THE LACEMAKER
DIRECTOR: CLAUDE GORETTA
FRANCE/SWITZERLAND 1979
MARCH 10
FRI 7PM
Whitsell Auditorium
In an award-showered performance
that made her an international star, Huppert plays a fragile,
virginal young teenager who is unable to communicate her love
and suffers for it. At an off season Normandy resort, the
gentle Pomme meets a rich student (Yves Beneyton), attracted
by her innocence. But the romance soon unravels as the strains
of class, intellect and emotion. The film’s title comes
from the famous painting by Vermeer—here a quiet portrait
of a woman destroyed by a world that cannot endure her ingenuousness.(110
mins.)
BUY
TICKETS
top 
LOU LOU
DIRECTOR: MAURICE
PIALAT
FRANCE
1980
MARCH 11
SAT 7PM
Whitsell Auditorium
 One
of Pialat’s strongest films recounts the melancholy intensity
of a torrid sexual relationship between a young bourgeoisie
who knows better (Huppert) and a rough hot-tempered drifter
(Gerard Depardieu) who pleases her with his inarticulate chauvinism.
While casting a dyspeptic eye on a woman who ditches it all
for a walk on the wild Pialat plumbs the ironies of class
and contemporary social relationships. “The sexiest couple
in the history of cinema.”—Andrew Sarris.”
FILM COMMENT.(110 mins.)
BUY
TICKETS
top
EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF
DIRECTOR: JEAN-LUC
GODARD
FRANCE/SWITZERLAND 1979
MARCH 12
SUN 7PM
Whitsell Auditorium
 A
work which Godard considered his “second first film.”
It charts the intertwined lives of three characters: Paul
Godard (Jacques Dutronc), a filmmaker whose marriage is on
the rocks; his ex-girlfriend Denise Rimbaud (Nathalie Baye),
who wants to escape to the country; and Isabelle Rivière
(Isabelle Huppert), a prostitute who sells her body to lead
a free life. “Jaggedly witty and woundingly beautiful,
Godard suggests that capitalism has so distorted modern life
that ‘we cannot seem to touch without bruising.”
—CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO.” “A stunning, original
work . . . breathtakingly beautiful and often very funny.”—Vincent
Canby, THE NEW YORK TIMES. (87 mins.)
BUY
TICKETS
top
MADAME BOVARY
DIRECTOR: CLAUDE
CHABROL
FRANCE 1991
MARCH
16 THUR 7PM
Guild Theatre
 Chabrol’s
faithful version of the much-filmed Flaubert novel treats
Emma Bovary as a casualty of a provincial society whose restrictions
asphyxiate her. Yearning for more, Emma (Hupppert) seduces
the town doctor, marries him, finds him dull, and breaks all
rules of bourgeois propriety by pursuing the illusions she
has imbibed from romantic literature. Of course, her flight
into adultery and financial profligacy dooms all.”—ROLLING
STONE.(130 mins.)
BUY
TICKETS
top
BETWEEN
US (ENTRE NOUS)
DIRECTOR: DIANE
KURYS
FRANCE 1983
MARCH 17 FRI 7PM
Whitsell
Auditorium
 Borrowing
biographical details from her parents’ lives, Kurys creates
an expansive, bittersweet portrait of two women who find solace
in each other in fifties France. Out of touch with herself
and trapped in a marriage of convenience with a primitive
though loving husband, Lena (Huppert), an insecure Jewish
refugee, becomes rejuvenated by her intimate friendship with
bohemian artist Madeleine (Miou-Miou). Light-hearted and solemn,
affectionate and ironic, ENTRE NOUS’ rich emotional layers
and complex characters “Achieves an epic scale and Olympian
oversight without sacrificing the most intimate nuances of
domestic detail.”—David Ansen, NEWSWEEK.(112
mins.)
BUY
TICKETS
top
THE PROMISED LIFE
DIRECTOR: OLIVER
DAHAN
FRANCE 2002
MAR 18 SAT 7PM
Whitsell Auditorium
 Huppert
has one of her richest recent roles as a bleached blond, leather
jacketed hooker trolling the tourist trade on the Riviera.
Seemingly indifferent to the sudden appearance of her estranged
teenaged daughter Laurence (Maud Forget), who nonetheless
defends her from a merciless pimp, Sylvia is forced to flee
with her to the north of France where she grew up. Employing
magnificent compositions of the landscape, Dahan juxtaposes
the journey of this damaged and vulnerable pair with fleeting,
textured images from Sylvia’s youth, memories whose distant
warmth add poignancy to the harsh present.(94
mins.)
BUY
TICKETS
top
THE SEPARATION
DIRECTOR: CHRISTIAN
VINCENT
FRANCE
1994
MARCH 19
SUN 6:30PM
Whitsell Auditorium
 “THE
SEPARATION is a terse, intense chronicle of a marriage in
its death throes. Huppert’s simmering opacity is perfectly
suited to the role of a married woman who begins an affair
that, like almost every facet of her life in the film, transpires
entirely off-screen. Vincent is solely interested in the interaction
between Huppert and her wounded husband (Daniel Auteuil),
rigorously capturing the smallest details of their hellish
domestic world, comprised of stilted silences, trivial disagreements
that go unresolved or unspoken, and a stifling sense of inarticulate
frustration.”—CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO.(85
mins.)
BUY
TICKETS
top
THE CEREMONY (A JUDGEMENT IN STONE)
DIRECTOR: CLAUDE
CHABROL
FRANCE/GERMANY
1995
MARCH 23
THUR 7PM
Whitsell Auditorium
 Based
on the suspense novel “A Judgement in Stone” by
Ruth Rendell, Huppert plays a cool, calculating and evil postal
worker in a small town who insinuates herself into the life
of a smug bourgeois couple (Jean-Pierre Cassel and Jacqueline
Bisset). Casting a lethal spell over their uneducated maid
(Sandrine Bonnaire), all become the victims of a dark a mysterious
vengeance. Chosen Best Foreign Film of the Year by the National
Society of Film Critics, Bonnaire and Huppert shared the Best
Actress award at the Venice Film Festival, and Huppert won
the Best Actress César.(109 mins.)
BUY
TICKETS
top
SAINT-CYR
DIRECTOR: PATRICIA MAZUY
FRANCE 2000
MARCH
24 FRI 7PM
Whitsell
Auditorium
 Nominated
for eight César awards, Mazuy’s historical drama
provides a rich role for Huppert as Madame de Maintenon, the
commoner who became mistress and eventually the wife of Louis
XIV. Maintenon uses her influence to found an enlightened
school for young noblemen, but when her students embrace her
principals of liberal education a bit too liberally, the school
become a battleground for the religious and political conflicts
of the era. Meticulously and lavishly executed, with music
composed by John Cale, SAINT-CYR is a wryly-conceived microcosm
of its setting’s social and political clashes.(119
mins.)
BUY
TICKETS
top
STORY OF WOMEN (UN AFFAIRE DE FEMMES)
DIRECTOR: MAURICE
PIALAT
FRANCE 1988
MARCH 25 SAT 7PM
Whitsell
Auditorium
 In
1943, Marie Latour became the last woman guillotined in France.
Huppert is formidable as Marie, a woman trying to survive
in a Nazi-occupied village in Vichy France. Saddled with an
infirm, shirking husband, she must provide for her family,
and discovers that abortion is an easy, profitable source
of income. Pragmatic, tough, opaque in motive and survivalist
in morality, Marie becomes a “Maker of Angels,”
performing abortions for women of every class until her success
compels someone to denounce her. Chabrol treats the story
with dispassion and clear-eyed irony, conspiring with Huppert
to make Marie neither saint nor sinner, victim nor villain.
“Probably one of the masterpieces of the decade.”—NEW
YORK TIMES. (110 mins.)
BUY
TICKETS
top
THE PIANO TEACHER
DIRECTOR: MICHAEL
HANEKE
FRANCE/AUSTRIA
2001
MARCH 26 SUN
7PM
Whitsell Auditorium
“Violence
in Vienna of every possible kind–psychological, sexual,
physical–generates shock and trauma in Michael Haneke’s
masterful adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning Elfriede Jelinek’s
novel about a respected piano professor (Huppert) dedicated,
it would seem, only to music. A former prodigy grown into
desolate, denying music nun, she does everything–playing
the piano, tending to her mother, bullying her pupils–with
blank-faced froideur. Both sadist and masochist, relentless
perfectionist and stern destroyer, la pianiste, locked in
an eternal struggle with her monstrous mother (Annie Girardot),
vents her repressed anger and sexuality in acts of humiliation,
self-mutilation, and voyeurism.”—CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO.
(130 mins.)
BUY
TICKETS
top
CLEAN SLATE (COUP DE TORCHON)
BERTRAND TAVERNIER
FRANCE 1981
MARCH 30 THUR 7PM
Whitsell Auditorium
Transposing Jim Thompson’s novel “Pop 1280” from the American South to French Colonial Africa, Tavernier provides a field day for his actors while capturing the nihilistic black humor of the original story. Philippe Noiret plays the seemingly affable, cuckolded Cordier who turns a blind eye to corruption, or is too thick to recognize it. Surrounded by the crooked and the cruel, the racist and the reprehensible, Cordier reveals that his cordiality disguises a deep-rooted pathology, and he begins to dispatch those who insult or upset him. In one of her first comic roles, Huppert shines as the loyal mistress of a man who discovers that he can literally get away with murder. “Best picture of the year.”—Kevin Thomas, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES. (128 mins.)
BUY
TICKETS
top
|
