Rendez-Vous with French Cinema

1914. To escape a life of destitution, Nélie Laborde joins the Red Cross and becomes a nurse on the front lines of the First World War. During a German attack, Nélie meets Rose Juillet, a young Swiss aristocrat who has lost her father and fortune and is traveling to northern France to seek shelter with Madame de Langwil, a wealthy family friend whom she has never met. Later that night, Rose is apparently killed by a shell blast. Believing Rose dead, Nélie makes an impulsive decision to take her identity and travel to Nancy to introduce herself to Madame de Langwil in her place. She is offered a position as a reader to the childless widow and begins to enjoy a life of comfort she has never known. Until the night the real Rose Juillet returns to claim her rightful place…Aurélia Georges's adaptation of Wilkie Collins's novel The New Magdalen focuses on the impact of rigid class hierarchy on the lives of three women, offering a nuanced feminist reading that resonates with the iniquities of our era. It also establishes Aurélia Georges as a leading talent in contemporary French cinema, a filmmaker with a masterful command of suspense and moral complexity.

Monday, March 7 at 7:00PM

$10.50 adults, $8.50 students + seniors (free for members!)

Not Rated. 1 hour 52 minutes.

Nominated for Best First Film in France's César awards, their Oscar equivalent. 1981, the dawn of a new era in France: the Socialist candidate François Mitterrand has just been elected president. But while his tiny hometown in Brittany erupts with joy, twenty-year-old Philippe has other things on his mind. He's obsessed with sound, manipulating tape recordings to make weird effects on his older brother Jérôme's radio show. And next week he'll be assessed for compulsory military service. If the army takes him, he might never see Marianne again. Marianne is his brother's girlfriend, and he's totally in love with her. It's hopeless, of course. Or is it? When Philippe leaves to serve with the French forces in Berlin, it's with a mix tape from Marianne in his pocket. With this feature debut, director Vincent Maël Cardona crafts an evocative time capsule of an era close to us in years but in many ways now remote, when Europe was divided by an iron curtain and a sequence of songs on magnetic tape could serve as a declaration of love. Deploying a stellar soundtrack of European post-punk classics, Cardona juxtaposes the eternal thrills of first love and the frustrations of provincial life with a lovingly specific depiction of a bygone period, lending tremendous emotional immediacy to the lives of those who came of age at the dawn of the 1980s.

Monday, March 14 at 7:00PM

$10.50 adults, $8.50 students + seniors (free for members!)

Not Rated. 1 hour 36 minutes.

With this closely observed double portrait of an aging French film star and the young Black woman he hires as his new bodyguard, first-time feature writer-director Constance Meyer breathes new life into the odd couple theme, bearing witness to a passing of the torch from the legendary Gérard Depardieu to the formidable young actress Déborah Lukumuéna. Film fans will rejoice to see Depardieu return to the kind of shockingly vulnerable performance that made his reputation many decades ago. The real thrill, however, is to see Lukumuéna go head to head with him. You will be stunned by the range of this brilliant newcomer's talent. Depardieu has too often been reduced to tabloid fodder in recent years, but he is here at his most generous, sensitive best, lending his legendary charisma to a warts and all picture of Georges, a capricious superstar who realizes how disconnected he has become through his unexpected bond with Lukumuéna's no-nonsense private security agent Aïssa. Shaping both performances, Meyer's assured direction shows a sharp eye for detail and a subtle empathy that gives this film about urban loneliness an unexpected warmth.

Monday, March 21 at 7:00PM

$10.50 adults, $8.50 students + seniors (free for members!)

Not Rated. 1 hour 35 minutes.

Like most of her friends in the housing projects outside Paris, eighteen-year-old Adja’s focus is on having fun and getting through the days at her internship. But a fight over the farmland at the foot of her housing estate keeps encroaching on her carefree life: the government plans to evict the farmers from their land to build the biggest leisure complex in Europe. A group of activists have occupied the farmland and turned it into a ZAD, a zone to defend from environmentally reckless expansion. Adja and her influencer friend Sabira joke that the activists are tree-hugging hippies, but Adja can't deny how she feels about Arthur, a farmer's son on the front lines of the fight. While writer-director Emilie Carpentier captures our attention—and emotions—with a charming tale of first love between two young people from different backgrounds, her real subject here is the dawning of political and social awareness at the cusp of maturity. In capturing Adja's gradual decision to step up and fight for her future, she pays tribute to the courage of a generation for whom the fight for environmental justice is an urgent matter of survival.

Monday, March 28 at 7:00PM

$10.50 adults, $8.50 students + seniors (free for members!)

Not Rated. 1 hour 28 minutes.