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scip111
Reviews
Jeux d'enfants (2003)
Again, why I love French movies.
SPOILER BY WAY OF INTERPRETATION###### Most movies have one thing sinisterly in common with life. Both pretend that while people are good, life is full of bad things that happen to them which sometimes make them do bad things later. This is true, too, of villains. They are always justified by a bad child-hood or society. This movie is not much different. Sophie is abused because of her heritage/race (in French films this is allowed to be a background detail, in an American film they only mention it if that's what the movie's about in the first place, and even then they feel compelled to include a moral lesson about it {basically in order to deny that it is a facet of everyday life}). Julien's loss of his mother is his own motivation. But seriously folks the character's motivations are exactly what this movie is NOT about. They live their lives the way they do, not out of self-defense, but out of love of life. The ending makes perfect sense when viewed from this perspective. Do you dare to live life? Do you have unlimited control of your actions? If you did AND you had someone calling you on it at every point then your life would be as wild and nonsensical as these two fantasy figures. Wuthering Heights? Maybe. Romeo and Juliet? More likely.
Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962)
Why I love French Film
This film is a perfect example of why I love French film. In a word, realism. In many words, the desire to capture life's most important, daring, fanciful, yet haphazard moments with the faith that by doing so you are illustrating a timeless notion. Cleo from 5 to 7 plucks a single string from a singer's life and by pulling at it, illustrates the fabric of the beautiful and unique, but predetermined world that it is woven into. What illustrates this best is the third scene of the movie when the heroine flits about a local shop browsing hats. The camera shows her shopping but also captures many reflections that expose the larger world around her. The window pane showcases soldiers marching by, foreshadowing the war in Algiers. The mirrors take snapshots of Cleo with different head-dresses all be-speaking a future she won't choose. In the background, her maid sits disapprovingly. Small details like these, that are often neglected in other movies, are the backbone of this work of art. Cleo from 5 to 7 is a movie about much more than two hours in the lead character's life. It is about the character's whole life as illustrated by two hours. Like Joyce's Uylsses, it finds parallels between the struggles of a day with the struggles of a life.