Cinema St. Louis’ CLASSIC FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL Concludes This Weekend With Three More Great Films

The Tenth Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series concludes this weekend. — 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 mid-1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema.

There are three more events for the Tenth Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival happening this weekend:

Friday, March 23rd at 7:00pm – LE SAMOURAI

In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts. After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trenchcoat can protect him. An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director Jean‑Pierre Melville, “Le samouraï” is a razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture — with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology. Writing in the New Yorker on the film’s original U.S. release, Penelope Gilliatt called Melville “the poet of the implacable. In France he is thought of as the most American of directors, the man who has taken the B picture and the policier to new heights; to us he is apt to seem one of the most French, able to make something artful and full of art out of little, like a chef concocting an idyllic hors d’oeuvre out of mayonnaise and a few raw vegetables.” She describes “Le Samourai” as “a sort of meditation on solitude, embodied in a lonely, rigorous mercenary who assassinates to order,” and praises the film as “cold, masterly, without pathos, and not even particularly sympathetic; it has the noble structure of accuracy.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Kathy Corley, professor of film in the Electronic and Photographic Media Department at Webster University.

Saturday, March 24th at 6:00pm – LA BELLE NOISEUSE

Winner of Cannes’ Grand Prix in 1991, Jacques Rivette’s “La belle noiseuse” is a free adaptation of Balzac’s “The Unknown Masterpiece” infused with elements drawn from a trio of works by Henry James. In the film, the once-famous painter Édouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) lives quietly with his wife, Liz (Jane Birkin), in a rambling countryside château in the rural Provence region of France. When young artist Nicolas (David Bursztein) visits him with his striking girlfriend, Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart), the aging and increasingly unproductive Frenhofer finds himself inspired to begin painting again in earnest. At the urging of his agent, he commences work on the painting “La belle noiseuse,” a nude portrait that he left unfinished years earlier (and for which Liz had posed). Pressed by Nicolas, Marianne reluctantly agrees to serve as Frenhofer’s new (and nude) model.  Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum — a longtime enthusiast of the director’s work — writes in the Chicago Reader: “The complex forces that produce art are the film’s obsessive focus, and rarely has Rivette’s use of duration to look at process been so spellbinding; hardly a moment is wasted. Rivette’s superb sense of rhythm and mise en scene never falters, and the plot has plenty of twists. With exquisite cinematography by William Lubtchansky, beautiful location work in the south of France (mainly at an 18th-century chateau), and drawings and paintings executed by Bernard Dufour. The title translates roughly as ‘the beautiful nutty woman’; it’s also the title of the masterpiece the painter is bent on finishing.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Robert Hunt, film critic for The Riverfront Times.

Sunday, March 25th at 7:00pm – PEPE LE MOKO

The notorious Pépé le moko (Jean Gabin, in a truly iconic performance) is a wanted man: Women long for him, rivals hope to destroy him, and the law is breathing down his neck at every turn. On the lam in the labyrinthine Casbah of Algiers, Pépé is safe from the clutches of the police — until a Parisian playgirl compels him to risk his life and leave its confines once and for all. Julien Duvivier’s “Pépé le moko” is one of the most influential films of the 20th century and a landmark of French poetic realism. The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington raves: “Pépé le moko’ is a timeless romantic thriller that steeps us in one of those great artificial movie worlds that become more overpowering than reality itself. It’s a film with atmosphere so thick and rich you can almost smell it: full of winding fetid streets that steam with spices and intrigue, packed cabarets latticed with smoke and shadows. Directed and co-written by Julien Duvivier, starring Jean Gabin as Pépé, this splendid entertainment is set in ’30s Algiers. But despite extensive location photography, it’s not a real city we see here but a noir metropolis, as fantastic as anything in the Arabian Nights.” Wilmington concludes: “‘Pépé le moko,’ despite its pop origins, becomes, like its imitator ‘Casablanca,’ a powerful statement on cultural exile and doomed romance.”

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Robert Garrick, attorney, board member of the French-preservation nonprofit Les Amis, and former contributor to the davekehr.com film blog.