Crossed Tracks, (or Roman de Gare in French) the latest offering by the prolific filmmaker Claude Lelouch, comes across as a sophisticated and witty take on the spicy ‘train station’ thrillers one flips through hurriedly between lonesome journeys. Lelouch being one of the lesser revered contemporaries of the French New Wave auteurs and frequently bashed by the Cahier’s critics for his melodramatic sentiments, is in fact in this film very close to the themes of the masters like Truffaut, Chabrol and Godard …

Blanc (”White” in English) is easily the film lacking layers in Kieślowski’s Trois Couleurs trilogy. Though interestingly it is the film having the most rich storyline out of the three. Both Bleu and Rouge have stories that are simple if you consider a story by the number of events that happen and the number of twists that the tale takes. Yet, both are exceedingly rich in metaphors, in cinematic challenges achieved, in the psychological depths that they enter into through their characters and of their characters, and both are extremely thought-provoking.

[ May 12, 2008; 9:01 pm to 11:00 pm. ] The William Faulkner of cinema, Alain Resnais through La Guerre Est Finie (”The War Is Over”) does not only a brilliant psychological study of the revolutionary but also of the resistance itself. The spirit, the anger, the disjointedness, the weariness, the inspiration, the mechanical, the loss of charm, the loss of ideology with the gain of further knowledge, the loss of innocence in more ways than virginal: how often do you find a film that can catch all this?

Bleu (in English, Blue), from the Trois Couleurs trilogy of Krzysztof Kieślowski, is all about the pain of love. In many ways, the film reminded me of the Italian masterpiece Cinema Paradiso, but both films take completely different aspects of the same theme. While Cinema Paradiso is about the pain of unrequited love, unfulfilled love, Bleu is about the pain of love that is lost, love that seems never to wash us again, love that seems to have filled up our life with its suffocating scent for ever.

This film is a non-linear movie about the life of France’s musical soul, Edith Piaf, played by the excellent Marion Cotillard. Piaf begins life as the daughter of a poor mother and an absentee father. Soon the father returns and moves his daughter to a brothel, and later returns for her once again to take her traveling with his circus.

The recipient of the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, “Persepolis” is a compelling, wonderfully told film based on the autobiographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, writes Tom Elce
Persepolis (2007)A vivid and personal account of the years following the 1979 Islamic revolution told from the point-of-view of writer-director Marjane Satrapi as she grew […]

“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is absolute gorgeous. There are few other words for it. Emotionally, I cannot call it heartbreaking, because it is about a man who achieves what he sets out to achieve, and there is nothing tragic in that. Jean-Do’s immobile life is a stunning success, and although it ended early, it ended on a note of deserved beatitude.

Director Melville, one of the stalwarts of the new wave genre, films Le Samourai as a thriller with a cinema-verite approach, creating an atmosphere through pauses and an eye for detail. His style here, is for the lack of a better term, “pure filmmaking”, writes Aniruddha Basu
“There is no solitude greater than a samurai’s,” “Unless […]