| THE LOVERS
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
FRANCE 1958
FRI SEPT
23, 7 PM
SUN SEPT 25, 5 PM
Whitsell Auditorium
 Malle’s
international breakthrough came with his sexually frank, often
satirical second feature, a great succes de scandale plagued
by censorship problems in many countries (Portland too). A
tale of ennui and infidelity amongst the affluent middle class,
THE LOVERS features a smoldering Jeanne Moreau as the bored
wife of a provincial newspaper publisher who embarks on a
guiltless affair with a young student. Malle sends his would-be
Madame Bovary swanning through a succession of chic salons
and swank soirées, exposing the glamorous, desperate
self-absorption of the French bourgeoisie. The film won the
Jury Prize at Venice, precipitated an obscenity case in the
U.S. that went all the way to the Supreme Court, and rocketed
both director and lead to stardom. Though tame by today’s
standards, “the combination of highly pleasurable body
language, Brahms on the soundtrack, and the ravishing, velvety
monochrome photography of Henri Decai prove hard to resist.”—TIME
OUT. “ . . .the first night of love in the cinema.”—François
Truffaut. (88 mins.)
with VIVE LA TOUR, (FRANCE
1962)
Long
before Lance Armstrong, malle made this dazzling, impressionistic,
intensely phisycal study of the grueling Tour de France bicycle
race (19 MINS.)
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ZAZIE DANS LE MÉTRO
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
FRANCE 1960
SAT SEPT
24, 7 PM
SUN SEPT 25, 7:30
Whitsell Auditorium
 A
classic of the French New Wave, the zany ZAZIE DANS LE MÉTRO
is a pell-mell cyclone of jokes, japes and free-spirited homage
to silent cinema. ZAZIE breathlessly follows the cynical,
foul-mouthed brat of the title, a girl from the provinces
on her first trip to Paris for a weekend to visit her eccentric,
drag-queen uncle (Philippe Noiret). Finding a cinematic equivalent
for the surrealist, punning style of author Raymond Queneau,
who wrote the novel on which the film is based, Malle unleashes
an endless stream of sight gags, trick shots, parodies and
in-jokes. “An exceedingly funny picture . . . bold,
delicate, freakish, vulgar, outrageous, and occasionally nightmarish.”—THE
NEW YORKER. (92 mins.)
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THE FIRE WITHIN
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
FRANCE 1963
FRI SEPT
30, 7 PM
Guild Theatre
 LE
FEU FOLLET won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival
and is counted by many as his greatest achievement. Influenced
by Robert Bresson, it chronicles the last hours in the life
of a dissolute old playboy who, having successfully finished
a treatment for alcoholism at a Versailles sanitarium, attempts
to reconnect with his old friends and life. Finding only betrayal
and dishonesty and that his life has no meaning, he decides
he must kill himself. In love with death, he moves, as in
slow motion, towards his own demise. Malle captures the fatalistic,
claustrophobic atmosphere with startling close-ups, jagged
editing and the haunting music of Erik Satie. Writer Jean
Genet celebrated the film, saying, “Malle has effected
something phenomenal, having turned literature into film,
photographed the meaning of an unsubstantial, touching and
rather famous book, and given its tragic intention a clarity
it never achieved in print.” “Arguably the finest
of Malle’s early films . . . a small gem, polished to
perfection.”—TIME OUT. (107 mins.)
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PHANTOM INDIA – PART
ONE
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
INDIA/FRANCE 1968
SAT OCT
1, 3:30 PM
Guild Theatre
 Malle’s
ambitious PHANTOM INDIA remains one of cinema’s great
documentaries, providing a breathtaking view of an almost
impossible subject: the totality of India. Originally presented
on French and British television in seven separate episodes,
we present it here divided into three screenings. Each episode
was designed to be completely autonomous, rewarding individually
or collectively. Part One consists of the first three episodes:
“Impossible Camera,” in which the traditional
India of poverty and exploitation is juxtaposed against the
serene beauty of surrounding nature; “Things Seen and
Unseen,” which explore the South of India; and “The
Indians and the Sacred,” which explores asceticism,
Sadhus wanderers, the ashrams and the tenets of Hinduism.
“Had Louis Malle only made PHANTOM INDIA, an honored
place in the history of film would have still been his. .
. not only a remarkable document of a time and place, but
also a meditation on the difficulty of truly knowing the Other,
the way that a camera’s “view” always betrays
an attitude or position beyond an objective recording.”—FILM
SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER. (156 mins.)
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THE THIEF OF PARIS
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
FRANCE 1967
SAT OCT 1, 7
PM
Guild Theatre
 Lavishly
re-creating the splendor and squalor of late 19th-century
Paris, THE THIEF OF PARIS showcases a stellar performance
by Jean-Paul Belmondo as a nihilistic young man whose hatred
of society leads him to a life of crime. Raised to despise
poverty, then left penniless when he is tricked out of his
inheritance, his revenge is to become “the thief of
Paris,” targeting the bourgeois class he no longer belongs
to. “I’m going to make a generalization, even
though I hate generalizations. My films are about people who
suddenly find something in their way, that diverts them from
their expected path and makes them ask themselves questions
that most people manage to avoid in the course of their everyday
lives. . . No other character is closer to me . . . I have
never made as autobiographical a film as this one”—Louis
Malle. “A solid period thriller-cum-romance, that also
contains an incisive comment on hypocrisy, injustice, anarchy
and corruption”—Bloomsbury Foreign Film Guide.
“Malle’s best French film”—David Thompson.
(120 mins.)
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PHANTOM INDIA — PART
TWO
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
INDIA/FRANCE 1968
SUN OCT 2, 2
PM
Guild Theatre
 Episode
Four, “Dream and Reality,” focuses on Keralta,
a state of great natural beauty having the highest literacy
standards and the largest Christian majority; Episode Five,
“A Look At the Castes,” investigates the basic
structure of Indian social life as typified in a village in
Rajastan. “My proposition was that we would start in
Calcutta, look around and eventually shoot. No plans, no script,
no lighting equipment, no distribution commitments of any
kind....”—Louis Malle. (104 mins.) ADMISSION INCLUDES
PARTS 2 & 3.
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PHANTOM INDIA — PART
THREE
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
INDIA/FRANCE 1968
SUN OCT 2, 4
PM
Guild Theatre
 The
concluding episodes of Malle’s unique travel documentary
include “On the Fringe of Indian Society,” a look
at groups living in India who have not integrated into society—the
Bongo, the Jews in Cochin, Catholics, the Pondicherry Ashram
and the Toda tribe; and “Bombay-The Future India,”
a portrait of a city of over 5 million inhabitants, ten percent
of them living in the street. “The interesting aspect
of those documentaries for me was that “It took one
month just to examine the material, and then I stayed in the
cutting room for a year. . . I was in Paris, I was going to
the editing room every day and it was as if I was still in
India...It’s been like a big chunk of my life. It was
enormously important for me, and I’m still trying to
make sense of it today.”—Louis Malle, in “Malle
on Malle.” (104 mins.)
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VIVA MARIA
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
FRANCE 1965
SUN OCT 2, 7
PM
Guild Theatre
 A
potent and irreverent mix of travelogue, circus story, politics
and a little bit of striptease, VIVA MARIA follows two beautiful
entertainers and anarchists named Maria. Circus performer
Jeanne Moreau and itinerant Irish revolutionary Brigitte Bardot
become entangled in the Mexican revolution with comic results.
“We thought it could be fun to put Bardot and Moreau
in the same situation as Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster in
VERA CRUZ and do a pastiche of those buddy films. We started
from that.”—Louis Malle. (115 mins.)
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MURMUR OF THE HEART
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
FRANCE/ITALY/GERMANY 1971
FRI OCT 7, 7
PM
SAT OCT 8, 4:30 PM
Whitsell Auditorium
 Malle’s
warm, nostalgic and sometimes comic approach to his ultimately
Oedipal subject was shocking to some first released, but now
enjoys regard as a popular classic. Buoyed by Charlie Parker
jazz and rich with period detail, MURMUR is set in Dijon in
1954. The story focuses on the relationship between the infirm,
Camus-loving adolescent Laurent and Clara, his Italian-born
mother, who has brought him to a spa for his heart murmur.
But more than simply a story of incest, Malle reveals a loving,
almost ethnographic sense of French bourgeois life, perhaps
because he based the film on reminiscences of his early adolescence:
“. . . relationships with my two brothers and my parents,
school, sexual awakening, passion for jazz, a heart murmur
which sent me to a spa with my mother when I was fourteen.
Scenes like the visit to the whorehouse, spinach tennis at
the family table, of the Corot painting knifed in front of
my father comes straight from memory.” “A high
comedy of uncommonly high order”—Vincent Canby,
THE NEW YORK TIMES. “ (110 mins.)
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LACOMBE LUCIEN
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
FRANCE 1974
SAT
OCT 8, 7 PM
SUN OCT 9, 4 PM
Whitsell Auditorium
 Regarded
by many as his masterpiece, LACOMBE LUCIEN offers an incisive,
disquieting portrait of a young French peasant’s drift
into Fascism in Vichy France. Its protagonist is Lucien, a
casually brutal, largely amoral 17-year-old governed chiefly
by his instincts. When his efforts to join the French Resistance
are rebuffed, he slowly falls in with the Gestapo where he
finds acceptance and revenge—only to then fall in love
with a Jewish girl. One of the first French features to address
the issue of French collaboration with the Nazis, many credit
the outcry Malle received as being instrumental in his subsequent
decision to immigrate to the U.S. “Malle’s film
is a long, close look at the banality of evil; it is—
not incidentally—one of the least banal movies ever
made. . . Without ever mentioning the subject of guilt and
innocence, in its calm, leisurely, dispassionate way, it addresses
it on a deeper level than any other movie I know” —Pauline
Kael. (135 mins.)
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PRETTY BABY
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
US 1978
SUN OCT 9, 7
PM
Whitsell Auditorium
 “For
his first truly American project, Malle decided to make a
film inspired by the figure of E.J. Bellocq, a legendary photographer
of prostitutes and the New Orleans demi-monde whose richly
detailed glass slides had only recently been discovered. Keith
Carradine plays Bellocq, whose frequent visits to houses of
ill repute just to take photographs make him an intriguing
figure to 12-year-old Violet (Brooke Shields). Violet lives
with her prostitute mother Hattie (Susan Sarandon) in Storyville,
the still-legal red-light district. Hattie meets a rich client,
marries him and moves to St. Louis, leaving Violet to fend
for herself now as a full-time professional. There’s
little comfort for the still teen-aged anywhere in Storyville,
however, and soon Violet must turn to Bellocq for support
and eventually love. While capturing her youthful beauty and
sensuality, Malle doesn’t shy away from showing the
brutality of this world. The gorgeous cinematography is by
Sven Nykvist.”—FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER.
(110 mins.)
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ATLANTIC CITY
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
US 1980
FRI OCT 14, 7
PM
Whitsell Auditorium
 “Winner
of a Golden Lion at Venice and nominated for five Academy
Awards, ATLANTIC CITY tells the story of Lou Pascal (Burt
Lancaster), a small-time gangster spending his twilight years
as the retainer for a mob widow in the shadow of the Jersey
shore’s newly-built casinos. He takes a shine to a much
younger woman, Sally (Susan Sarandon), who works in a fish
restaurant but who dreams of becoming a croupier and moving
to Monaco. Sally’s estranged husband Dave arrives on
the scene with a parcel of drugs that he needs to sell right
away; Lou agrees to help, and does - but not soon enough to
save Dave. And worse, now things become hot for Lou and Sally,
who must decide how much they might really mean to each other.”—FILM
SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER (105 mins.)
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MY DINNER WITH ANDRE
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
US 1981
SAT OCT 15, 7
PM
Whitsell Auditorium
 “Wallace
Shawn, a late-thirty-something still trying to establish himself
as an actor and playwright, goes to meet his friend André
Gregory for dinner at an old-fashioned French restaurant.
André is a celebrated avant-garde theater director,
but several years before he dropped out of the scene and spent
some time wandering the world. After pleasantries and exchanges
of news, Wally asks André to tell him what he’s
been doing during his extended sabbatical; therein begins
Andre’s tale of a search for truth with mystical figures
on four continents. Written by the actors, MY DINNER WITH
ANDRÉ raises the art of conversation to the level of
a fine art; the beauty of the writing, as well as the exceptional
skill with which it’s delivered, brings the audience
into the very flow of their exchanges. And through it all
there’s Louis Malle and his remarkably perceptive camera,
gently molding and shaping the evening through his visual
presentation. A tour-de-force, and an extraordinary delight.”—FILM
SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER. (110 mins.)
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CALCUTTA
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
FRANCE 1968-69
SUN OCT 16, 7
PM
Whitsell Auditorium
 “The
strength of Malle’s intense look at the Indian city
of Calcutta is what some would consider a weakness: a willful
disregard for narrative cohesion. Where most documentary filmmakers
would be tempted to impose order on these images, Malle presents
them en masse, letting their sheer force stand for itself.
Men and women washing themselves in the river, beggars at
a train station, drummers and dancers, believers destroying
homemade deities, a corpse’s head burning on a funeral
pyre, society heels at the racetrack: such images are arguably
archetypes of Indian travelogues, but Calcutta’s constant
assault moves into far deeper territory, its gaze never faltering
along the way. With CALCUTTA, Malle impressively wills himself
to forget eighty years of cinema history, and returns his
camera to the days of Lumière, when a film’s
images, not its narrative, could leave audiences enraptured.”—Jason
Sanders, PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE. (105 mins.)
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AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
FRANCE 1987
SAT OCT 22, 4:30
PM & 7 PM
Whitsell Auditorium
 Winner
of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and and seven
Césars (French Oscars), among them Best Picture, Malle’s
poignant autobiographical drama recreates the personal tragedy
of his first friendship, formed during the Nazi occupation
of France. It chronicles the relationship between two boys—Julien,
an 11-year-old from a well-to-do family and Jean, a new boy
at the Catholic boarding school whose sensitivity and intelligence
set him apart from the other students. Gradually, Julien discovers
a momentous, life-threatening secret: Jean is Jewish, and
has been given refuge from the Nazis and their collaborators
by the school’s headmaster. While the two chums struggle
with the typical schoolboy problems, danger is never far from
the surface and Julien must resist his childish impulse to
share his secret knowledge with others. In a haunting and
timeless work meshing memory and imagination, Malle explores
his introduction to an adult world marked by violence, disorder
and prejudice. “A flat out perfect film. The acting
is of the highest quality ever achieved by children onscreen”—Peter
Travers, ROLLING STONE. (104 mins.)
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PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
US 1987
SUN OCT 23, 7
PM
Guild Theatre
 A
companion piece to his documentary GOD’S COUNTRY (screening
Oct. 28) , which followed third and fourth generation Americans,
PURSUIT is a moving and entertaining essay by a new immigrant
exploring the American dream through the eyes of fellow new
arrivals. “For several months in 1986 I rambled around
the USA looking for the most recent immigrants. Today they
arrive from the five continents. Russians, Pakistanis, Ethiopians,
Salvadorian, Koreans all share the same hope—to make
it in their new country. They pursue their goals with a tremendous
amount of energy, and mixed results. Do they change America?
How do they adjust? Does the melting pot still work? The answers
are not simple, but my search allowed me to meet remarkable
human beings.”—Louis Malle. “The film is
fascinating, not for how different its 1986 is from 2005,
but for what is the same: Egyptians in Los Angeles who speak
of being stereotyped as Arab terrorists, a scion of a wealthy
dictator (Nicaragua’s Somoza, in fact) cataloging the
family’s new suburban splendor, or an English-language
class of Southeast Asian refugees, all repeating “Let’s
go to Wendy’s and have a hamburger.”—PACIFIC
FILM ARCHIVE. (80 mins.)
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VANYA ON 42nd STREET
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
US 1994
THUR OCT 27,
7 PM
Whitsell Auditorium
 “Louis
Malle’s new film sees him reunited with André
Gregory and Wallace Shawn, the two actors who turned MY DINNER
WITH ANDRE into such a charming night out. Based on Gregory’s
recent, critically acclaimed, modern-dress version of Chekhov’s
Uncle Vanya (it also featured a new translation by playwright
and director David Mamet ) Malle’s film brings together
most of the principals who were involved in the New York stage
production.... Malle brings his rigorous cinematic eye to
this adaptation. Not a straight transliteration from stage
to screen, we are treated to a imaginative, highly detailed,
beautifully tailored production.... The film is a total delight,
peopled by characters of immense humanity, acted by a cast
that meshes perfectly, and presided over by a master of cinema.
Malle meets Chekhov, a match made in heaven.”—TORONTO
INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL. (119 mins.)
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GOD’S COUNTRY
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
US 1986
FRI OCT 28, 9:30
PM
Guild Theatre
 “Invited
by PBS to make a film in the U.S., Malle decided to focus
on the rural community of Glencoe, 60 miles west of Minneapolis.
With its well-kept farms and churches, amateur theater groups
and town dances, Glencoe seemed like an idyllic example of
the American heartland. Caught up with other projects, Malle
put his Glencoe footage aside and only went back to the film
in 1985. Returning to the town for a follow-up, Malle discovered
a very different scene. The farm crisis was in full swing,
with weekly foreclosures on long-held family farms. People
were moving when they could to Florida or the Southwest in
search of work. Moreover, Malle begins to see and hear some
of the cracks in the town’s postcard-perfect image,
as frustrated farmers blame their troubles on a host of real
or imagined enemies.”—FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN
CENTER. (95 mins.)
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MAY FOOLS
DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE
FRANCE 1989
SAT OCT 29, 7
PM
Guild Theatre
“Malle’s lovely comedy of manners seems designed
for pleasure. A more deluxe pairing than Michel Piccoli and
Miou-Miou is hard to imagine, the music by legendary violinist
Stephane Grappelli is gloriously nostalgic, and the setting,
a wine estate near Toulouse, offers a verdant backdrop for
Malle’s remembrance of one of the most fateful periods
of post-war French life: the spring of 1968. When the matriarch
of a wine-growing family dies, her son, the blissfully negligent
Milou (Piccoli) who has been taking care of the property,
gathers the rest of the family, including his scheming sister
(Miou-Miou), for the funeral. Bourgeois to the bone, most
of them settle into tranquil, leafy isolation, initially dismissive
of reports of student protests in Paris. Their preference
for politesse over politics, and their petty bickering over
the estate, soon turn to panic as the older family members
begin to believe their affluence and status are threatened
by bloodthirsty Stalinist hordes. . . . so wry, ambiguous
and Renoirian is its satire of human folly that the film was
condemned by both the right and the left in France.”—CINEMATHEQUE
ONTARIO. (108 mins.)
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THE SILENT WORLD
DIRECTORS: JACQUES COUSTEAU, LOUIS MALLE
FRANCE 1956
SUN OCT 30, 4:30
PM
Guild Theatre
Louis Malle was just 23 when he was asked by author and undersea
explorer Cousteau to help him make a film that could be a
kind of illustrated companion to his immensely popular book
also entitled “The Silent World;” in fact, the
popularity and impact of the film proved even greater, garnering
an Oscar for Best Documentary and the Golden Palm (top prize)
at the Cannes Film Festival. A lyrical meditation on the mysteries
of the physical world, and of humankind’s tentative
steps to explore them, the film follows Cousteau and his crew
as they navigate the oceans; the underwater cinematography,
much of it shot by Malle himself, is often simply breathtaking,
the brilliantly colored coral reefs serving as a stationary
counterpoint to the teeming schools of sea life whizzing past
them.”—FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER. (86 mins.)
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