ARNAUD DESPLECHIN IN FOCUS
PRESENTED WITH CAHIERS DU CINÉMA
October 6-14, 2007

Arnaud Desplechin is one of the most exciting French directors to emerge in recent years. His films are vibrant and complex, and like the tangled family and personal relationships they depict, they range freely between comedy and drama. They also reflect Desplechin’s deep love of cinema. For this series, presented in collaboration with Cahiers du Cinéma, which has just launched an Englishlanguage online edition, Desplechin has paired four of his films with movies by Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes, Alain Resnais, and François Truffaut.


Esther Kahn
Saturday, October 6, 3:00 p.m.

2000, 142 mins. Imported 35mm print. Directed by Arnaud Desplechin. With Summer Phoenix, Ian Holm. Theater and life overlap in Desplechin’s first English-language film, about a young Jewish woman in late-Victorian London who wants to be an actress. When her tutor convinces her that she must experience love to develop her talent, her personal and professional lives intertwine.


Summer Interlude
Saturday, October 6, 6:00 p.m.

1950, 95 mins. 35mm. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. A ballerina recalls an idyllic, ultimately tragic summer love affair in this pivotal early film by Ingmar Bergman, which Jean-Luc Godard praised as “the most beautiful of films.” It was also a favorite of Bergman’s: he called it “one of my most important films...my first with a style of my own.”


My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument
Sunday, October 7, 3:00 p.m.

1996, 178 mins. 35mm. Directed by Arnaud Desplechin. With Mathieu Amalric. In this epic of contemporary twenty-something romance, a struggling assistant professor, bored in his relationship, reaches a breaking point when an academic rival receives a promotion. Attempting to cope with his chaotic love life, he launches into conversations addressing sex, anxiety, and philosophy.


Two English Girls
Sunday, October 7, 6:30 p.m.

1971, 130 mins. 35mm. Directed by François Truffaut. With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Kika Markham, Stacey Tendeter. This sequel to Jules and Jim is a beautiful, bittersweet film about a Frenchman who falls in love with two sisters. New York Times critic Vincent Canby called it “beautiful, charming…it’s also immensely sad and even brutal, though in the nonbrutalizing way that truth can sometimes be.”


Kings and Queen
With Arnaud Desplechin and Jean-Michel Frodon in person
Saturday, October 13, 3:00 p.m.

2004, 150 mins. 35mm. Directed by Arnaud Desplechin. With Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric, Catherine Deneuve. Desplechin won critical acclaim for his split narrative following a chic single mother and her boisterous, psychotic ex-husband. “A thrilling, exhausting tragicomedy that crams almost every known emotion into its running time,” wrote Dennis Lim in The Village Voice.


Faces
Saturday, October 13, 7:00 p.m.

1968, 130 mins. 35mm. Directed by John Cassavetes. With John Marley, Lynn Carlin. “One of the most powerful and influential American films of the 1960s,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum in The Chicago Reader of Cassavetes’s drama, which examines a deteriorating marriage over one pivotal night. Partly improvised, this film sheds profound light on issues of class and middle age.


La Sentinelle
Sunday, October 14, 3:00 p.m.

1992, 139 mins. 35mm. Directed by Arnaud Desplechin. With Emmanuel Salinger. In Desplechin’s debut film, a medical student traveling from Germany to France discovers a decapitated head stowed in his suitcase. His curiosity intensifies to obsession in this haunting allegory of Cold War anxiety.


Je t’aime, Je t’aime
Sunday, October 14, 6:00 p.m.

France, 1968, 91 mins. Imported 35mm print. Directed by Alain Resnais. With Claude Rich, Olga Georges-Picot. In this drily comic sci-fi adventure, a man recovering from attempted suicide becomes the test subject for a time-travel experiment that abandons him in a world of fractured personal memories. The film is a wry distillation of Resnais’s obsession with time and memory.


Presented with generous support from the French Embassy, New York. Special thanks to Cahiers du Cinéma editor Jean-Michel Frodon, and to Delphine Selles-Alvarez and Sandrine Butteau at the French Embassy, New York.