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FOCUS ON FRENCH CINEMA: A MAN AND A WOMAN (WITH CLAUDE LELOUCH IN PERSON)

Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant play characters trying to escape their pasts in Claude Lelouch’s A MAN AND A WOMAN

A MAN AND A WOMAN (UN HOMME ET UNE FEMME) (Claude Lelouch, 1966)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, March 28, $40, 7:30
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

Winner of both the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman is one of the most popular, and most unusual, romantic love stories ever put on film. FIAF is celebrating the work’s fiftieth anniversary by screening a newly restored version on March 28 as part of the Focus on French Cinema festival, followed by a Q&A with the seventy-nine-year-old Lelouch, who has also made such films as Vivre pour vivre, Les Uns et les Autres, La bonne année, and La Belle Histoire, and writer-director Philippe Azoulay. In A Man and a Woman, Oscar-nominated Anouk Aimée stars as Anne Gauthier and Jean-Louis Trintignant as Jean-Louis Duroc, two people who each has a child in a boarding school in Deauville. Anne, a former actress, and Jean-Louis, a successful racecar driver, seem to hit it off immediately, but they both have pasts that haunt them and threaten any kind of relationship. Shot in three weeks with a handheld camera by Lelouch, who earned nods for Best Director and Best Screenplay (with Pierre Uytterhoeven), A Man and a Woman is a tour de force of filmmaking, going from the modern day to the past via a series of flashbacks that at first alternate between color and black-and-white, then shift hues in curious, indeterminate ways. Much of the film takes place in cars, either as Jean-Louis races around a track or the protagonists sit in his red Mustang convertible and talk about their lives, their hopes, their fears. The heat they generate is palpable, making their reluctance to just fall madly, deeply in love that much more heart-wrenching, all set to a memorable soundtrack by Francis Lai. Lelouch, Trintignant, and Aimée revisited the story in 1986 with A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later, without the same impact and success. There will also be a special twenty-minute excerpt from Azoulay’s upcoming documentary about Lelouch, Tourner Pour Vivre (Shoot to Live); the evening will conclude with an after-party featuring wine, cocktails, and hors d’oeuvres.

AGNÈS VARDA — LIFE AS ART: DAGUERRÉOTYPES

Agnès Varda will be at FIAF on March 7 to talk about her 1975 documentary, DAGUERRÉOTYPES

CinéSalon: DAGUERRÉOTYPES (Agnès Varda, 1975)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, March 7, $14, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesday nights through March 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

On February 28, legendary auteur Agnès Varda was at FIAF for the special talk “Agnès Varda: Visual Artist.” The Belgium-born, France-based Varda, who is eighty-eight, will be back at FIAF on March 7 for the 7:30 screening of her 1975 documentary, Daguerréotypes, after which she will participate in a Q&A with former MoMA curator Laurence Kardish. (The film will also be shown at 4:00; both screenings will be followed by a wine and beer reception.) The eighty-minute work, which only received its official U.S. theatrical release in 2011 at the Maysles Cinema, is an absolutely charming look at Varda’s longtime Parisian community. In the film, Varda, who has made such New Wave classics as Cléo de 5 à 7 and Le Bonheur as well as such seminal personal documentaries as The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès, turns her camera on the people she and husband Jacques Demy lived with along the Rue Daguerre in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. Varda, who also narrates the film, primarily stands in the background while capturing local shopkeepers talking about their businesses and how they met their spouses as customers stop by, picking up bread, meat, perfume, and other items. Varda uses a goofy, low-rent magic show as a centerpiece, with many of the characters attending this major cultural event; the magician references the magic of both life and cinema itself, with Varda titling the film not only after the street where she lives but also directly evoking the revolutionary photographic process developed by Louis Daguerre in the 1820s and ’30s. Daguerréotypes has quite a different impact now than it did back in the mid-1970s, depicting a time that already felt like the past but now feels like a long-forgotten era, when neighbors knew one another and lived as a tight-knit community. The FIAF CinéSalon series “Agnès Varda: Life as Art” continues with Jacqot de Nantes on March 14 and Lola on March 21. Varda fans will also want to check our her gallery show at Blum & Poe, which runs through April 15.

COMEDY ON FILM: WHAT MAKES THE FRENCH LAUGH? APNÉE

Céline (Céline Fuhrer), Thomas (Thomas Scimeca), and Maxence (Maxence Tual) take a bath together in riotously silly anarchic French farce

CINÉSALON: APNÉE (Jean-Christophe Meurisse, 2016)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 14, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through February 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

FIAF’s “Comedy on Film: What Makes the French Laugh?” series continues on Valentine’s Day with Jean-Christophe Meurisses’s Apnée, a riotous, ludicrous, hysterical, and often cringeworthy absurdist fable about an anarchic trio of friends/lovers who flit about France doing anything they want, unaware of the consequences of their actions. Céline (Céline Fuhrer), Thomas (Thomas Scimeca), and Maxence (Maxence Tual) are all id, no ego and superego, as they live in their own reality, separate from the rest of what is considered conventional society. Wearing wedding dresses, they try to get married; seeking to relax, they take a bath together in a storefront window; in search of a family, they storm in on an older, empty nest couple. Indeed, they are like three children who don’t know any better, who haven’t reached basic levels of adulthood, but at their core, they just want to be happy, and what’s wrong with that? Writer-director Meurisses’s feature debut, which was nominated for Best First Film at the Cannes Film Festival (the Golden Camera) and the Lumière Awards as well as the Queer Palm, is extremely silly, essentially a series of crazy vignettes, some that work a whole lot better than others, with lovely cinematography by Javier Ruiz Gomez, from Céline, Thomas, and Maxence (well, body doubles, anyway) ice skating naked while wearing Mexican wrestler masks to the three of them dressed in white in a rowboat on a beautiful lake. Apnée — the title refers to both sleep apnea as well as the French phrase “la plongée en apnée,” or “free-diving” — is screening February 14 at 4:00 and 7:30 in Florence Gould Hall, with the later show introduced by actor Edward Akrout; both screenings will be followed by a party and prize drawing. “Comedy on Film: What Makes the French Laugh?” concludes February 21 with Quentin Dupieux’s Reality, with writer and photographer Calypso introducing the 7:30 show.

TICKET ALERT — AGNÈS VARDA: VISUAL ARTIST

French legend Agnès Varda will discuss her life and career as a visual artist at FIAF

French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 28, $30, 7:30
Series continues Tuesday nights through March 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

Over the years, FIAF has shown many films by Nouvelle Vague master Agnès Varda, the celebrated auteur behind such classics as Vagabond, Cléo from 5 to 7, The Gleaners and I, Jacquot de Nantes, and The Beaches of Agnès. Now the French Institute Alliance Française is bringing Varda herself to Florence Gould Hall for the special talk “Agnès Varda: Visual Artist,” taking place on February 28 at 7:30, moderated by art dealer Olivier Renaud-Clément. The Belgium-born, France-based Varda, who was married to Jacques Demy for nearly thirty years, will be focusing not only on her film career but her upcoming gallery show at Blum & Poe, which runs March 2 to April 15. The discussion also kicks off FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Agnès Varda: Life as Art,” which consists of Varda’s Daguerréotypes on March 7, with the 7:30 screening followed by a talk with Varda and curator Laurence Kardish, Jacqot de Nantes on March 14, and Lola on March 21. This is a very special chance to see the remarkable eighty-eight-year-old Varda, so get your tickets now.

COMEDY ON FILM: WHAT MAKES THE FRENCH LAUGH? DELICATESSEN

Butcher-landlord Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) has a unique way of taking care of his tenant-customers in DELICATESSEN

CINÉSALON: DELICATESSEN (Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, January 10, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through February 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

Following a rather rough 2016, the world doesn’t seem to be as funny as it once was. FIAF is trying to do something about it with its first CinéSalon series of 2017, “Comedy on Film: What Makes the French Laugh?” Running on Tuesday nights through February 21 — without a hint of Jerry Lewis in sight — the festival kicks off January 10 with Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s delicious debut, Delicatessen. In a bizarre, postapocalyptic future, one apartment complex is surviving via its ground-floor butcher shop, where landlord Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) carefully wields his giant cleaver, hiring desperate, lonely men to do odd jobs for him before carving them up and selling their flesh and bones to his hungry customers. His latest potential victim is Louison (Dominique Pinon), a mild-mannered clown struggling to get by. But when Clapet’s shy daughter, Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac), takes a liking to Louison, the butcher has to decide whether someone else should be their next meal. Meanwhile, Aurore Interligator (Silvie Laguna) keeps devising Rube Goldberg-esque ways to kill herself, Marcel Tapioca (Ticky Holgado) tries to prevent Clapet from making mincemeat of his mother-in-law (Edith Kerr), Frog Man (Howard Vernon) has come up with his own curious menu, Clapet gives special treatment to sexpot Mademoiselle Plusse (Karin Viard), and an underground group of Troglodistes are preparing for revolution.

Louison (Dominique Pinon) clowns around in Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Genet’s brilliant audiovisual feast

Inspired by the work of Terry Gilliam, Delicatessen is a brilliant audiovisual feast, with every sound and image orchestrated for maximum absurdity, courtesy of cinematographer Darius Khondji (Seven, Stealing Beauty), longtime Marguerite Duras composer Carlos d’Alessio (India Song, The Children), and art director Miljen Kreka Klakovic (The Pillars of the Earth, The Order). Caro also did the gorgeous production design and makes a cameo as Fox. Several scenes turn into wildly inventive, hysterical musical numbers with a vaudevillian sensibility. Winner of four César Awards, the film is wickedly funny, taking place in a grim, fantastical, surreal vision of the future that is part Road Warrior, part Brazil, part Monty Python, where even methods of surveillance are downright strange. The cast is appropriately weird, none more so than Caro and Jeunet regular Pinon and his familiar, oddball face. The directors went on to collaborate on the stunning sci-fi gem The City of Lost Children before going their separate ways, Jeunet making such films as Alien: Resurrection, A Very Long Engagment, and Amélie and Caro writing and directing Dante 01. A twenty-fifth anniversary digital restoration of Delicatessen is screening January 10 at 4:00 and 7:30; “Comedy on Film: What Makes the French Laugh?” continues through February 21 with such other French laugh fests as Mohamed Hamidi’s One Man and His Cow, Jean-Christophe Meurisses’s Apnée, Michel Hazanavicius’s OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, and Quentin Dupieux’s Reality, with each show followed by a reception and the 7:30 show introduced by a special guest.

POETIC AND POLITICAL — THE CINEMA OF RABAH AMEUR-ZAÏMECHE: BACK HOME

Kamel (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche) and Louisa (Meryem Serbah) are outsiders in their own village in BACK HOME

CINÉSALON: BACK HOME (BLED NUMBER ONE) (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2006)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, November 29, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through December 13
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

FIAF’s Cinésalon series “Poetic and Political: The Cinema of Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche” continues November 29 with Ameur-Zaïmeche’s second feature, Bled Number One (Back Home), the follow-up and kind of prequel to Wesh Wesh and the second part of an unofficial trilogy that concludes with Adhen (Dernier Maquis). Kamel (Ameur-Zaïmeche) has returned home to his isolated village of Loulouj in northeast Algeria after having spent several years in France. Meanwhile, Louisa (Meryem Serbah) has left her husband, Ahmed (Ramzy Bedia), but her parents (Meriem Ameur-Zaïmeche and Larkdari Ameur-Zaïmeche) and brother (Soheb Ameur-Zaïmeche) insist she go back to him, saying she is bringing shame on the family. Both Kamel and Louisa feel like outsiders in their own village, which is balancing precipitously between the past and the future. The desperados, a group of young men who are spreading fundamentalist Muslim views, is battling with the patriots, the longtime members of the community, threatening violence on anyone who doesn’t follow the letter of the Koran. During Zerda, the pre-Islamic ritual of slaughtering and serving a bull in which the women are kept separate from the men, Kamel, in his ever-present orange hat, decides to be with the women instead, and the men, feeling shunned, remind him over and over that he is not to eat with them. The treatment of women in this patriarchal society is a central focus of the film. Louisa wants to break free of the chains that bind her, but she takes a bigger risk every time she strays from accepted, outdated convention. And the more Kamel proves to be his own man, the more the other men want to be rid of him. In fact, the patriots closely watch the town border, refusing entry to anyone they don’t want inside.

The film, which was written by Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche and Louise Thermes, is photographed in a documentary style, with long shots both in time and distance; often what is being said among the characters can’t be heard and is not translated into English, as it is more for setting a realistic pace and a naturalistic flow. The muted, faded greens and blues of the village residences stand in stark contrast to the lush green mountainside and bright blue sky. The few times there is music, it turns out that it is being played live by Rodolphe Burger by the sea; at one point he sings William Blake’s “The Little Vagabond,” about God and the Devil. Bled Number One (“bled” in Algerian means “field” or “terrain”) is a subtle, poetic film laden with sociopolitical undertones, a melancholic yet beautiful work from an auteur who deserves a bigger audience. “To write Bled Number One, I didn’t return at all to Algeria to capture something about today’s youth there. I wrote this story based on my holiday memories,” Ameur-Zaïmeche has said. “But it is also because I felt that things hadn’t really changed, that time passes differently there. You have the time to reflect and be, faced with the elements. . . . A film is a gesture, a burst, a job, an enterprise, an action. An action in life, a pure lesson of life. It is here that we grasp something alive. For it is necessary to remain alive, no matter what else happens.” Bursting with life, Bled Number One is screening at FIAF on November 29 at 4:00 and 7:30; the later show will be followed by a Q&A with ArteEast executive director Jaime-Faye Bean, and both shows will end with a wine and beer reception. “Poetic and Political: The Cinema of Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche” continues December 6 with Smugglers’ Songs before concluding December 13 with Story of Judas.

POETIC AND POLITICAL — THE CINEMA OF RABAH AMEUR-ZAÏMECHE: ADHEN

Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche will be at FIAF on November 1 to screen and discuss ADHEN, which he directed, cowrote, and stars in

CINÉSALON: ADHEN (DERNIER MAQUIS) (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2008)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, November 1, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through December 13
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

FIAF celebrates the career of French-Algerian indie writer, director, actor, and producer Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche in its November-December CinéSalon program “Poetic and Political: The Cinema of Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche.” The seven-week series will include all five of his films, realistic meditations on immigration, family, history, religion, and rebellion made between 2001 and 2015. The festival begins November 1 with 2008’s gentle and patient slice-of-life drama, Adhen. Christian Milia-Darmezin stars as Titi, a new Muslim convert who works at a small French company that repairs shipping pallets. Titi is teased by some of his fellow workers (Serpentine Kebe, Abel Jafri, Mamadou Koita, Sylvain Roume as Giant, Salim Ameur-Zaïmeche as Bashir) because he is not circumcised, so the not-very-bright Titi takes scissors to himself, landing him in the hospital. Meanwhile, the boss, Mao (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche), sets up a mosque for his employees, believing it will be good for morale, although he threatens to cut their bonuses if they don’t attend prayers every Friday. Growing worker unrest over low pay and long hours increases when Mao doesn’t let them participate in the selection of the Iman (Larbi Zekkour) and the mechanics start talking about unionizing.

A muezzin (Serpentine Kebe) calls fellow workers to prayer in ADHEN

A muezzin (Serpentine Kebe) calls fellow workers to prayer in Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s ADHEN

Adhen is beautifully shot by cinematographer Irina Lubtchansky, who lets her camera linger at the end of scenes, moving away from the characters and slowly turning up from the stacks and stacks of red pallets to a lightly cloudy bright blue sky or from a conversation about raises to trees blowing in the wind on the shore of a flowing river. The pallets are piled so high they are like physical barriers to the workers’ success, except when the muezzin (Kebe) climbs to the top and calls everyone to prayer, as if religion is the only answer to their problems. Later, when Giant encounters a trapped animal he thinks is a huge rat, the parallel between the frightened creature and the employees is palpable. Ameur-Zaïmeche, who cowrote the script with Louise Thermes, even gets away with such overt metaphors as a boss named Mao dealing with red pallets that transport commercial goods. He maintains a slow, easygoing pace throughout, regardless of where the emotions of the characters and story lead, from funny and proud to angry and resentful. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Dubai International Film Festival, Adhen is screening November 1 at 4:00 and 7:30; the later show will be followed by a Q&A with Ameur-Zaïmeche, moderated by Algerian-born French author and NYU visiting professor Zahia Rahmani. “Poetic and Political: The Cinema of Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche” continues Tuesday nights through December 13 with Ameur-Zaïmeche’s Wesh Wesh, Back Home (Bled Number One), Smugglers’ Songs, and Story of Judas in addition to an election-night Director’s Choice screening of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, followed by a reception with live election results.