to the United States. Ophüls would settle down in Hollywood for a few years, where he continued making movies, and once the war was over, he returned to Europe in 1950. It’s this period he’s become most known for, when he made his most acclaimed feature film, The Earrings of Madame De…

PopCult Podcast – Janet Planet/The Beast

This week we’ve got a close-up examination of a complicated mother/daughter relationship and a woman going on a surreal odyssey through her past lives.