CITY Screen’s Four Of The Best season of French cinema opens on Sunday night at 8pm with the epitome of Parisian cool, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut Breathless (A Bout De Souffle).
The seminal film of the Nouvelle Vague – the French new wave, in English money – has been digitally re-mastered for its 50th anniversary, all the better for enjoying this film-noir pastiche booted and suited with pathos.
Jean-Paul Belmondo’s joyrider shoots a cop, chases friends and debts across night-time Paris and falls in love with Jean Seberg’s literary lady. Seberg quotes books, ideas and names; Belmondo measures his profile against Bogart’s; the Godard phenomenon was born.
Further films will be Jacques Tati’s 1949 comedy Jour de Fete on July 25 at 8pm and Villa Amalia, Benoit Jacquot’s 2009 study of solitude, self-discovery and the nature of identity, starring Isabelle Huppert, on August 3, at 6.15pm The season concludes on August 17 at 6.15pm with The Girl On The Train, André Techiné’s 2009 account of the young French woman at the centre of a media frenzy after she claimed to have been the victim of an anti-Semitic assault, only to be exposed as a liar. Emilie Dequeene and Catherine Deneuve star in this tender and sincere retort to a nation’s fury.
For tickets, phone 0871 902 5726 or book online at picturehouses.co.uk
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