Gen
Art Advisory Board member Fisher Stevens'
Just a Kiss had its WORLD PREMIERE at the
2001 Gen Art Film Festival.
The film
was picked up by Paramount Classics and
opens in a theater near you soon!
••
Just a
Kiss is an inventive mix of live action
and animation. Cockeyed fate turns two
young couples inside out, upside down and,
when they least expect it, back to right
where they started. This stylish comedy
blends together sex, newsworthy accidents,
fist-fights among friends, multiple
indiscretions, some more sex, and then
adds one amazing twist of fate to top off
a tale that begins with Just a Kiss. The
film stars Ron Eldard, Kyra Sedgwick,
Marisa Tomei, Patrick Breen, Marley
Shelton, Taye Diggs and Sarita
Choudhury.
••
Just a
Kiss opens in New York and Los Angeles
this Friday, September 27th. The film
opens in San Francisco and Miami on
October 4th. The film opens in Chicago on
October 18th, however, you can get a sneak
peak of the film with director Fisher
Stevens doing a Q&A at the Chicago
International Film Festival on Saturday,
October 5th at 9:30pm.
Jacques Audiard's reputation in France
belies the fact that he has only directed
three films. Read My Lips,
his fourth, will certainly add to his
aura, for it is a skillfully made, eerie
and unsettling work. To describe it as a
romantic thriller is to miss its many
subtleties;
••
Audiard's
highly disciplined eye, his ability to
strip the narrative down to its essentials
and to keep the audience uncertain as to
which way the story will unfold, provides
much pleasure. Carla, a loyal, hardworking
secretary, is beginning to chafe at the
limitations of her career. But as a
35-year-old woman with a hearing
deficiency, she is not sure how to climb
out of her humdrum existence, though she
is confident in her own abilities. Into
her life comes Paul Angeli, a new trainee.
••
Paul
is 25 years old and completely unskilled;
in addition, he's a thief, fresh out of
jail and very good-looking. It's a case of
good meeting bad; Audiard slowly turns
Read My Lipsinto a cagey
dance for position and power between the
two. As both characters get to know each
other better, their strange, mutually
dependent relationship ties them together
in dark and fateful ways, leading us
towards an unexpected climax.
Read
My
Lips, continued. Directed
by
Jacques
Audiard All that
glisters...
••
Jacques
Audiard's films expose the reality beneath the
gloss of French society. He made his name by
puncturing the myth of the Resistance. Now he has
turned his attention to the false glamour of
gangsterism, writes Peter Lennon. TVI REVIEW OCCURED ON
- Saturday May 25,
2002
••
Jacques Audiard speaks
with a fierce rapidity, his sentences sauced with
argot, his driving delivery crashing through the
babble of voices and the clatter of dishes in the
Dôme restaurant at Montparnasse. It's hard
not to think of the director's father, screenwriter
Michel, who for 40 years supplied French film
hoodlums with pugnacious jabber in works such as
Next Time I'll Kill You, Leontine, and She No
Longer Talks She
Shoots. CLICK FOR
MORE••
At first sight Audiard
could pass for a hoodlum himself, lean and with a
truly mean look when he dons his woolly cap, which
seems to have ambitions to become a balaclava. But
that is not the full story. As a young man, Audiard
was determined to keep clear of cinema and studied
literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne. He takes
a more intellectual line than his father, as we saw
in his superb and complex 1996 movie A Self-Made
Hero.
••
Audiard's new film, Read
My Lips, tells the story of Carla, a timid,
secretly deaf office worker (Emmanuelle Devos) who
helps a trainee with a criminal record (Vincent
Cassel) hold down a job in the strange world of fax
machines and photocopiers. He then uses her
lip-reading skills to pull off a theft. The first
part is shot in tight, imprisoning framing; the
isolation of deafness becomes the point of view.
But the silenced world around Carla gives up its
secrets through her unsuspected skill. The story
then opens into the garish, violent world of
nightclubs and
gangsterism.
••
"From the first I wanted
to tell a story of two people on the margins," says
Audiard. "To describe two forms of exclusion -
people of limited talent who meet and create a
'complementarity', the incompetence of one becoming
the competence of the other. I thought of using an
ugly woman and a handsome lad, but ugliness is hard
to convey - it is too subjective. Then I thought of
deafness, and matched it with
lawlessness."
••
Modern French films seem
inordinately reliant on gangsterism, however. Would
timid Carla so readily enter that frightening
arena? "You must remember that the film is partly
ironic," Audiard says. "The first part had to be
absolutely believable. The spectator had to say,
'Oh yes, I recognise that world.' From this
reality, I needed the girl to go through a series
of fictional, unbelievable adventures. But it is a
fantastic story, a romantic story. If the beginning
had not been powerfully realistic, what followed
would not have been possible. From there you can
take the spectator where you want, on to a
merry-go-round. Carla stretches her talent for
lip-reading and, in effect, brings home the
bacon.
••
"I chose Emmanuelle
Devos," he adds, "because I have known her work for
ages, both on stage and in film. But she never had
a leading role. I thought it would be more
convincing if Carla were played by someone not very
recognisable to the general public. Vincent Cassel,
of course, has had a long career in
cinema."
••
When Audiard was growing
up, everything pushed him into the movies. As the
son of Michel - who was involved in more than 100
films - Jacques grew up surrounded by stars such as
Jean Gabin. "And it was much more than that," he
says. "The whole family was in the business. My
uncle was a producer, my sister is a film editor.
But in my adolescence I never wanted to do film. I
only got interested when my then girlfriend, a film
editor, suggested I should work as a trainee editor
during the long university holidays. I worked as an
assistant editor for four or five years and learned
an enormous amount. But I still did not go into
cinema. A friend got me to join a theatre, where I
did all kinds of work. Then one day he had me adapt
work for the stage. It was only then that I decided
I wanted to write."
••
Audiard made some
well-received shorts and wrote half a dozen
screenplays. He did not make his first feature, See
How They Fall (1994), until he was 42, and by then
he had access to a strong cast. It is a noirish
thriller, with two interlinking plots - one
featuring the murder of a cop, the other the
befriending of a slow-witted boy by a conman - and
stars Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean Yanne, Bulle
Ogier and Mathieu
Kassovitz.
••
Kassovitz and Trintignant
returned two years later for A Self-Made Hero, the
story of a young chancer who rises high in post-war
French political society by concocting a past for
himself as a Resistance hero. The movie won Audiard
a César award for best director and raised
him to international
status.
••
Was it his intention to
undermine the myths of the Resistance? "I belong to
the 'after-war' generation," he says, "I was the
little French boy who grew up hearing people talk
of De Gaulle and the Resistance. France against the
Nazis! Then when that boy grew up, he began to
uncover things. We began to legitimately ask the
question, 'What exactly did our parents do during
the Occupation?' We discovered it was not the story
they were telling us."
••
Audiard makes no claims
to originality in this regard. He acknowledges a
debt to The Sorrow and the Pity, in which Marcel
Ophuls explored for the first time just how
tarnished was the true history of the Resistance.
Audiard was 20 when the documentary came out in
1972 and he was hugely
impressed.
••
I remind him that in 1972
they put bombs in cinemas where The Sorrow and the
Pity was shown.
••
"We had none of that," he
says.
••
The question of
collaboration, anti-semitism and racism could not
be more topical, given the success of Le Pen's
party in the recent presidential
election.
••
"When you see what has
just happened in France," says Audiard, "it is
obvious where Le Pen comes from. He comes from a
kind of French, Pétainist right. He is a
pure product of those days. People thought they
could cover their eyes and say, 'Look, Le Pen is a
Republican now, a convinced democrat - people
change.'
••
"Maybe people might
change," Audiard concludes. "But I wouldn't like to
take the risk."
Academy
Award(R) Nomination for 'Daughter From Danang'
Broadcast premiere on PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
Monday, April 7 at 9 p.m. EST (check local
listings)
BOSTON,
Feb. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- "Daughter from Danang"
has been nominated
for an Academy
Award(R) for Documentary Feature, it was
announced today. The
90-minute film
from producers Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco
will be broadcast
for the first
time on AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, Monday, April 7 at
9 p.m. on PBS.
The highly
honored, critically acclaimed film tells the
story of a
Vietnamese
mother and her Amerasian daughter who are
joyously reunited after
22 years-but
whose illusions are quickly shattered as the
reality of cultural
differences and
years of separation sets in. "Daughter from
Danang" has been
recognized with
the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary at the
Sundance Film
Festival, a
Golden Gate Award Grand Prize from the San
Francisco International
Film Festival,
and was a feature selection, New Directors/New
Films, New York
2002.
••
"We're
thrilled and honored by the
nomination-particularly because of
the
attention it
will bring to the film's timely message,"
filmmakers Dolgin and
Franco said in
a statement. "'Daughter from Danang' is, at its
core, a
reminder that
wars don't end when peace treaties are signed or
the bombing has
stopped; it can
take generations to heal the wounds of war. The
Academy's
recognition and
the AMERICAN EXPERIENCE broadcast on April 7
will help us
deliver this
story of personal courage to as wide an audience
as possible."
••
"To have
'Daughter from Danang' singled out by the
Academy is a great
honor," said
Margaret Drain, executive producer of AMERICAN
EXPERIENCE. "Gail
Dolgin and
Vicente Franco have done a superb job in telling
a heartbreaking,
true story with
the drama of a feature film. 'Daughter from
Danang' is a model
of what
'reality' programming should be. AMERICAN
EXPERIENCE is proud to be
part of
it."
••
This is the
first Oscar(R) nomination for Dolgin and Franco
and the eighth
for AMERICAN
EXPERIENCE.
••
Major
funding for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE is provided by
the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation.
National corporate funding is provided by
Liberty Mutual and The
Scotts Company.
Additional funding is provided by the
Corporation for Public
Broadcasting
and by public television viewers.
Credits
"Daughter from Danang" is
produced by Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco
and
is a presentation of
American Experience and ITVS in association
with
NAATA.
Directed by Gail Dolgin
and Vicente Franco
Cinematography: Vicente
Franco
Editor: Kim
Roberts
Music: B. Quincy Griffin,
Hector Perez
American Experience is
produced by WGBH Boston.
Margaret
Drain
Executive
producer
Mark Samels
Senior
producer
SOURCE WGBH
-0-
02/11/2003
/CONTACT: Daphne B.
Noyes, WGBH Boston, +1-617-300-5344, or Johanna
Baker,
JOEY
ADAMS
The
Sherman Bros
