ROMANCE SCREENING

"But I still thought it might be seen as progressive in America, especially because its rare confluence of cinematic taste, literary intelligence, and hard-core sex might undercut the crippling puritanism of our movie codes, which usually equate eroticism with porn, sleaze, and stupidity rather than, say, art, health, and intelligence."
-Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

"In her solemn, sexually graphic ''Romance,'' Catherine Breillat explores the nature of a woman's need for male attention and erotic love. Though many of her film's insights might be obtained from back copies of Cosmopolitan plus a smattering of the Marquis de Sade, watching it is a memorable experience for several reasons. Not least of these is its blunt, hard-core frankness. It's doubtful that the film's intellectual aspects would command the same attention if the camera did not make the actors' genitals as familiar as their faces."
-Janet Maslin, NEW YORK TIMES


Suggested Secondary Screenings:  EYES WIDE SHUT (Stanley Krubick, 1999) and LAST TANGO IN PARIS (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)

THE PIANO TEACHER SCREENING

"There is an old saying:  Be careful what you ask for, because you might get it. THE PIANO TEACHER has a more ominous lesson:  Be especially careful with someone who has asked for you."
-Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN TIMES

"Once one expereinces Mr. Haneke's own sadistic tendencies toward his audience, one is left with a sour taste in one's mouth, and little else."
-Andrew Sarris, NEW YORK OBSERVER

"Retraint is this movie's mystery and its miracle. No matter how gruesom it is, mercifully, it's always holding back."
-Wesley Morris, BOSTON GLOBE

Suggested Secondary Screenings:  BELLE DU JOUR (Luis Bunuel, 1967) and THE NIGHT PORTER (Liliana Cavani, 1974)

SITCOM SCREENING

"A pet rat sets off a chain reaction of debauchery in a prim and proper nuclear family in SITCOM, a sort of 'Mouse Hunt meets the Marquis de Sade'... promising in outlets that relish notoriety and aren't obliged to shy away from jaunty depictions of homosexuality, bisexuality, S&M, incest..."
-Lisa Nesselson, VARIETY


"SITCOM is a clever little movie that demonstrates the advantages and limitations of cleverness alone."
-Mick LaSalle, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE


"SITCOM, which is sardonically filmed with the snappy look of a television comedy, has a sour streak that eventually poisons its humor. Mr. Ozon pushed the limits of shock value much more effectively with the carefully measured violence of SEE THE SEA than he does with this frontal assault."
-Janet Maslin, NEW YORK TIMES

BAISE-MOI SCREENING

"Despite some game performances from two lead femmes, this hard-core pic is a half-baked, punk-inflected porn odyssey masquerading as a movie worth seeing and talking about."
-Lisa Nesselson, VARIETY

"It alternates between between graphic, explicit sex scenes and murder scenes of brutal cruelty.  You recoil from what's on the screen.  Later, you ask what the filmmakers had in mind.  They are French, and so we know some kind of ideology and rationalization must lurk beneath the blood and semen... BAISE-MOI is more of a bluff.  The directors know their film is so extreme that most will be repelled, but some will devise intellectual defenses and interpretations for it, saving them the trouble of making it clear what they want to say."
-Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

One of recent cinema's most controversial texts, BAISE-MOI is an unapologetic display of graphic violence and explicit sex.  The audacity and effrontery of the film has led to violent debates and drastic censorship.  It is a film made very much in the punk mindset.  Quality is sacrificed for raw emotion.  It has upset many for its blurring of art and pornography as well as its association with exploitation.  Like the French New Wave before it, BAISE-MOI manages to unite low and high culture forms.  Porn and philosophy make an uneasy marriage in the film.

Suggested Secondary Screenings:  THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED (Kirby Dick, 2006), THE PORNOGRAPHER (Bertrand Bonello, 2001), DESTRCITED (Various Directors, 2006), and THELMA AND LOUISE (Ridley Scott, 1991)

NOE AND FASHION

Agnes B, a French fashion company, helped finance Gaspar Noe's first feature film I STAND ALONE (as well as being specifically thanked at the end of TROUBLE EVERY DAY).  There is an undeniable connection between the themes of the New Extreme and high fashion, especially European fashion magazines.  It is a really interesting collision of art and commerce, similar to cinema itself.  Here a a couple examples of the intersection of fashion, cinema, and the extreme through Gaspar Noe.  Earlier we watched a few of his music videos where he honed some techniques and probably picked up a pay check, and these offer a similar glimpse at Noe's methods.  The first is an avant-garde/experimental set of shorts staring super model Eva Herzigova and the second is a cologne commercial staring Vincent Cassel.

IRREVERSIBLE SCREENING

"An integrated work whose form clearly mirrors its content."
-Rick Groen, GLOBE AND MAIL

"Noe's summation is an ideological sucker-punch from a filmmaker who gets off on abusive relationships."
-Wesley Morris, BOSTON GLOBE

"Is there a point to this spew, a cry against the mongrel violence of men? Or is Noe merely a sadist who enjoys inflicting ugly, pitiless images on his audience?"
-Edward Guthmann, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

One of the most controversial and infamous films, IRREVERSIBLE continues Gaspar Noe's attempts to alienate his audience.  Based on the premise that 'time destroys everything,' IRREVERSIBLE employs a backward narration that reimagines the genre of the rape-revenge film.  Combining images and sounds that irritate and trouble, Noe assaults the spectator.  Now a cult film, its original release united debates over its sexual violence, censorship, and artistic expression.

Suggested Secondary Screenings:  5x2 (Francois Ozon, 2004) and MEMENTO (Christopher Nolan, 2000)

SEX IS COMEDY SCREENING

"There are insightful moments about the delicate relationships between a director and her cast, and about the mind games that go on both behind the camera and in front of it."

-Andrew Sarris, NEW YORK OBSERVER

"It's refreshing to see this side of Breillat, a self-reflective artist whose evident anger over the sexual state of the world doesn't entirely subsume her, or her humanity."

-John Anderson, NEWSDAY

"A rigorous and bracingly charming movie about moviemaking."

-Ty Burr, BOSTON GLOBE

Perhaps the least extreme of the films we will watch, SEX IS COMEDY is a commentary on what it means to represent sex on screen from the perspective of the actor and the director.  In this meta-film, a Breillat surrogate must work with two young actors as well as her crew to capture a moment of raw intimacy and intensity.  The director employs numerous and often contradictory strategies to achieve her goal and edges the border of exploitation, sadomasochism, and touches on issues of consent.  How far must one push oneself or others in the pursuit of art?  This is the central question of Breillat's film and her cinema overall.  As we continue with her work, a fascination with the obscene, that which should not be seen, will continue and SEX IS COMEDY is an excellent text that Breillat provides to explain her method and motivations.

Suggested Secondary Screenings:  IRMA VEP (Olivier Assayas, 1996), BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971), DAY FOR NIGHT (Francois Truffaut, 1973), CONTEMPT (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), BROKEN EMBRACES (Pedro Almodovar, 2009), THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS (Lars von Trier, 2003) and H STORY (Nobuhiro Suwa, 2001).