Bertrand Bonello has been directing features for almost 20 years and has yet to make a clear breakthrough with the U.S. art-house scene. When I say his last two films, House of Pleasures and Saint Laurent, came close enough, I really mean “actually had U.S. distribution”; box-office-wise, though, they didn’t seem to make a splash. This is all the more unfortunate when Bonello strikes me as one of the most interesting directors of his generation, and, regardless of categorization, probably one of the best working today, my thoughts on which are evidenced by naming Saint Laurent the best film of 2015.
Perhaps proper notices awaited Madeleine Among the Dead, a Vertigo riff that, not unlike last year’s Phoenix (itself a sleeper hit), would rework the story from the woman’s perspective – but in a more literal homage, as we can see in a nine-and-a-half-minute sequences posted to Le CiNéMA Club.
Perhaps proper notices awaited Madeleine Among the Dead, a Vertigo riff that, not unlike last year’s Phoenix (itself a sleeper hit), would rework the story from the woman’s perspective – but in a more literal homage, as we can see in a nine-and-a-half-minute sequences posted to Le CiNéMA Club.
- 8/31/2016
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
On My Skin: Barraud Explores the Essence of Monstrosity
There are moments within Antoine Barraud’s sophomore feature Portrait of the Artist that tend to feel enlivened with an arresting strangeness. There is the peripherally entertaining notion of provocative body horror shadowing us while we follow a filmmaker creating his latest project, simultaneously losing his grip on reality. But more often than not, the film feels like a thriller version of Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery. Barraud’s French language title, Le Dos Rouge (basically The Red Back) was perhaps too literal of a title, and the allusion to Joyce’s classic text (though this is really more ‘as a middle aged man’) gives it a certain extra textual density since Joyce’s novel is an allusion to Daedalus, the man responsible for constructing the Labyrinth which entombed the deadly Minotaur in Greek Mythology.
Bertrand (Bertrand Bonello) is a filmmaker...
There are moments within Antoine Barraud’s sophomore feature Portrait of the Artist that tend to feel enlivened with an arresting strangeness. There is the peripherally entertaining notion of provocative body horror shadowing us while we follow a filmmaker creating his latest project, simultaneously losing his grip on reality. But more often than not, the film feels like a thriller version of Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery. Barraud’s French language title, Le Dos Rouge (basically The Red Back) was perhaps too literal of a title, and the allusion to Joyce’s classic text (though this is really more ‘as a middle aged man’) gives it a certain extra textual density since Joyce’s novel is an allusion to Daedalus, the man responsible for constructing the Labyrinth which entombed the deadly Minotaur in Greek Mythology.
Bertrand (Bertrand Bonello) is a filmmaker...
- 3/15/2015
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
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