Archive for October, 2009

One of the best films I’ve watched this year are ‘Reconstruction’ and ‘Allegro’ by Christoffer Boe. “It is a film, it is all a construction. But even so, it hurts.” “It is very important that you understand the movie is actually playful. It likes being a movie, it’s playing with how you can tell a story, and it doesn’t really take itself too seriously.”
The movie about how people do not take seriously the things that may happen every day. Perhaps it’s nor right, perhaps it’s so. The film looks like reconstruction a dream – you sleep and you don’t. You make a choice and you cant do that.

Love is like a dream but it’s not in our power to change the way it goes. After graduating from the Danish Film School in 2001, Christoffer Boe’s student film Anxiety played at the 2002 festival, where it won a prize from French critics, and then Boe returned to the Croisette the following year with his debut feature, Reconstruction. A dazzlingly inventive and playful film, Reconstruction’s tale of love and parallel universes in Copenhagen beguiled critics and was awarded both the Camera D’Or and the Prix Regards Jeune. Boe was celebrated as international cinema’s most precocious wunderkind, and his film played all around the world, plundering prizes – including the prestigious FIPRESCI Director of the Year award at San Sebastian Film Festival – wherever it went.
Next his film ‘Allegro” is also coming the way of love but with a lot more melancholy. Ansering on the question – Were those films a reflection on what was going on in director’s life at the time, Christoffer Boe said: ‘My movies have gone in the exact opposite direction of my own life. I’ve become more and more happy, and my movies have become more and more depressive. Offscreen is off the charts in depression and hatred. I don’t know how the relationship works between that, but it seems like there is an outlet in my cinema for some feelings that I don’t have in my personal life.’

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTtc8Xx4LM0"]

If you could travel back in time are you sure you can ewmind all those you loved and all thoose who loved you.
- ‘What’s the meaning of this?… Do you remember this woman?…You remember something?
- I forgot it.

FM: Are you ever totally satisfied with your films? Reconstruction was such a huge success and seemed to be universally loved, but how did you feel about it?

Boe: I really don’t look back. When I make a movie, it’s a closure on something I want to deal with, but I don’t look back on when I was very successful. Obviously I tend to look at what people don’t like. There was a lot of stuff that people said about Reconstruction and even more so about Allegro. Obviously I try to listen to that because there might be something wrong with the way that I work with some of the ideas, but I don’t look back in the sense that it’s never Le Mépris. It’s never Godard.

Une femme douce / A Gentle Creature / 1969 / is the first color Robert Bresson’s film sees a marked change in the director’s style from the cold austerity and intensity of his earlier works, such as Au hasard Balthazar (1966) and Mouchette (1967). Although the film deals with familiar Bresson themes of suicide and domestic repression, his approach in this film is far more accessible, making the film attractive to a mainstream cinema audience (for perhaps for the last time in Bresson’s film-making career). Bresson cast a successful model Dominique Sanda in the role of the ill-fated heroine of the film, allegedly for the sound of her voice rather than her more obvious attributes. Sanda’s celebrity may have been another important factor which contributed to the film’s popularity.

Director: Robert Bresson
Script: Robert Bresson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (novel)
Photo: Ghislain Cloquet
Music: Jean Wiener
Cast: Dominique Sanda (Elle), Guy Frangin (Luc, son mari), Jeanne Lobre (Anna, la bonne), Claude Ollier (Le médecin), Jacques Kébadian (Le dragueur), Gilles Sandier (Le maire), Dorothée Blank (L’infirmière)
Country: France
Language: French
Runtime: 88 min
Aka: A Gentle Creature; A Gentle Woman

Summary
When his young wife commits suicide, leaving no explanation for her act, an introspective pawnbroker looks back on their life together and tries to understand why she had to kill herself.