Godard stars as an eccentric filmmaker in this fragmentary love poem from his 1980s period. Loosely based on Bizet’s opera, First Name: Carmen reinvents cinema into elliptical broken rhythms and passages of poetry to renew one of the oldest of tales: that of two lovers on the run.
The very last film by Jacques Rivette, the most consistently underrated of the French New Wave critics-turned-filmmakers (a group which includes François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard), Around a Small Mountain is a wry, gentle gem starring 60s icon Jane Birkin.
In Jacques Doillon’s abrasive melodrama, an encounter between two couples takes tragic proportions as the quartet of lovers play with burning jealousy and possessive desire. The vampiristic and self-destructive impulses of love are explored with piercing honesty and through impassioned performances.
