Qui plume la lune?
France,
1999, 101 min
Shown in 2000
CREDITS
- dir
-
Christine Carrière
- prod
-
Alain Sarde
- scr
-
Christine Carrière
- cam
-
Pierre David
- editor
-
Raymonde Guyot
- cast
-
Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Garance Clavel, Else Dourdet, Michèle Ernou, Michelle Brousse
- prod co
-
Cine Valse; Arte France Cinema; CRRAV
- source
-
Flach Pyramide International, 5, Rue Richepanse, 75008 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1-40-20-05-51
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Garance Clavel in person.
OTHER
Suzanne and Marie are two little girls in a northern French town who have lost their mother to cancer and whose chief occupation in life now is preventing their sad-sack father, Lucien, from doing himself in—whether by jumping into a too-shallow pond, painting himself red and dancing in front of a bull or any number of suicidal gestures too zany to succeed. It’s a game the whole family can play—dysfunction as eccentricity—and it works, until the girls hit mid-adolescence. Widowerhood wears poorly on Lucien, worse with each passing year, and Marie’s first sexual foray is seen as the grand betrayal her father has been waiting for. Everything changes. The girls become adults, estranged (Marie), fearfully attached (Suzanne), both looking for a way back into the desperate comforts they knew as kids. They do make it back, through some rather bizarre turns befitting this offbeat family. Christine Carrière’s second feature (her first was the César-nominated Rosine) expands with bittersweet humor the project young French filmmakers have taken on in the ’90s (see this year’s Skin of Man, Heart of Beast), to revisit the family scene and admit that it was damn weird.
—Judy Bloch
FACTOID #319
The Library of Congress supplied the Festival with the only existing print of Double Indemnity for the Fred MacMurray tribute in 1987. The problem was, the reels were not marked for the projectionist. But the show must go on! The projectionist ordered the reels using his intuition and the gamble paid off—the film was screened in perfect sequence.
