Le Havre (2011)

Directed by
Aki Kaurismäki

Writing credits
Aki Kaurismäki

 

Marcel Marx, a former bohemian and struggling author, has given up his literary ambitions and relocated to the port city Le Havre. He leads a simple life based around his wife Arletty, his favourite bar and his not too profitable profession as a shoeshiner. As Arletty suddenly becomes seriously ill, Marcel's path crosses with an underage illegal immigrant from Africa. Marcel and friendly neighbors and other townspeople help to hide him from the police, and they arrange and pay for an illegal trip by boat to immigrate into England. The police officer in charge of finding the boy eventually finds him in the boat, but allows him to escape.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1508675/

To Each His Own Cinema (2007)

AKA Chacun son cinéma ou Ce petit coup au coeur quand la lumière s'éteint et que le film commence

Directed by
Theodoros Angelopoulos (segment "Trois Minutes")
Olivier Assayas    (segment "Recrudescence")
Bille August (segment "The Last Dating Show")
Jane Campion (segment "The Lady Bug")
Youssef Chahine (segment "47 Ans Après")
Kaige Chen (segment "Zhanxiou Village")
Michael Cimino (segment "No Translation Needed")
Ethan Coen (segment "World Cinema")
Joel Coen (segment "World Cinema")
David Cronenberg (segment "At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World")
Jean-Pierre Dardenne (segment "Dans l'Obscurité")
Luc Dardenne (segment "Dans l'Obscurité")
Manoel de Oliveira (segment "Rencontre Unique")
Raymond Depardon (segment "Cinéma d'Eté")
Atom Egoyan (segment "Artaud Double Bill")
Amos Gitai (segment "Le Dibbouk de Haifa")
Alejandro González Iñárritu (segment "Anna")
Hsiao-hsien Hou (segment "The Electric Princess House")
Aki Kaurismäki (segment "La Fonderie")
Abbas Kiarostami (segment "Where is my Romeo?")
Takeshi Kitano (segment "One Fine Day")
Andrey Konchalovskiy (segment "Dans le Noir")
Claude Lelouch (segment "Cinéma de Boulevard")
Ken Loach (segment "Happy Ending")
David Lynch (segment "Absurda") (special edition)
Nanni Moretti (segment "Diaro di uno Spettatore")
Roman Polanski (segment "Cinéma Erotique")
Raoul Ruiz (segment "Le Don")
Walter Salles (segment "A 8 944 km de Cannes")
Elia Suleiman (segment "Irtebak")
Ming-liang Tsai (segment "It's a Dream")
Gus Van Sant (segment "First Kiss")
Lars von Trier (segment "Occupations")
Wim Wenders (segment "War in Peace")
Kar Wai Wong (segment "I Travelled 9000 km To Give It To You")
Yimou Zhang (segment "En Regardant le Film")

 

A 2007 French anthology film commissioned for the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival. The film is a collection of 34 short films, each 3 minutes in length, by 36 acclaimed directors. Representing 5 continents and 25 countries, the filmmakers were invited to express "their state of mind of the moment as inspired by the motion picture theatre".

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0973844/

Irreversible (2002)

AKA Irréversible

Directed by
Gaspar Noé

Writing credits
Gaspar Noé

Irréversible contains thirteen scenes presented in reverse chronological order. The film begins with two men in a small apartment suite. One of them is the "Butcher", the protagonist of Noé's previous film, I Stand Alone. In a drunken monologue, the Butcher reveals that he was arrested for having sex with his daughter. Their philosophical musings shift to the subject of a commotion in the streets outside, which is derisively attributed to the patrons of a nearby homosexual S&M nightclub called The Rectum. Minutes earlier, two men named Marcus and Pierre are escorted out of that nightclub by the police. Marcus is on a stretcher, apparently injured, and Pierre is in handcuffs. Men on the streets shout homophobic insults at them. Earlier that evening, Marcus and Pierre arrived at the club in a frantic search for somebody nicknamed le Tenia — "the Tapeworm". Marcus finds the man believed to be le Tenia and attacks him. The man pins Marcus down, then breaks his arm and attempts to rape him. Pierre rescues Marcus by bludgeoning the attacker's face using a fire extinguisher, fatally crushing the man's skull after repeated blows. Before entering the club, it is learned that Marcus and Pierre went in search of le Tenia after questioning several prostitutes. Apparently their goal is retribution for someone's rape. They track down a transsexual prostitute named Concha who identifies the rapist as le Tenia after Marcus threatens to slash her with a piece of broken glass. Concha also reveals that the rapist is likely to be found at a nightclub called The Rectum. Marcus and Pierre were aided in their search by a street thug named Mourad and his friend Layde. Mourad promised to help them find le Tenia for money so that Marcus could have his revenge, rather than leave the matter to the police. It is revealed that le Tenia anally raped Marcus' girlfriend Alex, and beat her so severely that she fell into a coma. The rape takes place after Alex encounters le Tenia beating Concha in a pedestrian underpass. Le Tenia then turns his attention on Alex and threatens her with a knife to her throat. He then proceeds to rape Alex, pinning her down on her stomach and threatening her. After raping Alex, le Tenia brutally beats her. From this scene, it becomes clear that Pierre and Marcus attack the wrong man later in the story. Le Tenia was in fact standing right next to the man Pierre killed in club Rectum. In the next scene, we see Alex, Marcus, and Pierre at a party. Alex is annoyed by Marcus' unrestrained use of drugs and alcohol and his flirtatious behavior with other women, and consequently decides to leave the party. The next scene shows the trio discussing sex in a metro station and in the train. It is revealed Pierre used to be Alex' lover. The penultimate scene shows Marcus and Alex lying in bed after sex. Alex reveals she might be pregnant, and Marcus is pleased with the possibility. To prepare for the party, Marcus leaves to buy wine and Alex has a shower. Alone, Alex uses a home pregnancy test that confirms she is now carrying a child, for which she is elated. She is shown sitting on the bed clothed, with her hand on her belly. A poster for Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the tagline "The Ultimate Trip", is above the headboard. The final colorful scene shows Alex reading An Experiment with Time by John William Dunne in a park, surrounded by playing children. Beethoven's 7th Symphony is heard in the background. The camera spins around faster and faster until it blacks out into a strobe effect, accompanied by a pulsing, roaring sound. A rapidly-spinning image of the cosmos can be dimly perceived. The final title card reads: "Time destroys everything" — a phrase uttered in the film's first scene by one of the men in the apartment.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290673/

The Piano Teacher (2001)

AKA La pianiste


Directed by
Michael Haneke

Writing credits
Michael Haneke
Elfriede Jelinek (novel)

Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) is a piano professor at a Vienna music conservatory. Although already in her forties, she still lives in an apartment with her domineering mother (Annie Girardot); her father is a long-standing resident in a lunatic asylum.

The audience is gradually shown truths about Erika's private life. Behind her assured façade, she is a woman whose sexual repression verges into full-fledged desperation and is manifested in a long list of paraphilias, including (but by no means limited to) voyeurism and sadomasochistic fetishes such as sexual self-mutilation.

When Erika meets Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), a charming 17-year-old engineering student from a bourgeois background, a mutual obsession develops. Even though she initially attempts to prevent consistent contact and even tries to undermine his application to the conservatory, he eventually becomes her pupil. Like her, he appreciates and is a gifted interpreter of Schumann and Schubert.

Erika destroys the musical prospects of an insecure but talented girl, Anna Schober, driven by her jealousy of the girl's contact with Walter — and also, perhaps, by her fears that Anna's life will mirror her own. She does so by hiding shards of glass inside one of Anna's coat pockets, damaging her right hand and ruining her aspirations to play at the forthcoming jubilee concert. Erika then pretends to be sympathetic when the girl's mother (Susanne Lothar) asks for advice on her daughter's recuperation. (The sub-plot of the pupil and her mother, mirroring the main relationship in the film, is absent in Jelinek's novel.) In a moment of dramatic irony, the girl's mother rhetorically asks Erika who could do something so evil.

Walter is increasingly insistent in his desire to start a relationship with Erika, but when she finally acquiesces, he is unwilling to indulge her violent fantasies, which repulse him. The film climaxes, however, when he attacks her in her apartment in the fashion she let him know she desired, beating and then raping her. She discovers that the reality of her desires does not match her conception of them.

Erika takes a kitchen knife to a concert in which she is supposed to fill in for the injured Anna. She meets Anna and Anna's mother, and Walter, in the foyer of the concert hall. Minutes before the concert is due to start, Erika stabs herself in the shoulder and leaves the foyer. Her onscreen injury is not especially severe, but the implication is that further self-harm will ensue.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0254686/

Un Chien Andalou (1929)

Director:
Luis Buñuel

Writers:
Salvador Dalí
Luis Buñuel

The film opens with a title card reading "Once upon a time". What may be the film's conclusion unfolds; a middle-aged man (played by Buñuel) sharpens his razor at his balcony door and tests the razor on his thumb. He then opens the door, and idly fingers the razor while gazing at the moon, about to be engulfed by a thin cloud, from his balcony. There is a cut to a close-up of a young woman (Simone Mareuil) being held by the man as she calmly stares straight ahead. Another cut occurs to the moon being overcome by the cloud as the man slits the woman's eye with the razor, and the vitreous humour spills out from it.

The subsequent title card reads "eight years later". A slim young man (Pierre Batcheff) bicycles down a calm urban street wearing what appears to be a nun's habit and a locked box with a strap around his neck. A cut occurs to the young woman from the first scene, who has been reading anxiously in a sparingly furnished upstairs apartment, and she hears the young man approaching on his bicycle. She promptly throws aside the book she was reading (revealing a reproduction of Vermeer's The Lacemaker) and goes to the window. She emerges from the building and attempts to revive the young man after witnessing him collapse from the bicycle.

Later, the young woman assembles pieces of the young man's clothing on a bed in the upstairs room, and seemingly through concentrating on the clothing causes the young man to appear near the door. The young man and the young woman stare at his hand, which has a hole in the palm from which ants emerge. A slow transition occurs focusing on the armpit hair of an unknown figure and a sea urchin at a sandy location. An androgynous young woman appears in the street below the apartment, poking at a severed hand with a cane while surrounded by an angry crowd and police.

The crowd clears when the police place the hand in the box previously carried by the young man, and the androgynous young woman contemplates something happily while standing perilously in the middle of the now busy street, clutching the box. She is then run over by a car and a few bystanders gather around her. The young man and the young woman watch these events unfold from the apartment window. The young man seems to take sadistic pleasure in the androgynous young woman's danger and subsequent death, and as he gestures at the shocked young woman in the room with him, he leers at her and grasps her bosom. The young woman resists him at first, but then allows him to touch her as he imagines her nude from the front and the rear. The young woman pushes him away as he drifts off and she attempts to escape by running to the other side of the room. The young man corners her as she reaches for a racket in self-defense, but he suddenly picks up two ropes and drags two grand pianos containing dead and rotting donkeys, stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments, and two rather bewildered priests (played by Jaime Miravitilles and Salvador Dalí) who are attached by ropes. As he is unable to move, the young woman escapes the room. She finds the young man in the next room, dressed in his nun's garb in the bed.


The subsequent title card reads "around three in the morning". The young man is roused from his bed by the sound of a doorbell (represented visually by a martini shaker being shaken by a set of arms through two holes in a wall). The young woman goes to answer the door and does not return. Another young man dressed in lighter clothing (also played by Pierre Batcheff) angrily arrives in the apartment, possibly to punish the other young man for his lecherous actions against the young woman. The second young man forces the first one to throw away his nun's clothing and then makes him stand against a wall.

The subsequent title card reads "Sixteen years ago." We see the second young man from the front for the first time as he admires the art supplies and books on the table near the wall and forces the first young man to hold two of the books as he stares at the wall. The first young man eventually shoots the second young man when the books abruptly turn into pistols. The second young man, now in a meadow, dies while swiping at a nude figure which suddenly disappears into thin air. A group of men come and carry his corpse away.

The young woman comes into the apartment to possibly confront the first young man and sees a death head moth. The first young man sneers at her as she retreats and wipes his mouth off his face with his hand. Subsequently the first young man makes the young woman's armpit hair attach itself to where his mouth would be on his face through gestures. The young woman looks at the first young man with disgust, and leaves the apartment sticking her tongue out at him.

As she exits her apartment, the street is replaced by a coastal beach, where the young woman meets a third man with whom she walks arm in arm. He shows her the time on his watch and they walk near the rocks, where they find the remnants of the first young man's nun's clothing and the box. They seem to walk away clutching each other happily and make romantic gestures in a long tracking shot. However, the film abruptly cuts to the final shot with a title card reading "In Spring," showing the couple buried in sand up to their elbows, presumably dead, possibly bringing the film full-circle to a time after the unknown events of the opening scene.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020530/