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MONSIEUR HIRE Screens at The Classic French Film Festival This Saturday
The Classic French Film Festival celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the 1980s (with a particular focus on filmmakers from the New Wave), offering a comprehensive overview of French cinema. MONSIEUR HIRE will screen as part of the festival at 12pm Saturday, June 21st at the St. Louis Art Museum.
In a provincial French apartment block, Monsieur Hire (Michel Blanc) endures a solitary life of dull work as a tailor and vitriolic scorn from his neighbors. Hire’s only solace is an occasional night out bowling and his voyeuristic admiration of a neighbor, the ravishing Alice (Sandrine Bonnaire of “Vagabond”), a beautiful, free-spirited woman conducting a heated love affair through un-drawn curtains across the way. But when police discover the nude body of another young woman in a nearby vacant lot, Hire becomes the prime suspect in a murder investigation that brings him face to face with the object of his desire even as it threatens to ensnare them both in a web of deceit, accusation, lust, and guilt.
Touching, lyrical, erotic, suspenseful, and enigmatic, this psychological drama is both “a twisted love story and a tragic thriller,” according to the London Sunday Times. Adapted from celebrated Belgian crime novelist Georges Simenon’s book by director Patrice Leconte (“Suicide Shop,” “The Widow of Saint-Pierre”), “Monsieur Hire” is a film of gorgeously muted widescreen color and funereal beauty that coolly unpacks sexual obsession and romantic love. Roger Ebert says the film has an intelligence and understated intensity “so delicate that you almost hold your breath for the last half-hour.”
Roger Ebert said MONSIEUR HIRE:
“…. is so delicate that you almost hold your breath during the last half-hour. Events of grave subtlety are taking place……the concluding passages of the movie have the weight of sad, inevitable tragedy to them. But nothing prepares us for the movie’s extraordinary final shot, in which a swift action contains a momentary pause, a look, that seems torn out of the very fabric of life itself.”
MONSIEUR HIRE screens at 12pm Saturday, June 21st at the St. Louis Art Museum, 1 Fine Arts Drive, Forest Park
With an introduction and post-film discussion by Calvin Wilson, film, jazz, and dance critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Admission: $12 general admission; $10 for students, Cinema St. Louis members, Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) members, and Alliance Française members; Webster U. screenings free for Webster U. students.
A PDF version of the Classic French Film Festival program is available to download HERE:
Check back later in the week here at We Are Movie Geeks for more information about the Classic French Film Festival
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