Claude Lelouch

[rohmerin]

Let's leave the closet. Another fan here. I've loved the 6 Lelouch films that I've seen.
I like his Ophülsian way to film long sequences in complicated and elegant shots.
There's a Lelocuh talk in international DVDs that was a kind of guide for me.

Chabrol? I did not like any of his 12 movies I saw. But they don't have anything in common. New vague is another label

[Camera Obscura]

Well, I might have just come out of the closet, but you're gonna sideline Chabrol in favour of Lelouch?

From what I've seen, Lelouch pleases me as a reasonably accomplished craftsman, mostly working comfortably within established French genres with decent budgets and A-list French actors. Chabrol operates in an entire different world and rather consistently explored the same themes rather brilliantly throughout many of his films (not all of them, but Les bonnes femmes, the Hélène-cycle, La Cérémonie, just to name a few). It might not have rubbed off on contemporary critics, but looking at Chabrol's oeuvre now, talk about 'cumulative power'.

[rohmerin]

I've just seen Vivre pour vivre for firt time and I disagree all Dylan loved. Montand was a racal macho in hi real life and here plays himelf. The contrast between violence from WWII or that 60's war in the former colonies + the good living in Europe, NY and the safari is like Mondo cane !
Yves Sain-Laurent outfits are sublime, Candice Bergen speaks good French and she's gorgeous, like an Aryan dream. Girardot is great (I agree that, very good actress, always, even on her dubbed Italian roles) but the film is a mess, the plot is anecdotic. The love triangle is deja vù. If someone want to see a may-december adultery love affair, please take Dino Risi's il tigre (known in US as The tigger and the pussycat): Risi has got something to say in chic Rome.
An all the Robert Capa refferences, come on !

Here I find for 1st time all his tastes: winter sports, the travelling around the Globe as a James Bond in Air France, but I repeat, the film doesn't work and it's loooooong.

I want to improve my French, so I'm going to get more Claude's.

(and sorry for my English, I have to improve it too, I know).

[Dylan]

I saw it as being about a man who wants affairs but still cares about the women he's involved in too much so he's bound to hurt them and himself. One could say that is is a film about non-involvement. He goes to Africa. He goes to Vietnam. He's distrubed by what he sees but it's just another news story, another adventure to return from. He sees the women the same way. He's not really involved with them either. The sound dials out for certain scenes, replaced with music or sound effects: he's not really there, he's not listening, he's in his subjective world thinking. And this film makes adultery look like a lot of work and emotional hell - it's incredibly detailed with him going here and arranging this and that. Trains. Plains. Hotels. Ski resorts. Apartments. Artworks. NYC. Amsterdam. All restless motion.

It is beautiful to look at and listen to. And it's shot in NYC, Amsterdam, Paris, Africa. The costumes couldn't be better, as you noted. The music is great, perhaps the best part about the film. It's also very energetic with numerous fascinating details and shots with some wonderful bits of humor and beautiful dialogue.

Meanwhile, I love the first Mondo Cane but I didn't see any connection to that here, other than (perhaps) the scoring, which isn't what you're talking about.

[rohmerin]

Girardot is his shelter after all the adventures (in the double meaning of the word adventure in all the Latineuropean languages) because he's a war correspondant as Capa was (too cheap, sorry).
I disagree again, he involves with Bergen, he didn't it with his mistresses before (we only know two). Because she knows, but he involves. So, he's brave in life but coward with women, was that the final judgment?

I like what youn say about the sound. He doesn't listen, yes.
The train sequence back to Paris when he confess and Giradot suffers and escapes is the only one when I got into the film and it's the one that make me feel something.

Mondo cane, I didn't explain well. If you remember, they show us a "nice" thing (4 instance, a starlett in bikini in Cannes), the following will be a horrible one, the sharks, then nice, after that, horror, etc, etc. That is the structure I saw in Vivre pour vivre.

[Dylan]

So, he's brave in life but coward with women, was that the final judgment?

I disagree, again, he's a man who wants affairs but is too emotional toward the women he's with to handle them without everybody crashing down. He's anything but a coward with women. What I meant was that his experiences with women mirror his career as a war correspondent & what was going on in the world in 1967, which I think is brilliant.

And meanwhile, how many movies about these kinds of characters are there? When approaching a script like this you'll probably (obviously?) be inspired by the experiences of Martha Gellhorn or Robert Capa and the like, but I think Claude Lelouch's own personality makes it into his male characters. He's obviously very alpha & strong but deeply self-critical, flawed, & cynical about his own gender. He comes across as brutally honest to me.

[warren oates]

Just having seen Lelouch's legendary street racing short C'était Un Rendez-vous, I found a single reference to it in an old archived thread. I'm not remotely a car nut and yet it's still immensely thrilling to watch, in spite of all the moral qualms I have with the shooting, because of the undeniable reality* he captures. A great documentary of the process of its own reckless making and one of the better long takes/one-take films I've seen. While you can watch it on-line many places in varying degrees of transfer quality and legality, the official home video distributors, Spirit Level Film in the UK, will be releasing a Blu-ray next week, which will hopefully be region-free like their DVD is. It seems like it might already be available directly from their website.

*yeah I know about the post sound work and the spotter

[Numero Trois]

But I am beginning to look back more fondly on Lelouch now we are in the era of even more commercial, pretty but empty French cinema, such as those two Coco Chanel films, Ma femme est une actrice (a film in the mode of Lelouch if ever there was one)

Mileage of course always varies, but I think Attal's Ma Femme Est une Actrice is a decent film. One of a countless number of charming French comedies. Of course it's not revolutionary, but it is sharply written enough not to mention sincere enough in its apparent autobiographical storytelling. It's straightforward, not what I think of comparing to when it comes to the particular quirks of LeLouch. You're right in mentioning the preciousness in his work. It's certainly there of course in A Man and a Woman, and it's there in his later films, at least the ones that I've seen. It's almost like a cognitive dissonance, a certain habitual cluelessness that messes up even his best constructed films.

Out of what I've seen, the only Lelouch film that I don't find largely vomitous is the obscure Un homme qui me plaît (Love Is a Funny Thing, 1969), which has a good Annie Girardot star turn, and finds Lelouch shooting in Los Angeles.

Yes. Not to mention the pleasure of seeing Girardot & Belmondo

Spoiler

driving cross-country all the way to Mardi Gras in New Orleans with various stops along the way.

It's funny how novel it still feels to see two major French actors well outside the usual Paris milieu. Unfortunately, LeLouch couldn't resist drawing out the ending, but that's just a minor fault in one surprisingly enjoyable film.

[rohmerin]

Has anybody seen Ces amours-la? What war may bring. I've just seen the UK Blu Ray and the films reminds me the horrible Tornatore's Bariaa. Well, I mean, He has made (again a musical drama) and a biographical portrait, He has remade Les unes et les autres (without its beauty), Toute une vie (without the great story). He's marked by WWII, we know, but He even uses his films for going on the action in a not so beautiful film about a woman who loves too much: first a French, then a nazi, later two soldiers, an interratial Jules et Jim, later an Auswitchz survivor.

Is there any Lelouch's expert? Because one of those movie clips is stunning and impressive: an American-Indian runs in Texas or Kansas a la Cimarron The great race and he wins chariots, horses, etc. What is this film?

[rohmerin]

I've found a lobbycard with the race and teh film is Another Man, Another Woman. Is it ggod?

http://www.cartelespeliculas.com/galeri ... os=-187069" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[domino harvey]

Has anybody seen Ces amours-la?

Yes, in fact it was my comments about the film here that started this thread-split in the first place!

[Numero Trois]

Ces amours-là (Claude Lelouch) I should have known better than to expect anything but maudlin schmaltz from Lelouch, but fool me seventeen times, shame on me... The film starts to right itself towards the end, when it turns into a musical and begs the question why the whole thing couldn't have been sung, though. The self-reflexive moments are pretty clumsy and pretty much cement now just as then how Lelouch had no business being mentioned in the same breath as the Nouvelle Vague-- those were pics made by lovers of great films, his are a product of shitty ones.

With perhaps a few exceptions, a good summation of his entire career. Roman de gare was another recent one seriously marred by that tendency of his.

[Caligula]

Pleasantly surprised to see that one of my most wanted films, Lelouch's Les Miserables, is up for pre-order at Amazon.fr.

Anyone have any idea whether this'll be English-friendly, if not, what the chances are of it being licensed for a subbed version elsewhere (If memory suffices, Warner issued the VHS)?

[tenia]

I don't specifically know for Les Misérables since it's not sold yet, but I have Itinéraire d'un enfant gâté (another Lelouch released by Marco Polo) and it has no subtitles at all (not even a French SDH one). I have a couple of other releases from this collection which, IIRC, also have no subs, so I'd be careful with Les misérables if you need Eng subs.

[Caligula]

Thanks, Tenia. Unfortunately I'd need the subs. As it is a restored version, here's hoping someone picks it up for release in an English-friendly version.

[domino harvey]

Was not surprised to see wildly varying reactions to Roman de gare (2007) online after catching up with it, but I thought it did a commendable job of playing with the audience and misleading and withholding information in a way that seemed quite pleasingly puckish and not obnoxious, unlike as in something like the Girl on the Train (based on an actual roman de gare!)— I think this is a bigger feat than its detractors give it. I went in knowing absolutely nothing and was delighted at the cinematic chicanery of it all, though 100000% your mileage may vary

[domino harvey]

And just when you thought it was safe to praise Lelouch for misleading and withholding information from the audience, along comes Salaud, on t'aime (2014). There is no possible way to ever guess the multitude of ways this film completely shifts and ruins any good will in the last half hour. Like, I am legit stunned-- this is one of the worst last acts to any movie I have ever seen, and it just keeps getting worse and worse as it goes while you sit there, jaw open in disbelief. The set up is not particularly promising-- Johnny Hallyday's doctor/BFF Eddy Mitchell tricks Hallyday's four estranged daughters, each named for the seasons, into coming to visit him on the false premise that he's dying. So we get something akin to the Royal Tenenbaums/the Upside of Anger, with a quartet of jaded daughters arriving and old wounds are prodded and eventually healed etc. Until the film

Major, major spoilers for a film no one will ever see

follows the usual melodramatic outburst of hurt from his daughters by showing Hallyday react by hanging himself from a tree in suicide. This surprised me in a good way, because it reconstituted the film I thought this was into something more interesting-- how novel to make a typical family reunion movie and push it somewhere so dark. Truly, if Lelouch had cut everything in this film from the funeral to the train station epilogue, this would have been a flawed but interesting curiosity and the implications of the act would have resonated on some level.

But Lelouch is a fucking idiot.

Six months later, Michell reveals that in fact Hallyday didn't kill himself, he was murdered and made to look like a suicide. So, the only thing interesting about this movie gets thrown out. He's sure one of the daughters did it and the rest are covering, so he accuses them. They exit the film, justifiably pissed because as we then see, Hallyday was in fact murdered by hunters wanting to use his land. There's also a bank robber completely unrelated to any of this who buys Hallyday's house, just thrown in because there weren't enough characters already.

Oh, and then in the epilogue, Mitchell reveals that Hallyday was dying actually so he didn't lie.

I literally flipped off my TV at the last revelation. If this had been the Lelouch film I saw with him in audience, I would not have hesitated to tell him to fuck off in person

[vsski]

Domino - you strike me as someone who watches and likes a lot of French cinema given many of your posts here.

Which would you rank as your favorite Lelouch films?

I have seen most of his 60s movies up to 95’ Les Misérables, but nothing since given that I left Europe then and I have found it hard to see his movies in theaters. I remember liking several of his films, but he typically is not mentioned as often as the Nouvelle Vague gang.

[domino harvey]

Of the three post-95 Lelouch films I’ve seen, Roman de gare, easily

[vsski]

Thanks - I’ll have to seek that one out.

[yoloswegmaster]

StudioCanal has acquired the worldwide rights to the films of Claude Lelouch.

[knives]

Is the version of Love is a Fun y Thing streaming on Tubi a dub? Ten minutes into it everything so far has been in English.

[domino harvey]

I don’t know why I keep putting my hand into this particular garbage disposal, but it is probably not surprising that Le voyou (1970) is another lousy effort from Lelouch. Jean-Louis Trintignant is the titular thief, an unpleasant thug placed within a plot of so little consequence that this audience member figured out long before I was supposed to that this whole movie is just an exercise at the service of exactly one “twist” that made me irritated, not delighted, when I figured it out— mainly because I still had a full third of the movie left and I knew it was going to keep doing this shit as it prepared to “reveal” its methodology.

Spoiler

For those who need to spoil things, the gimmick here is that the film presents events as occurring in a linear fashion but the second half of the film actually takes place before the first half.

Why this kind of trickery (where the mechanism itself is the only twist) was thought to be worth centering your entire lame crime movie around is not a question this film can answer. But hey, you also get a spectacularly awful meta opening musical number, poorly staged and unlikely, AND one of the most obnoxious self-referential gags I’ve ever seen, as Trintignant starts humming the theme to his previous collab with Lelouch after a police inspector says “A man and a woman”— le vom

[domino harvey]

A small addition to your Lelouch collection (from an IMDb post):

C'etait un Rendezvous is the creation of the French filmmaker Claude Lelouch in 1976. Using a Ferrari 275 GTB early one August morning, Lelouch attached a camera to the bumper of the car and sped through the streets of Paris. He gave the driver a set route from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur, which is straight through the heart of Paris. The driver is still unknown to this day, because Lelouch was never able to obtain a permit to close the streets. The driver, who Lelouch told officials was an F1 racer, went over the speed limit and blew off many red lights. When this film was first shown, Lelouch was arrested, and because of this, the footage has spent many years underground before it began to resurface on DVD a few years ago. Lelouch used a new technology of the time, a gyro stabilized camera mount, in order to mount the camera on the car. The problem with this is that the technology of the time only allowed for a ten minute film with this mount. Lelouch told his driver to rush because of this time limit, and the video itself is only about nine minutes.

Looks like a typical Paris driver to me

I’d never heard of this but it one of his most seen films on Letterboxd for some reason (did it go viral in the last couple years?) and it is up on YouTube. I’m not really sure an actuality like this needs an opinion foisted on it, but it is at any rate surely one of the most unambiguously reckless films I’ve ever seen… but I must confess I did enjoy it, so I’m part of the problem!

[Saturnome]

It always been popular, but outside of cinephile circles. I grew up in the world of vintage car shows and (bootleg?) dvds of it were a popular item. Even though it's a 10 minutes film. People would chat about what car was used, if the engine sound was authentic or not.