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French films Fantasy
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René Clair’s telling of the Faustian myth is a characteristically tongue in cheek rendition of the famous tale, reminiscent in style to his earlier American film, I Married a Witch (1942). Both films rely heavily on special effects and unusual photography to emphasise the supernatural elements of the plot, but in a way that is intentionally comical...
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Jean Genet’s inspired and totally unique visual poem evoking homosexual desire and existentialist suffering has achieved the status of an icon of gay cinema, although it is only quite recently that the film has succeeded in reaching a wide audience. After its initial screening in 1950, the film was immediately banned in France and the only copies remained in the hands of wealthy gay...
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A fine example of French comic farce from the 1950s, Jean Boyer’s Le Passe-muraille is best known for effectively launching the film career of its star, Bourvil. Better known as a stage comic and singer at the time, Bourvil demonstrates in this film that he also has a formidable talent as an actor. Although he plays a comic role...
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Already renowned for his acutely surreal and optimistic view of life, director René Clair surpassed himself with this outlandish romantic fantasy. As French matinee idol Gérard Philipe is propelled through history and cardboard Freudian dreamscapes, into the arms of such beauties as Martine Carol and Gina Lollobrigida...
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Marianne de ma jeunesse is an unusual departure for Julien Duvivier, yet it is easily one of his finest, most evocative films, showing a rare glimpse of his more human side. In contrast to the director’s more familiar dark psychological dramas and cynical thrillers, this is a romantic fable, having a charm, tenderness and visual style that is more recognisably Cocteau than Duvivier...
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One of the lesser works from Hungarian filmmaker Géza von Radványi, Ein Engel auf Erden is an absurd fantasy comedy that is memorable only for its cast, which includes some of the best loved actors in French cinema – most of whom were at an early stage in their career. At the time she made this film...
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Jean Cocteau’s final film is a fitting conclusion to a remarkable artistic career spanning over fifty years. The film manages to encompass all aspects of Cocteau’s creative genius and it is perhaps the best homage that cinema could offer him, whilst being a stunning work of art in its own right. As the title suggests...
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This early Louis Malle film is a sparkling French farce, very reminiscent of the comic silent movies of the 1920s. A precocious little girl, with a foul mouth and a wicked sense of fun, provides the catalyst for some deliriously funny comic situations. The high-point is probably Philippe Noiret prancing about on top of the Eiffel tower...
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There are few films that stand out as being unique and entirely unlike anything that has gone before, but Alain Resnais’s L’année derniere à Marienbad is one such film. Whereas most films adopt and build on previously established conventions, this film tears up the rule book completely and transports us into a parallel universe...
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Despite all the bad press it has received, Orson Welles’ Le Procès (a.k.a. The Trial) is one of the great cinematrographic achievments of the Twentieth Century. It is a film that has until recently been largely overlooked, probably as a result of the barrage of negative criticism which sunk the film when it was first shown in the mid 1960s...
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Although nearing the end of his remarkable film career, comic actor Fernandel still had what it took to enliven a lacklustre comedy and draw a large cinema audience. Le Bon roi Dagobert is a schoolboy’s comic book reinterpretation of history, in much the same vein as the earlier Fernandel offering François Premier (1937)...
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Les Créatures is the most intriguing work – certainly one of the most provocative - from Agnès Varda, arguably France’s greatest woman filmmaker. The style of the film – in particular its mélange of genres (comedy, thriller, fantasy and eroticism) – mirrors that of Varda’s New Wave contemporaries...
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This is a very unusual film, where the director Luis Bunuel plays intriguing games with one’s notions of normal convention and fantasy. As the film progresses and the viewer is persuaded to accept increasingly unlikely events as reality, the distinction between fantasy and reality is ultimately merged. In the end the viewer is forced to ask a disturbing question...
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The film that torpedoed Jacques Tati’s filmmaking career, effectively marginalising one of France’s most inventive and daring film directors, Playtime is now almost universally considered to be a cinematic masterpiece and a work of immense creative vision. With its ambitious sets and striking cinematography...
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Intended as a colourful adaptation of Jean-Claude Forest’s comic books of the 1960s, Barbarella has since acquired a reputation as very possibly the most gloriously over-the-top science fiction film in cinema history. The mere fact that the film never lets up for a moment but continues to take itself seriously right up until the closing credits...
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This is an early work from the controversial Polish filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk, a surreal fantasy which coldly satirises the state-controlling regimes of Eastern Europe. As in many of Borowczyk’s other films, the film has very strong erotic and sensual undertones, although there is surprisingly no explicit eroticism in the film itself...
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André Delvaux directed this haunting mélange of dream and reality, his second full-length film after his acclaimed L’Homme au crâne rasé (1966). Delvaux’s work is strongly influenced by other great directors (Resnais, Coctau, Buñuel...), and also by the great tradition of Flemish art...
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Generally, fairy tales and live action cinema are two things which are best kept well apart, the marriage of the two being something which few would ever want to experience whilst stone-cold sober and without the comforting palliative afforded by a kilo of hallucinogenic drugs. Jacques Demy’s 1970 musical fantasy...
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This is a totally off the wall but brilliantly funny comment on bourgeois life in France of the early 1970s. As in his earlier film, Belle du jour, director Luis Bunuel mingles reality and fantasy to the point that, in the end, we cannot distinguish the two. Using Russian doll-like dreams within dreams and surreal, often disturbing...
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What began as a private joke between Jacques Demy and his wife Agnès Varda about the prospect of men giving birth ended as this sweet-natured role-reversal comedy starring real-life lovers Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni. Whilst Demy doesn’t get anywhere near to exploiting the full comic potential of the subject...
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