Latest news with #AlainGuiraudie
Local France
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Local France
French films with English subtitles to watch in June 2025
The cinema club Lost in Frenchlation holds regular screenings of French films with English subtitles, with the aim of allowing French language beginners to appreciate the richness and diversity of French cinema. The films are usually a mixture of new releases and classics. Here's what is coming up in June – including a special premiere to mark the Champs-Elysées Film Festival and not one but two Blanche Gardin vehicles. Miséricorde – Wednesday, June 4th What? The New York Times described Alain Guiraudie's 2024 multi César–nominated movie as 'film noir with the lights turned on', while French critic Caroline Besse called it a 'delicious thriller like a mushroom omelette'. We hold no such cinematically flavourful opinion on this tree-bound missing person mystery set in darkest Aveyron, save to say you'll probably really enjoy it. Catherine Frot is a joy as the concerned widow whose son is caught up in the centre of the story. Advertisement When? Drinks at 7pm, screening at 8pm, followed by a Q&A with one of the stars. Where? Jeu de Paume, 1 Pl. de la Concorde, 75008 Paris. Tickets? Tickets – costing between €7.50 and €11.50 – can be ordered here . Les Musiciens – Friday, June 6th What? Frédéric Pierrot is on scene-stealing form in this well regarded drama. He is the misanthropic perfectionist composer of a piece of music that an idealistic heiress (Valérie Donzelli) wants to see performed at a unique concert bringing together four Stradivarius instruments. When? Drinks at 7pm, screening at 8pm, followed by a Q&A with director Gregory Magne. Where? L'Entrepôt, 17 Rue Francis de Pressensé, Paris 14. Tickets? Tickets – costing between €6 and €9.50 – can be ordered here . Un Monde Merveilleux – Thursday, June 12th What? Blanche Gardin continues to be utterly astonishing in this clever near-future comedy as a rebellious and technosceptic former teacher eking out an existence as a petty criminal, who kidnaps a caregiver robot in an effort to regain custody of her daughter. Advertisement When? Drinks at 7pm, screening at 8pm, followed by a Q&A with first-time feature director Guilio Callegari. Where? Luminor, 20 Rue du Temple, Paris 4. Tickets? Tickets – costing between €7.50 and €11.50 – can be ordered here . Le Grand Bain – Sunday, June 15th What? Remember The Full Monty – the 1997 British comedy about unemployed middle-aged Sheffield steelworkers who form a male striptease act? Think that, only French, and involving an all-male synchronised swimming team rather than loveable poundshop Chippendales. Just as heartwarming, too. When? Tea bar open from 7pm for a hot drink, screening at 7.30pm – with subdued lighting so cinemagoers can combine the movie with a spot of casual knitting as part of World Wide Knit In Public Day. Where? Studio des Ursulines, 10 Rue des Ursulines, 75005 Paris. Tickets? Tickets – costing between €5.40 and €9.40 – can be ordered here . Champs-Elysées Film Festival: L'Incroyable Femme des Neiges (The Incredible Snow Woman) – Sunday, June 22nd What? As part of the Champs-Elysées Film Festival, Lost in Frenchlation proudly hosts the premiere of Sébastien Betbeder's comedy drama – in which the remarkable Blanche Gardin (you may remember her as the technosceptic mother from Un Monde Merveilleux ) stars as an arctic explorer who fears nothing … except confronting her own existence back in her native Jura. Advertisement When? Limited drinks – included in the ticket price and served on the rooftop – start at 6.30pm, screening at 8.30pm followed by a Q&A with cast and crew. Hot food is available on the evening for €9, payable on the night. Where? Publicis Cinéma, 129 avenue des Champs-Élysées, 75008, Paris. Tickets? Tickets – costing €40 until June 1st and €45 thereafter, including rooftop cocktails – are available here .
Washington Post
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Desire and misbehavior are off the leash in ‘Misericordia'
Watching an Alain Guiraudie film is a reminder of how sunny most movies are, even the ones we're supposed to take seriously. The French writer-director makes transgressive dramas that double as the bleakest of black comedies, where friendships between men veer from social to sexual to antagonistic and back, and where the morality of a country village can be a thin veneer over the darkest deeds of the heart.
The Guardian
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A sinner, a killer and a very controversial erection: has director Alain Guiraudie surpassed Stranger By the Lake?
There's a wonderfully frank clifftop scene in Misericordia, Alain Guiraudie's new rural thriller, in which a priest seems to give absolution to a murderer. Not through some great act of clemency, though, but because of what he wants in return. 'He's a lot like me,' says the director, laughing. 'He's navigating between his greater ideals and his desires as a man. I think a lot of us do that.' Morally flexible clergymen, vacillating killers, characters whose desires lead them into terra incognita – this is Guiraudie's morally unstable terrain. Misericordia is the mirror image of his much-praised 2013 psychological drama Stranger By the Lake. Where that film made a murderer a dimly grasped object of desire, here the point of view is the killer's. Jérémie stirs up dormant passions when he returns to his childhood village for the funeral of his former baker boss. In Guiraudie's hands, it's never certain whether a story will turn out tragic or comic. In Misericordia, it's both: the film starts off in Talented Mr Ripley territory, before spiralling into bed-hopping, gendarme-dodging farce. I'd hoped to meet Guiraudie in Aveyron, where he was born and where many of his films are set, but he's upped sticks from the south-west and now lives in Paris. 'After 20 years, I fancied a change of horizon,' he says, sitting in a brasserie near the capital's Buttes-Chaumont park. 'And also I was there less and less. My furniture may as well have been in a storage unit.' With a full head of silvery hair and well-hewn features, the 60-year-old still looks fresh from a hike in the stark Aveyron highlands, in his Polartec jacket, climbing shoes and headband. Through Misericordia, Stranger By the Lake and his 2016 comedy-drama Staying Vertical, he has broadened the scope of on-screen depictions of rural France, something he thinks has narrowed since the 1970s. Mainly, Guiraudie likes to remind audiences that sexuality is just as rich out there as it is on the Parisian thoroughfare moving past our brasserie window. 'The working class has become completely excluded from the representation of sensuality, of sexuality, of homosexuality,' he says. 'There's an impression those things only concern hot young people in sexy jobs. But it's important to remember you can be a worker, or a farmer, and gay. Or not even gay, but with an erotic life.' The priest wandering into shot fully erect in Misericordia – surely a screen first – gets that point across effectively, as does the middle-aged sex worker cheerfully plying her trade in 2022's Nobody's Hero. It seems natural that Guiraudie is on intimate terms with la France profonde: he grew up in a five-house hamlet north of Toulouse with his parents on a small dairy farm. The claustrophobia of Misericordia – 'where everyone is always making up stories about the neighbours' – is a direct lift. In such a place, the idea of making films seemed absurd: 'It felt very far off socially and geographically. My parents always had a tendency to dampen my ambitions. By saying, 'Careful. It's not possible. You won't get there.'' After dropping out of history studies in Montpellier, Guiraudie began writing novels, then realised they were closer to film scripts. He broke out of his inertia by describing it, writing a story about two layabouts in a village square bantering about some magazine project. Encouraged by a Toulouse producer to film it, he turned it into his first short: 1990's Les Héros Sont Immortels (Heroes Never Die). He learned everything about film-making on the job, while working simultaneously as a night watchman. 'It was the most thrilling period of my youth,' he says, 'apart from certain great parties.' The erotic action of Stranger By the Lake was focused on the titular cruising spot, its drama alternating between horny conversations at its nudist beach and pornographically shot tussles in the undergrowth. The film had a classical purity. Although it was rapturously reviewed, and was by far his most commercially successful, some American viewers felt it described a world that had been made obsolete by Grindr and the like. But Guiraudie points out that real-life cruising is far from dead – from Berlin's Tiergarten to the actual lake where they filmed, Sainte-Croix in south-east France. 'It hasn't completely disappeared,' he says. 'Especially in France, we're still attached to it. We've still got that romantic notion of sex and love.' Even the film's explicit sex scenes added to the Greco-Roman feel. Shot with body doubles, this was an area in which Guiraudie forced himself to take a head-on approach. 'I wanted to face up to the representation of sex and of my sexuality: homosexuality. It's complicated because you give up a lot of your intimate self and you have to ask a lot of actors.' For someone whose films are so carnal, Guiraudie is an unlikely sort of moralist, in his amused fascination with how best to negotiate the world. His characters, in their wayward navigation of their desires, seem constantly to be trying to locate the correct path – not that the director, as his films veer from tragic to comic, makes it easy for them. That appears to be Guiraudie's take on how the universe works: a sense of unfathomability probably inherited from his Catholic education. Until he lost his faith at the age of 14, he insisted on going to mass himself, despite his parents' indifference to it. He points out that Catholicism has the same kind of pragmatic accommodation to sex seen in his films: 'It integrates the physical needs of man quite well. The proof is that forgives easily [via confession].' Guiraudie has torn up and strewn across the table his Kusmi tea sachet. He's getting used to Paris, he says, a once-unthinkable notion: 'I'm liking it more and more. I'm doing things the opposite way round to everyone else, heading off to the countryside as they get older.' Currently writing a new film, this Molière of the Massif Central is headed somewhere new in his work too: it will be set in France's overseas territories. Not that us humans have any choice but to adapt. 'My impression is that whatever we're living through – amorous or otherwise – never lives up to our ideals.' He laughs once more. 'Reality always smacks us in the face.' Misericordia is out on 28 March
New York Times
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In This French Director's Work, Sex Leads to Unexpected Destinations
Carnal urges drive the characters in the films of the French director Alain Guiraudie toward absurd and sometimes dangerous mishaps. In his sexually audacious narratives, which usually play out in the countryside, the temptation of the flesh is a potent catalyst. 'I don't know if you can say that desire is what drives all of cinema, but it's certainly what drives my cinema,' Guiraudie said via an interpreter during a recent video interview from his home in Paris. That artistic mandate guides his latest picture, 'Misericordia,' which opens in U.S. theaters on Friday. When it came out in France, it received eight nominations for the César Awards, France's equivalent to the Oscars, and was named the best film of 2024 by the renowned French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. The movie follows Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) as he returns to the small rural town of his youth, where he soon becomes the prime suspect in a murder, while also awakening the lust of the local Catholic priest. For Guiraudie, 60, eroticism and death are intimately entangled. 'There are two situations in which we return to our most primitive instincts: sex and violence,' he said. 'I see an obligatory connection.' In Guiraudie's gay cruising mystery 'Stranger by the Lake,' released in the United States in 2014, a young man witnesses a murder and then begins a steamy sexual relationship with the killer. In 'Misericordia,' however, Guiraudie set aside his proclivity for putting explicit images onscreen. 'The foundation of this project was the idea of making an erotic film with no sex scenes,' he explained. 'I told myself that I had filmed the sex act enough, and that in this project the characters' goals were elsewhere.' So Guiraudie opted for characters whose sexual hankerings go unfulfilled and who must deal with being turned down by the objects of their desire. It was crucial to him to convey that people are more often rejected than given the chance to connect, he said, because 'that's the reality for most gay people in the countryside, and probably for gay people in general.' Guiraudie grew up on a farm near the town of Villefranche-de-Rouergue, in southern France, and working-class individuals exploring their impulses is a signature focus of his work, both as a filmmaker and as a novelist. 'I emotionally and sexually constructed myself in that world,' said Guiraudie. 'It became politically important for me to give the working class the sensuality, eroticism, and complexity of desire that I felt it was excluded from in cinema, television and magazines.' Shooting sex scenes between men didn't come easy for Guiraudie, however. Early on, the director preferred portraying heterosexual lovemaking. He found it difficult to accept and depict his own sexuality, he said. It was through cinema, though, that he came to terms with his own desires. 'Owning my homosexuality socially and being able to film homosexual acts,' he said, 'were two intricately linked processes for me.' Cinema, Guiraudie said, has often portrayed sex scenes as solemn and meaningful expressions of deep passion. To subvert that, especially in his earlier films, he decided to approach sex with a lighter touch and to laugh about its inherent ridiculousness. 'Lots of films have sex scenes that are simply a succession of clichés,' he said, because we don't really know how other people have sex. 'Even pornography doesn't represent reality,' he said, leaving us with a choice: either to reveal 'something of our own private selves or invent new ways of making love.' Sex scenes in movies are often hastily edited with jump cuts, but Guiraudie tackles them as if they were a fight or dialogue scene, with a beginning, a middle and an end. 'We choreograph, we work through all the moves together so that we're not showing the sex organs or showing anything that's going to embarrass the actors,' he explained. 'What interests me most is connecting sex with narrative, with words, with normal life.' Like some other French auteurs (Catherine Breillat, for example), Guiraudie believes it's his responsibility to serve as the intimacy coordinator on set. 'It's really terrible that directors use people in that job,' he said. 'It's my job as a director to direct the actors, to talk to them, to be with them, to explain to them what to do.' Stateside, one of Guiraudie's most valuable champions has been Strand Releasing, a longstanding distributor of L.G.B.T.Q. and international films. The company handled 'Stranger by the Lake,' his breakthrough, and his recent titles 'Staying Vertical' and 'Nobody's Hero,' which, though not explicitly queer, are still sexual misadventure comedies. (The Criterion Channel is currently streaming five of Guiraudie's earlier movies to coincide with the 'Misericordia' release.) 'He's certainly not ashamed of tackling sexuality,' said Marcus Hu, Strand Releasing's co-founder. 'Nothing is taboo for Alain — and even when it is, he finds comic relief in it.' That frankness, however, has limited distribution options for, Guiraudie's movies, Hu said, citing the example of 'Stranger by the Lake.' 'We could not get the film on platforms like iTunes or Amazon,' he said. More than a decade has passed since then, and Guiraudie said that he did not think things had moved forward. He added that, though culture was becoming increasingly reactionary and puritanical, he still aims to create provocative art that appeals to a broad audience, not only to L.G.B.T.Q. viewers. 'My goal has always been to get out of that niche,' Guiraudie said, 'to make a universal cinema by showing desires that were not universal.'
