You will be awarded 10 extra credit points if you attend one of these French films (subtitled in English) and then share your experience with the class.
Entrance is FREE!
The films will be shown at San Diego State's Little Theater. Please click here for a University campus map. Please refer to Google maps for driving directions to the University.
LA FILLE du RER
THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN (2008)
Friday April 16 - 7pm
André Téchiné's provocative feature is inspired by true events: the RER D (a Paris commuter line) affair of July 2004, in which a non-Jewish young woman claimed to be the victim of an anti-Semitic attack by six men, whom she identified as Arabs and blacks. The girl of the title, the unemployed, twenty-ish Jeanne, is constantly in motion: if not on the RER train that goes right by the house in the Paris suburbs that she shares with her widowed mother, Louise, then on rollerblades. Gliding through a park, Jeanne meets thuggish Franck, who becomes her boyfriend and sets up house with her, in a warehouse of stolen merchandise and drugs. Louise urges Jeanne to apply for a secretarial position with Samuel Bleistein, a lawyer and Jewish activist, once in love with Louise. Jeanne's motives for her act remain unknowable. "The Girl on the Train" provides a prism through which we may begin to understand anti-Semitism, racism, and what it means to declare yourself a victim.
SATURDAY MARATHON !!! 4 Films Back-to Back
LES CHANSONS D'AMOUR
LOVE SONGS (2007)
April 17 - 1 :00 pm
Frequently hailed as "the second coming of the Nouvelle Vague," the extremely talented Christophe Honoré shows the influence of Jean-Luc Godard's minimalist musical, A Woman Is a Woman (1961), and Jacques Demy's all-sung The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), in this tune-filled movie set in present-day Paris about a "ménage à trois" and fluid sense of sexuality. Ismaël and his live-in girlfriend, Julie, open their relationship to include Ismaël's coworker Alice. When the trio are at a club one night, Julie dies suddenly. Ismaël is crippled with grief, which is assuaged somewhat by his close ties with Julie's family, especially her older sister, Jeanne. Alice and Ismaël remain friends and begin new relationships: Alice with a Breton named Gwendal, Ismaël with Gwendal's younger brother, Erwann. When words won't suffice for the characters' surfeit of emotion, they simply break out into song. The fourteen tracks written by Alex Beaupain plumb the heights of ecstasy and the depths of melancholy and are delivered in an exceptionally casual way, as if singing were the most natural mode of communication among Honoré's beautiful, heartbroken characters. Love Songs, a genuine, touching homage, updates the musical form for the 21st century.
UN BAISER, S'IL VOUS PLAIT
SHALL WE KISS? (2007)
April 17 - 3 :00 pm
Wry, observant and touching, Shall we Kiss? is a very contemporary meditation on the myriad implications of a simple kiss. When Gabriel and Emilie meet by chance, he offers her a ride, and they spend the evening talking, laughing and getting along famously. At the end of the night, Emilie declines Gabriel's offer of "a kiss without consequences." Emilie admonishes him that the kiss could have unexpected consequences, and tells him a story, unfolding in flashbacks, about the impossibility of indulging your desires without affecting someone else's life.--© Music Box Films
UN SECRET (2007)
April 17 - 5:00 pm
A Secret follows the life of a Jewish family in post-World War II Paris. François, the son of Maxime and Tania a solitary and imaginative child, invents for himself a brother and the story of his parents' past. One day, he discovers a dark family secret that shatters his life forever: before the war and well before François's birth, his father Maxime was married to Hannah with whom he had a son. At a wedding Maxime met Tania, a young, athletic and beautiful swimmer. He felt madly in love but decided to remain faithful to Hannah. When the Nazis invaded France, Maxime decided to move his family to the free zone and left ahead of them. On her way with her son to meet Maxime, Hannah made a decision that would change her life and that of her family forever, leaving both Maxime and Tania to make difficult choices to survive the war. With the birth of François, the pair started a new family in post-war France, hoping that the existence of Hannah and her son would remain a secret. When François discovers the truth, the family will be forced to revisit their difficult past.
LA FILLE COUPÉE EN DEUX
A GIRL CUT IN TWO (2007)
April 17 - 7:00 pm
A flirtatious television weather reporter named Gabrielle is the object of two men's affections in this colorful new film from Claude Chabrol. When Gabrielle meets a famous elderly novelist at a book-signing event in her mother's Lyon shop and at an interview for her TV station, she sets her sights on him. Their brief amorous affair soon grows to become a dark fixation which drives Gabrielle's handsome, spoiled young suitor, Paul, the heir to a pharmaceutical company, to madness. As the film progresses, the scheming protagonists and their families become more deeply obsessed, their relationships become increasingly humiliating and depraved, and the stakes of their games grow higher and higher. Chabrol uses black humor and accessible cinematic structure to skewer his stubborn, independent and self-absorbed characters. The story, inspired by the murder of architect Stanford White in 1906, begins as a playful, sexy triangle that turns darkly foreboding and dangerous, until it builds to a fever pitch with disastrous and melodramatic results.
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