Summer in France

Summer in France

Summer in France

Summer in France

TIFF Cinematheque - Retrospective

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The ultimate staycation: TIFF Cinematheque revives its decades-old tradition of spending summers in France with this series of over three dozen classics of French cinema, from well-known milestones in new or restored prints to great rarities and buried treasures. À toute vitesse!

Films in Summer in France

    • La Grande Illusion
    • Jean Renoir
    • Jean Renoir's antiwar masterpiece returns in a stunning new digital restoration.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • French Cancan
    • Jean Renoir
    • An eye-popping digital restoration of Jean Renoir's vibrant, high-kicking account of the founding of the Moulin Rouge in 1880s Paris.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Army of Shadows
    • L'Armée des ombres
    • Jean-Pierre Melville
    • Film noir master Jean-Pierre Melville's masterpiece is a tense, gripping portrayal of honour and betrayal in the clandestine world of the French Resistance during the Nazi Occupation.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Remorques
    • Stormy Waters
    • Jean Grémillon
    • A taciturn sea captain (Jean Gabin) falls into a passionate affair with a mysterious woman (Michèle Morgan) in this classic from neglected French master Jean Grémillon.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Lumière d'été
    • Summer Light
    • Jean Grémillon
    • Often compared to The Rules of the Game, Jean Grémillon's influential masterwork examines the uneasy and finally explosive interactions between a group of corrupt, high-society carousers and a crew of workers over a long weekend at a country manor.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Le Quai des brumes
    • Port of Shadows
    • Marcel Carné
    • A new digital restoration of Marcel Carné's doom-haunted masterpiece, about an army deserter (Jean Gabin) trying to flee from the fog-shrouded port city of Le Havre.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Diabolique
    • Henri-Georges Clouzot
    • Henri-Georges Clouzot's deliciously dark tale of two women who conspire to murder their mutual paramour features one of the most famous and terrifying endings in cinema history.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Les Enfants du paradis
    • Children of Paradise
    • Marcel Carné
    • Often considered to be France's answer to Gone With the Wind, Marcel Carné's sweeping romantic epic focuses on a love quadrangle set amidst the boisterous theatrical world of Paris in the 1840s.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Le Plaisir
    • Max Ophüls
    • Chosen by Jean-Luc Godard as the best film made in postwar France, Max Ophüls' trio of de Maupassant tales features a dream cast headed by Jean Gabin and Danielle Darrieux.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • La Bandera
    • Julien Duvivier
    • Julien Duvivier's feverishly fatalistic drama shifts from Paris to Barcelona to sun-scorched Morocco, as a man on the run (Jean Gabin) tries to escape his past by joining the Spanish Foreign Legion.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • The 400 Blows
    • Les Quatre cents coups
    • François Truffaut
    • François Truffaut's autobiographical first feature, chronicling the misadventures of a twelve-year-old delinquent hero (the unforgettable Jean-Pierre Léaud), was an international sensation and a clarion call for the emerging French New Wave.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Small Change
    • L'Argent de poche
    • François Truffaut
    • The first Toronto screening in well over a decade of François Truffaut's poetic comedy about the daily delights, passions and travails of children in provincial France.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Belle de Jour
    • Luis Buñuel
    • A beautiful young housewife (Catherine Deneuve) satisfies her masochistic fantasies by working as a daytime prostitute in Luis Buñuel's chic, shocking and wittily surreal comedy.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Jules et Jim
    • François Truffaut
    • François Truffaut's exuberant, sublimely romantic account of two best friends (Oskar Werner and Henri Serre) and their decades-long love triangle with the bewitching Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) is one of the most beloved classics of the French New Wave.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • The Bride Wore Black
    • La Mariée était en noir
    • François Truffaut
    • A vengeful woman (Jeanne Moreau) hunts down the five men who caused her husband's accidental death in François Truffaut's devilishly elegant homage to Hitchcock.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • L' Enfance nue
    • Naked Childhood
    • Maurice Pialat
    • Maurice Pialat's masterful feature debut follows in the hallowed tradition of Truffaut's The 400 Blows with its raw, intense portrait of a troubled adolescent shunted through a series of foster homes.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • La Peau douce
    • The Soft Skin
    • François Truffaut
    • The affair between a married, middle-aged magazine editor and an entrancing young stewardess turns fatal in François Truffaut's masterwork of erotic obsession.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • La Femme infidèle
    • The Unfaithful Wife
    • Claude Chabrol
    • Unavailable in Canada for more than three decades, Claude Chabrol's suspenseful, wryly perverse classic recounts the murderous consequences when a bored housewife drifts into an afternoon affair.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Le Feu follet
    • The Fire Within
    • Louis Malle
    • A suicidal, alcoholic playboy makes his final rounds of friends, family and lovers in Louis Malle's masterful adaptation of the famous novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Le Pont du Nord
    • Jacques Rivette
    • An ex-con (Bulle Ogier) and her leather-jacketed angel-protector (Pascale Ogier) chase and are chased through Paris on a scary treasure hunt in Jacques Rivette's paranoid, enigmatic and gloriously cinephilic thriller.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Breathless
    • À Bout de souffle
    • Jean-Luc Godard
    • One of the most famous debuts in film history, Jean-Luc Godard's jazzy, virtuosic masterpiece about a small-time hoodlum on the run (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his blithely treacherous American girlfriend (Jean Seberg) brought about a revolution in film form and style.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Vivre sa vie
    • My Life to Live
    • Jean-Luc Godard
    • Jean-Luc Godard's brilliantly Brechtian tale of a young woman (Anna Karina) gradually sliding into prostitution is one of the glories of the French New Wave.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
    • Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle
    • Jean-Luc Godard
    • In one of his greatest films, Jean-Luc Godard uses the slim story of a young wife and mother who works afternoons as a prostitute as a springboard for a dazzling cinematic essay on materialism, contemporary alienation and the changing face of Paris.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Pierrot le fou
    • Jean-Luc Godard
    • A bored novelist (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his beautiful, treacherous babysitter/mistress (Anna Karina) become embroiled in a seamy stew of guns, drugs and dirty money in Jean-Luc Godard's gloriously apocalyptic salute to amour fou.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Le Combat dans l'île
    • Alain Cavalier
    • This buried treasure of '60s French cinema segues from politically-charged thriller to tenderly affecting romance as a young woman (the gorgeous Romy Schneider) discovers that her jealous and abusive husband (Jean-Louis Trintignant) has become embroiled with a shadowy, right-wing paramilitary group.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Weekend introduced by Piers Handling
    • TIFF's Director & CEO introduces TIFF Cinematheque's screening of Jean-Luc Godard's horrifying and hilarious apocalyptic comedy.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Last Year at Marienbad
    • L'Année dernière à Marienbad
    • Alain Resnais
    • In an otherworldly hotel, a mysterious man tries to convince a woman that they had an affair a year before ("at Marienbad — or was it Fredericksbad?") in Alain Resnais' eternally enigmatic and immensely influential masterwork.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Muriel
    • Muriel, ou Le Temps d'un retour
    • Alain Resnais
    • A middle-aged widow reunites with her ex-lover and her stepson, who is haunted by a terrible event he witnessed during the Algerian War, in Alain Resnais' masterful meditation on time and memory.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
    • Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
    • Jacques Demy
    • The radiant young Catherine Deneuve was launched to stardom by Jacques Demy's exuberant, enthralling, and ever-enchanting musical classic.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Cléo de 5 à 7
    • Cléo from 5 to 7
    • Agnès Varda
    • A beautiful young pop singer spends two hours wandering through the summertime streets of Paris while awaiting a possibly fatal prognosis in this Nouvelle Vague masterpiece by Agnes Varda.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Sans Soleil / La Jetée
    • Two masterful meditations on time and memory from the great Chris Marker.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Van Gogh
    • Maurice Pialat
    • Maurice Pialat's brilliant, immensely moving depiction of the painter's last days was heralded as one of the best films of the 1990s.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Le Rayon vert
    • Summer
    • Eric Rohmer
    • Unseen in Toronto for almost two decades, Eric Rohmer's marvellously funny and movingly humane comedy chronicles a young woman's desperate search for a companion to share her summer vacation in the south of France.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • The Mother and the Whore
    • La Maman et la putain
    • Jean Eustache
    • A narcissistic, would-be intellectual (Jean-Pierre Léaud) vacillates between two women in Jean Eustache's raw, intense and exhilaratingly excessive rumination on youthful disenchantment in the wake of May 1968.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Eyes Without a Face
    • Les Yeux sans visage
    • Georges Franju
    • An unhinged scientist goes to gruesome lengths to repair the mutilated face of his beloved daughter in Georges Franju's hauntingly poetic horror masterpiece.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Thomas the Imposter
    • Thomas L'Imposteur
    • Georges Franju
    • A young man with an exceedingly weak grasp on the divide between fiction and reality is thrown into the maelstrom of World War I in this essential and very rare classic by Georges Franju.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Mademoiselle
    • Tony Richardson
    • Jean Genet wrote the script for this delectably depraved tale about a sadomasochistic schoolmistress (Jeanne Moreau) in a provincial French town who meets her match in a lustful, itinerant Italian labourer.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Playtime
    • Jacques Tati
    • Jacques Tati's immortal, inexhaustibly inventive comedy classic returns in a rare 70mm print.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Thérèse Desqueyroux
    • Georges Franju
    • Emmanuelle Riva (Hiroshima, mon amour) gives a superlative performance as a provincial woman who is driven to murderous lengths to escape from her suffocating marriage in Georges Franju's compelling adaptation of the novel by François Mauriac.

    • No events playing at this time.
    • Elevator to the Gallows
    • Ascenseur pour l'échafaud
    • Louis Malle
    • Louis Malle's brilliant debut feature stars an impossibly glamorous Jeanne Moreau as an iron-willed adulterer who engineers the perfect murder to escape from her stifling marriage.

    • No events playing at this time.

Whatever ironies attend the recent triumph of The Artist at the Academy Awards®, the cultural significance of its victories cannot be denied. (The argument that the film is more Hollywood than French is surely spurious.) An important reminder that there is another great originating film industry, with a history as rich and extensive as America's, The Artist derives from a culture whose cinephilia has no equal (as is obvious in our contemporary sidebar of films by Mia Hansen-Løve). Summer in France celebrates that passion with classics both familiar — including new digital restorations of Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du paradis, Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game and French Cancan — and considerably less so: for instance, Georges Franju's Thomas the Imposter, Alain Cavalier's Le Combat dans l'île and Jean Grémillon's Remorques and Lumière d'été, all of which deserve far better than the obscurity to which they have been consigned in North America. (All three directors receive major retrospectives this year, Franju at the San Sebastian film festival, Cavalier at the Cinémathèque française, and Grémillon at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna.)

As is perhaps inevitable with such a series, thematic constellations emerge: Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, stalwarts of the so-called Left Bank Group, explore the labyrinths of memory and consciousness; Maurice Pialat and François Truffaut offer divergent views of childhood that reflect their opposing approaches to life and cinema; Jean Gabin gets a mini-retrospective (he deserves a full one!), while Jeanne Moreau turns up several times, more fatale on each appearance. In at least three films, nasty men meet their ends with poison, while the Hitchcock-obsessed tip their hats to the Master in homages both blatant (Truffaut's La Peau douce and Marker's Sans Soleil, both conjuring Vertigo, and Claude Chabrol's La Femme infidèle) and implicit (Henri-Georges Clouzot's nail-biter Diabolique). And everywhere, amour fou and countless ménages à trois, some murderous, some perhaps imaginary (did X really meet A last year at Marienbad?), and some merely insouciant. Subsuming them all, Jean-Luc Godard declares the end of cinema in Weekend, a film that has more to say about how we live now than much contemporary cinema.

— James Quandt

Special thanks to Claire La Masne and Laure Dahout, Consulat général de France à Toronto; Jean-Baptiste Garnero, CNC — Archives Françaises du Film; Susan Oxtoby, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley.