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Oldeuboi (2003)
Yuck and yuk!!
Fake fight scenes, live octopus eating, incest, painful sex, prolonged scenes of tooth extraction, and a blown out looking protagonist with mad, dirty hair who jumps a pretty girl as she sits on the loo all await you in the pretentious and disgusting spectacle that is Oldboy. I actually turned it off to clean the house, which shows how much I liked it. As I discovered the entire plot on IMDb board, I feel lucky to have escaped before the denouement, which is the piece de resistance as in "lead me to the vomitorium." There's nothing I hate more than cleaning the kitchen except for foreign films that revel in pointless gore for its shock value.
L'école de la chair (1998)
Goes beyond the premise
Although the two protagonists are so different from one another in age, socio-economic status, education, they are both lonely souls who have been deprived of guidance and love. It is the blind leading the blind as they come together in a kind of relationship of convenience.
It seems at first that Dominique seeks a walk on the wild side, but ultimately to tame and to nurture her conquest, while Quentin seems to take even temporary financial support wherever he can find it. The characters' development, through their relationship with each other, and as they expose how their inner life has been conditioned before they met, is a kind of dance of the seven veils.
Neither is who each seems and manages to defy the inevitable stereotype we expect to fit the story's premise.
The nuanced twists and turns in character, and particularly as they forge a relationship with "the other," demands subtle acting. Both actors are up to the task.
Martinez's presence grows as an essential humanity is revealed that elevates him above his day to day urge for survival and autonomy. Isabelle Hubert stuns by restraint, bringing vulnerable dignity to Dominique's emotional trajectory.
They can not change the fate of their relationship, but they leave a lasting impression on each each other nonetheless.
L'affaire Dominici par Orson Welles (2000)
A documentary about an incomplete Orson Welles documentary: for the Francophile or true crime buff in you.
L'Affaire Dominici is a documentary within a documentary. Essentially an update and partial recreation of a documentary Orson Welles was making, but scrapped, the film concerns the murders of an English family( including their adorable ten year old daughter) in the remote countryside of the Basque part of France. Did the grizzled Dominici patriarch do it, and if so, why? The story of the crime sounds a few interesting themes, touched on though not in depth, and the images speak for themselves. The landscape is another character. Then there's Orson Welles.
Wonderful little rare diamond- in-the- rough, a bit sketchy, but fascinating to anyone who revels in "atmosphere." It's the sound track for a Francoise Sagan novel meets the "Return of Martin Guerre,"re-animated in the age of the atom bomb. It's also a revelation re: Orson Welles' approach to the art of the documentary. It's got it all--but only for those who love odd mixes:French culture and language, things morbid and quaint, classic film, Le jazz cool , and archival crime. Yes, it could be fleshed out and yes, it's raw, but that's its charm.