The generational chasm between our parents’ lives and the memories we preserve of them — sure, in turn, to warp and fade when passed to our children — is elegantly explored in “Little Girl Blue,” Mona Achache’s pained, poignant docudrama cry to her female elders. In an effort to process her mother Carole’s death by suicide in 2016, the filmmaker collates an assortment of archival materials to trace the arc of a turbulent and care-starved life, leading inevitably to the time-blurred figure of Achache’s grandmother, writer and editor Monique Lange. But it’s in the gaps between tangible records that the film gets most interesting, as Marion Cotillard steps in to inhabit the Carole of her memories, the ones Achache can’t quite find on paper.
This is hardly a novel technique, given the evolving hybridization of the documentary form, as filmmakers chase larger audiences with the narrative and aesthetic comforts of fiction.
This is hardly a novel technique, given the evolving hybridization of the documentary form, as filmmakers chase larger audiences with the narrative and aesthetic comforts of fiction.
- 3/6/2024
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
For all its many, many faults, 2023 was a banner year for international films. The awards season buzz for global gems like Justine Triet’s French courtroom thriller Anatomy of a Fall (released by Neon stateside), Jonathan Glazer’s German-language Holocaust drama Zone of Interest (A24), Hayao Miyazaki’s Japanese anime The Boy and the Heron (GKids), and J.A. Bayona’s Spanish-language real-life survival tale Society of the Snow (Netflix) only scratches the surface.
Among the many many other foreign highlights from last year are Mubi’s Fallen Leaves and How to Have Sex — the first a laconic triumph by Finnish film master Aki Kaurismäki, the latter a stunning debut by Brit first-timer Molly Manning Walker — Sony Pictures Classics’ The Teachers’ Lounge, a German school drama from director Ilker Çatak and Iranian drama Shayda from director Noora Niasari; Agnieszka Holland’s harrowing The Green Border, about Poland’s treatment of would-be...
Among the many many other foreign highlights from last year are Mubi’s Fallen Leaves and How to Have Sex — the first a laconic triumph by Finnish film master Aki Kaurismäki, the latter a stunning debut by Brit first-timer Molly Manning Walker — Sony Pictures Classics’ The Teachers’ Lounge, a German school drama from director Ilker Çatak and Iranian drama Shayda from director Noora Niasari; Agnieszka Holland’s harrowing The Green Border, about Poland’s treatment of would-be...
- 1/5/2024
- by Scott Roxborough
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
The Oldenburg Film Festival, Germany’s leading all-indie fest, unveiled highlights for its 30th-anniversary edition, including several world premieres featuring Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard and Mission : Impossible star Ving Rhames.
Uppercut, a boxing film featuring Mission: Impossible star Ving Rhames, will close the festival on September 17. Director Torsten Ruether remade his own, German-language, debut Leberhaken, which premiered in Oldenburg in 2021. The Million Dollar Baby-style story sees Rhames as a disillusioned former boxer who gets a shot at redemption when a young woman shows up at his gym, begging him to train her.
Spanish genre director F. Javier Gutierrez will bring his latest horror tale, The Wait, to Oldenburg this year. Gutiérrez’s 2008 debut Before the Fall, an end-of-the-world sci-fi thriller, was a cross-over hit, and his follow-up was the big-budget Rings (2017) for Paramount, the third entry in the Japanese-inspired horror saga. But the film, despite grossing $83 million worldwide, was...
Uppercut, a boxing film featuring Mission: Impossible star Ving Rhames, will close the festival on September 17. Director Torsten Ruether remade his own, German-language, debut Leberhaken, which premiered in Oldenburg in 2021. The Million Dollar Baby-style story sees Rhames as a disillusioned former boxer who gets a shot at redemption when a young woman shows up at his gym, begging him to train her.
Spanish genre director F. Javier Gutierrez will bring his latest horror tale, The Wait, to Oldenburg this year. Gutiérrez’s 2008 debut Before the Fall, an end-of-the-world sci-fi thriller, was a cross-over hit, and his follow-up was the big-budget Rings (2017) for Paramount, the third entry in the Japanese-inspired horror saga. But the film, despite grossing $83 million worldwide, was...
- 8/16/2023
- by Scott Roxborough
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
As tender, painful and intimate as an open caesarean scar, writer-director Mona Achache’s drama-documentary Little Girl Blue examines the fraught relationships between three generations of women within the director’s own family, starting with her literary grandmother Monique Lange, her mother Carole Achache and herself.
Although narrated by Achache, who “plays” herself throughout, the focus is above all on the troubled child of the midcentury Carole, who committed suicide in 2016 and left behind an enormous cache of letters, journals, publications, photographs and documents. Achieving a remarkable casting coup that will make all the difference for the film’s commercial prospects while richly enhancing its emotional texture, Achache persuades French superstar Marion Cotillard (La Vie en rose, Inception) to play Carole. The result is a fascinating psychodrama — with extra scoops of meta on top — that showcases the talents of all the story’s women, especially Cotillard and Achache. At the same time,...
Although narrated by Achache, who “plays” herself throughout, the focus is above all on the troubled child of the midcentury Carole, who committed suicide in 2016 and left behind an enormous cache of letters, journals, publications, photographs and documents. Achieving a remarkable casting coup that will make all the difference for the film’s commercial prospects while richly enhancing its emotional texture, Achache persuades French superstar Marion Cotillard (La Vie en rose, Inception) to play Carole. The result is a fascinating psychodrama — with extra scoops of meta on top — that showcases the talents of all the story’s women, especially Cotillard and Achache. At the same time,...
- 5/30/2023
- by Leslie Felperin
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
In one scene in Mona Achache’s “Little Girl Blue,” which world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Special Screenings section, the director is seen insisting that lead actor Marion Cotillard stays in character even on her tea break, to the extent that she must drink tea noisily as her character, Carole – based on the French filmmaker’s own mother – used to do. Does this suggest a manipulative relationship between director and actor? Cotillard disagrees.
“I don’t see a director and an actor as being in relationships of manipulation. It’s more a collaboration,” she tells Variety. “It happened to me only once where I felt that I was being manipulated by a director, and I really didn’t like that.”
Although the male director, whom she does not name, had led her to believe that it would be “a process of working together with a collaborative connection,...
“I don’t see a director and an actor as being in relationships of manipulation. It’s more a collaboration,” she tells Variety. “It happened to me only once where I felt that I was being manipulated by a director, and I really didn’t like that.”
Although the male director, whom she does not name, had led her to believe that it would be “a process of working together with a collaborative connection,...
- 5/24/2023
- by Leo Barraclough
- Variety Film + TV
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