Something unusual happened at the Cannes premiere of “The Best Years of a Life,” Claude Lelouch’s syrupy second sequel to his trend-setting 1966 global smash “A Man and a Woman.” Not the endless, roaring standing ovation that happened when the lights came up: That’s expected, even required, of the tuxed-up crowd at Grand Théâtre Lumière, for films far better and worse than this light fondant fancy. No, it came just after, as the applause eventually faded out and the vast audience harmonized in collective gibberish sing-song: Chaba-daba-da-daba-daba-da, da-da-da chaba-daba-da… — over and over, until beachside revelers some distance away could probably hear this mass karaoke spin on Francis Lai’s original 1966 love theme drifting on the breeze.
It was a sweet, decidedly uncool moment that emphasized what Lelouch’s sweet, decidedly uncool film really is: not so much a freestanding feature as an unadulterated nostalgia trip, its modest effect dependent...
It was a sweet, decidedly uncool moment that emphasized what Lelouch’s sweet, decidedly uncool film really is: not so much a freestanding feature as an unadulterated nostalgia trip, its modest effect dependent...
- 5/31/2019
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
In one of the more poignant moments from Richard Linklater’s “Before Midnight,” chatty couple Celine and Jesse imagine what it might be like to look back on their romance 80 years in the future. It’s a tantalizing speculation in a triptych rich with possibilities. Now, Claude Lelouch gets there with a trilogy of his own: In “The Best Years of a Life,” the 81-year-old French director revisits the swooning courtship from his Oscar-winning 1966 “A Man and a Woman,” concluding a cheesy opus that launched more than 50 years ago.
Decades before Celine and Jesse, there was the saga of Jean-Louis and Anne. With fellow octogenarians Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée reprising their roles as passionate lovers despite forces that pull them apart, “The Best Years of a Life” delivers a melancholic salute to the original movie. However, Lelouch’s obsession with his story’s legacy means that the movie often...
Decades before Celine and Jesse, there was the saga of Jean-Louis and Anne. With fellow octogenarians Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée reprising their roles as passionate lovers despite forces that pull them apart, “The Best Years of a Life” delivers a melancholic salute to the original movie. However, Lelouch’s obsession with his story’s legacy means that the movie often...
- 5/18/2019
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
‘I was extraordinarily lucky to have waited fifty-two years to make this film.’
Paris-based Other Angle Pictures has boarded world sales on French director Claude Lelouch’s The Best Years Of A Life ahead of its Out of Competition premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film reunites Lelouch with legendary actors Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant in the follow-up to his Palme d’Or, Academy Award, Golden Globe-winning 1966 romantic drama A Man And A Woman.
Its storyline revisits the original characters of Anne Gauthier and Jean-Louis Duroc – a script girl and a racing driver who embark on a hesitant...
Paris-based Other Angle Pictures has boarded world sales on French director Claude Lelouch’s The Best Years Of A Life ahead of its Out of Competition premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film reunites Lelouch with legendary actors Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant in the follow-up to his Palme d’Or, Academy Award, Golden Globe-winning 1966 romantic drama A Man And A Woman.
Its storyline revisits the original characters of Anne Gauthier and Jean-Louis Duroc – a script girl and a racing driver who embark on a hesitant...
- 5/8/2019
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- ScreenDaily
Au Beaune Pain: Lelouch Continues with Frivolous Comedy Spackle
Somewhere along the way Palme d’Or and Oscar winning auteur Claude Lelouch (1966’s A Man and a Woman) morphed into the Garry Marshall of French film, churning out vapid comedy vehicles sporting a glitzy array of notable Gallic stars. Whenever the slide began, his tendencies to overstuff his narratives with zany layers of (often inconsequential) tangential sub-plotting began years ago, look no further than his 1986 sequel to his most famous film, A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later for longstanding evidence of the change. His later period reflects the stamp of various muses, such as actress Audrey Dana, and now, frequent co-author Valerie Perrin. With 2013’s We Love You, You Bastard and 2015’s Un + Une, Lelouch has become completely divorced from his illustrious past filmography, a chasm only widened by his latest venture, Everybody’s Life, once more featuring Johnny Hallyday and Jean Dujardin amongst a cavalcade of a cast, all whirling through this odd kitchen sink array of miscellaneous characters all inclined to converse about their Zodiac signs as they fall in and out of romantic love or obsessive yearning during a a year’s time in Beaune, France.
As an annual jazz festival gets underway, a slew of characters intersect and coverage in the provincial town of Beaune in the Burgundy region. A judge (Eric Dupond-Moretti) must contend with the news of Clementine’s (Beatrice Dalle) retirement, a local prostitute whose company has brought him great joy since the death of his wife. Meanwhile, his colleague Nathalie (Julie Ferrier) falls out of a window after finding her husband (Gerard Darmon) with another man, sharing an ambulance with a hypochondriac singer (Mathilde Seigner) who believes she is having a heart attack following a performance at the festival. At the same time, a tawdry court case has drawn together another subsection of the community, including the troubled alcoholic Antoine (Christophe Lambert), currently facing the dissolution of his own marriage with his disconsolate wife (Marianne Denicourt) betwixt legal troubles. And as famed singer Johnny Hallyday faces a problem with a slippery doppelganger (who has a tryst with an unhappily married Comtesse played by Elsa Zylberstein, married to Vincent Perez), which causes some confusion with local cop Jean (Jean Dujardin), the marriage between former beauty queen (Nadia Fares) and Stephane (Stephane De Groodt) is also on the rocks. Meanwhile, the local hospital has decided to engage a new policy wherein patients must be put at ease through sexually provocative jokes, which brings a chummy nurse (Deborah Francois) into contact with several patients.
If Max Ophuls had wanted to make La Ronde (1950) into a relationship farce (to be fair, Roger Vadim kind of did this with his remake) set to light jazz, it might look something like Everybody’s Life. However, Lelouch feels as if he filmed his illustrious cast in a number of amusing scenarios and pasted the end results together as he saw fit, clipping it into a semblance of repeated scenarios with revolving characters, all who end up professing their love, being destroyed by it, or simply moving on to another chapter. However, the film is neither subtle nor diverse in its repetitive techniques, and for as entertaining as it is to see Hallyday and Dujardin horse around as they take selfies, the frivolousness quickly gets wearying, particularly by its grand framed finale, where we return to the court room a year later after the film’s beginning, with Lelouch stuffing all his characters, whether it makes sense or not, into the same room.
Gregoire Lacroix assists Perrin, Pierre Uytterhoeven (who co-wrote A Man and a Woman) and Lelouch in this adaptation from his own prose, but Everybody’s Life drifts aimlessly, as if besotted by the presence of its own unlucky in love characters all experiencing the same approximation of discontent. Most of these formulas are tedious, if not forgettable, with a glaring bright spot from Beatrice Dalle as a prostitute who wants nothing more to do with sex or men and relish the retirement she deserves. If somewhat less ungainly than rom-com Un+Une and the loopy We Love You, You Bastard, this isn’t a return to form or an ascension to new heights for Lelouch, try as it might to ‘experiment’ with traditional narrative form.
Reviewed on April 24th at the 2017 Colcoa French Film Festival – Opening Night Film. 113 Mins.
★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
The post Everybody’s Life | 2017 Colcoa French Film Festival Review appeared first on Ioncinema.com.
Somewhere along the way Palme d’Or and Oscar winning auteur Claude Lelouch (1966’s A Man and a Woman) morphed into the Garry Marshall of French film, churning out vapid comedy vehicles sporting a glitzy array of notable Gallic stars. Whenever the slide began, his tendencies to overstuff his narratives with zany layers of (often inconsequential) tangential sub-plotting began years ago, look no further than his 1986 sequel to his most famous film, A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later for longstanding evidence of the change. His later period reflects the stamp of various muses, such as actress Audrey Dana, and now, frequent co-author Valerie Perrin. With 2013’s We Love You, You Bastard and 2015’s Un + Une, Lelouch has become completely divorced from his illustrious past filmography, a chasm only widened by his latest venture, Everybody’s Life, once more featuring Johnny Hallyday and Jean Dujardin amongst a cavalcade of a cast, all whirling through this odd kitchen sink array of miscellaneous characters all inclined to converse about their Zodiac signs as they fall in and out of romantic love or obsessive yearning during a a year’s time in Beaune, France.
As an annual jazz festival gets underway, a slew of characters intersect and coverage in the provincial town of Beaune in the Burgundy region. A judge (Eric Dupond-Moretti) must contend with the news of Clementine’s (Beatrice Dalle) retirement, a local prostitute whose company has brought him great joy since the death of his wife. Meanwhile, his colleague Nathalie (Julie Ferrier) falls out of a window after finding her husband (Gerard Darmon) with another man, sharing an ambulance with a hypochondriac singer (Mathilde Seigner) who believes she is having a heart attack following a performance at the festival. At the same time, a tawdry court case has drawn together another subsection of the community, including the troubled alcoholic Antoine (Christophe Lambert), currently facing the dissolution of his own marriage with his disconsolate wife (Marianne Denicourt) betwixt legal troubles. And as famed singer Johnny Hallyday faces a problem with a slippery doppelganger (who has a tryst with an unhappily married Comtesse played by Elsa Zylberstein, married to Vincent Perez), which causes some confusion with local cop Jean (Jean Dujardin), the marriage between former beauty queen (Nadia Fares) and Stephane (Stephane De Groodt) is also on the rocks. Meanwhile, the local hospital has decided to engage a new policy wherein patients must be put at ease through sexually provocative jokes, which brings a chummy nurse (Deborah Francois) into contact with several patients.
If Max Ophuls had wanted to make La Ronde (1950) into a relationship farce (to be fair, Roger Vadim kind of did this with his remake) set to light jazz, it might look something like Everybody’s Life. However, Lelouch feels as if he filmed his illustrious cast in a number of amusing scenarios and pasted the end results together as he saw fit, clipping it into a semblance of repeated scenarios with revolving characters, all who end up professing their love, being destroyed by it, or simply moving on to another chapter. However, the film is neither subtle nor diverse in its repetitive techniques, and for as entertaining as it is to see Hallyday and Dujardin horse around as they take selfies, the frivolousness quickly gets wearying, particularly by its grand framed finale, where we return to the court room a year later after the film’s beginning, with Lelouch stuffing all his characters, whether it makes sense or not, into the same room.
Gregoire Lacroix assists Perrin, Pierre Uytterhoeven (who co-wrote A Man and a Woman) and Lelouch in this adaptation from his own prose, but Everybody’s Life drifts aimlessly, as if besotted by the presence of its own unlucky in love characters all experiencing the same approximation of discontent. Most of these formulas are tedious, if not forgettable, with a glaring bright spot from Beatrice Dalle as a prostitute who wants nothing more to do with sex or men and relish the retirement she deserves. If somewhat less ungainly than rom-com Un+Une and the loopy We Love You, You Bastard, this isn’t a return to form or an ascension to new heights for Lelouch, try as it might to ‘experiment’ with traditional narrative form.
Reviewed on April 24th at the 2017 Colcoa French Film Festival – Opening Night Film. 113 Mins.
★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
The post Everybody’s Life | 2017 Colcoa French Film Festival Review appeared first on Ioncinema.com.
- 4/28/2017
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Passage Over India: Lelouch’s Romantic Dramedy an Overstuffed Pilgrimage
French auteur Claude Lelouch, now well into his seventies, maintains a prolific career, striding through a sixth decade of filmmaking. However, the director, who scored his greatest successes following the inception of the New Wave with 1966’s A Man and a Woman, a simplistic love story which took home the Palme d’Or and the Foreign Language Oscar, continues a dismaying practice of busybodied narratives gone haywire with his latest effort, Un plus Une (the masculine and feminine form of ‘a’). While his masterpiece is widely regarded as the 1981 musical epic Les uns et les autres (known in the Us as Bolero), a decades spanning, multicultural wonder, it also represents a tidemark of ambitious narrative scope often repeated since but with little success (including an inhibited 1986 sequel to A Man and a Woman). Starring two notable French stars, both overall...
French auteur Claude Lelouch, now well into his seventies, maintains a prolific career, striding through a sixth decade of filmmaking. However, the director, who scored his greatest successes following the inception of the New Wave with 1966’s A Man and a Woman, a simplistic love story which took home the Palme d’Or and the Foreign Language Oscar, continues a dismaying practice of busybodied narratives gone haywire with his latest effort, Un plus Une (the masculine and feminine form of ‘a’). While his masterpiece is widely regarded as the 1981 musical epic Les uns et les autres (known in the Us as Bolero), a decades spanning, multicultural wonder, it also represents a tidemark of ambitious narrative scope often repeated since but with little success (including an inhibited 1986 sequel to A Man and a Woman). Starring two notable French stars, both overall...
- 9/12/2015
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
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