La patinoire
Belgium / France,
1998, 80 min
Shown in 1999
CREDITS
- dir
-
Jean-Philippe Toussaint
- prod
-
Anne-Dominique Toussaint, Pascal Judelewicz
- scr
-
Jean-Philippe Toussaint
- cam
-
Jean-François Robin
- editor
-
Ludo Troch, Anne Argouie
- cast
-
Tom Novembre, Mireille Perrier, Dolorès Chaplin, Bruce Campbell, Marie-France Pisier, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Dominique Deruddere, Gilbert Melki
- source
-
Les Films des Tournelles, 10 rue Sainte Anastase, 75003 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1-4277-7670
OTHER
Day for Night with a twist.... Like the Truffaut classic, The Ice Rink is a behind-the-cameras movie, but this time the French crew stumbling through the labors of filmmaking is also skidding, mincing, careening and teetering—on ice. They’re shooting the less-than-deathless tale of a hockey goalie in love, and the ice rink location spawns not only goofy pratfalls but deadpan reflections on “the eminently slippery terrain” of cinema, as writer-director Jean-Philippe Toussaint puts it. As the nearly unflappable director-within-the-film, Keatonesque Tom Novembre sets the pervading tone of faux-highbrow irony down on the mats with slapstick—much like his deft amplification of nothingness in La salle de bain (SFIFF 1990), which was based on one of Toussaint’s acclaimed novels. Square-jawed American actor Bruce Campbell (known to Sam Raimi cultists as the hero of Evil Dead) plays the ego-bloated leading man, whose toothy babe of a leading lady suffers the indignity of being stunt-doubled by a hairy-chested welterweight in a strapless gown. Be it taken as satire or a feature-length riff on a comic conceit, The Ice Rink is silliness and proud of it.
—Alicia Springer
FACTOID #78
Now among California’s political luminaries, former ambassador Shirley Temple Black and Representative Nancy Pelosi both worked at the Festival in their days as civilians. Temple assisted in film selection in the mid-’60s and Pelosi planned Festival events in the ’70s.
