Star Kevin Kline will join director Caroline Bottaro at FIAF on Saturday night for a sneak preview of their new film, QUEEN TO PLAY
SNEAK PREVIEW! MEET THE DIRECTOR & ACTOR
French Institute Alliance Française
Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Saturday, March 19, $10, 7:00
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org
www.zeitgeistfilms.com
After screening at film festivals around the world since 2009, Caroline Bottaro’s Queen to Play (Joueuse), about an American expatriate and a French chambermaid who connect over the game of of chess and their dual midlife crises, will finally get its theatrical release on April 1 at the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza. But the French Institute Alliance Française is offering a sneak peak at this drama, which is based on Bertina Henrichs’s novel The Chess Player and pairs Kevin Kline (A Fish Called Wanda) in his first French-speaking role with the great Sandrine Bonnaire (Vagabond), with a special showing Saturday night in Florence Gould Hall. The screening, which costs only ten bucks, a bargain for a movie these days, will be followed by a Q&A with star Kline and first-time director Bottaro.
Born in Parma in 1919, Angiolino Giuseppe Pascal Ventura began his unexpected film career after suffering an injury as a Greco-Roman wrestler, becoming a close friend of Jean Gabin’s and quickly establishing himself as one of the great character actors in French gangster pictures, appearing in more than seventy-five movies before his death in 1987. Over his career, he worked with such stars as Gabin, Jeanne Moreau, Annie Girardot, Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Danielle Darrieux and for such directors as Jacques Becker, Julien Duvivier, William Dieterle, Vittorio de Sica, Claude Lelouch, and Terence Young. FIAF will be paying tribute to the cool-as-a-cucumber actor with a two-brief three-week, six-film festival that begins January 11 with ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS (Louis Malle, 1957) and ARMY OF SHADOWS (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969) and continues January 18 with THE BIG RISK (Claude Sautet, 1960) and SECOND BREATH (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1966) and January 25 with MONSIEUR GANGSTER (Georges Lautner, 1963) and THE GRILLING (Claude Miller, 1981).
Based on the novel by Joseph Kessel (BELLE DE JOUR), Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 WWII drama ARMY OF SHADOWS got its first theatrical release in America a few years ago, in a restored 35mm print supervised by the film’s cinematographer, Pierre Lhomme, who shot it in a beautiful blue-gray palette. The film centers on a small group of French resistance fighters, including shadowy leader Luc Jardie (Paul Meurisse), the smart and determined Mathilde (Simone Signoret), the nervous Jean-François (Jean-Pierre Cassel), the steady and dependable Felix (Paul Crauchet), the stocky Le Bison (Christian Barbier), the well-named Le Masque (Claude Mann), and the unflappable and practical Gerbier (Lino Ventura). Although Melville, who was a resistance fighter as well, wants the film to be his personal masterpiece, he is too close to the material, leaving large gaps in the narrative and giving too much time to scenes that don’t deserve them. He took offense at the idea that he portrayed the group of fighters as gangsters, yet what shows up on the screen is often more film noir than war movie. However, there are some glorious sections of ARMY OF SHADOWS, including Gerbier’s escape from a Vichy camp, the execution of a traitor to the cause, and a tense MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE–like (the TV series, not the Tom Cruise vehicles) attempt to free the imprisoned Felix. But most of all there is Ventura, who gives an amazingly subtle performance that makes the overly long film (nearly two and a half hours) worth seeing all by itself.
In a very poor South American village, four men are needed to transport two truckloads of nitroglycerin to the scene of an industrial accident. The men jump at the chance to risk their lives for a small amount of cash because they have nothing else in their pitiful lives. Yves Montand stars in this endlessly tense, harrowing film that won the Golden Bear in Berlin, the BAFTA in England, and the Grand Prize at Cannes. The cast also includes Charles Vanet, Peter van Eyck, Folco Lulli, and Véra Clouzot, the wife of director Henri-Georges Clouzot (LES DIABOLIQUES, LES ESPIONS). THE WAGES OF FEAR will be screening as part of the French Institute Alliance Française series Hollywood Loves French Cinema, along with William Friedkin’s surprisingly gripping 1977 remake, SORCERER, in which Roy Scheider does an outstanding job playing the torturous Montand role as a driver who must go through hell to try to get a shipment of nitroglycerine to its intended destination.
