full moon in paris (les nuits de la pleine lune) 1984 region free dvd5 french bcbc

full moon in paris (les nuits de la pleine lune) 1984 region free dvd5 french bcbc



In 1981 Eric Rohmer began a new series of six films he called Comedies and Proverbs, each starting with a famous saying ("It is impossible to think about nothing." "He who talks too much will hurt himself." and so on). In each of the films one of the main characters is driven by an ideal (usually of a potential lover, but not always) and has that ideal frustrated. Like every Rohmer movie, the films are dominated by conversation and are beautifully shot in a style that rarely calls attention to itself. The six films in this series are as follows: 01 The Aviator's Wife (1981), 02 A Good Marriage (1982), 03 Pauline at the Beach (1983), 04 Full Moon in Paris (1984), 05 The Green Ray (1986), 06 My Girlfriend's Boyfriend (1987).



Full Moon in Paris (French: Les Nuits de la pleine lune) is a 1984 French film directed and written by Éric Rohmer. The film stars Pascale Ogier, Tchéky Karyo and Fabrice Luchini. The score is by Elli et Jacno.

Full Moon in Paris was Rohmer's fourth installment in his Comedies and Proverbs series. The story opens with the proverb "Qui a deux femmes perd son âme, qui a deux maisons perd sa raison" ("He who has two women loses his soul. He who has two houses loses his mind.")

Contains movie and Optional English Subtitles. No menus or extras. Regular DVD quality. Thank you.

(Subtitle option is listed as French on the DVD but it is actually English subtitles when played)















Synopsis

In this fourth film in Eric Rohmer's insightful "Comedies and Proverbs" series, the successful architect and tennis player Remi (Tcheky Karyo) is ready to marry his lover, Louise (Pascale Ogier), but she's not ready to give up the single life. Running from her fear of commitment, Louise takes an apartment in Paris, where she intends to revel in a never-ending party. Louise soon realizes, though, that she loves Remi more than she thought.



Cast

Christian Vadim, Virginie Thevenet, László Szabó, Pascale Ogier, Fabrice Luchini, Tchéky Karyo



Movie Review

Full Moon in Paris (1984)

September 7, 1984

By Vincent Canby

Eric Rohmer ROHMER shoots his movies in 35 millimeter. He uses full-size actors, seen in long shots, medium shots and close-ups, mostly away from the studio in recognizable landscapes and interiors. His technology is that used by every other movie maker in the commercial cinema. Yet his films - ''My Night at Maud's,'' ''Clair's Knee,'' ''The Marquise of O,'' ''Pauline at the Beach,'' among others - look and sound like those of no other contemporary writer-director in his native France or, for that matter, anywhere else in the world.



Mr. Rohmer's films come as close as may be possible to being cinema equivalents to the great 16th- and 17th-century miniatures, which were regarded at first as ''painting in small,'' but eventually came to be appreciated for their own esthetics, for a charm and delicacy that simply weren't possible to see in larger canvases. Mr. Rohmer's best comedies have an intimacy and precision of detail, visual, verbal and psychological, that one doesn't find in the work of any other contemporary film maker.



''Full Moon in Paris'' (''Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune''), which opens today at the Lincoln Plaza, could be a small masterpiece, though to call it small is not to make reference to its size or length or even to its place on a scale of masterpieces that would include such things as ''The Birth of a Nation,'' ''Citizen Kane'' and ''Rules of the Game.'' It is small only in its scope, which focuses exclusively on one wonderfully headstrong, positive young woman and her pursuit of an impossible goal.



Louise (Pascale Ogier) knows what she wants and has no doubt that, given a reasonable amount of cooperation from the men who love her, she can attain it. Louise wants to love and to be loved and to remain free. She has no interest in promiscuity, only in social liberation.



Louise works in a minor capacity at a design firm in Paris and in her off hours, to fulfill her artistic impulses, makes quite dreadful little lamps out of various kinds of neon tubing. When first seen, she's living in a Paris suburb, a ''new town'' of perfect banality, in a modern apartment with her architect-lover Remi (Tcheky Karyo) and commutes by train to her job in Paris. As much as she can, Louise loves Remi, one of the designers of the new town. However, Remi's possessive adoration has begun to make her uneasy.



''We're so close to being happy,'' Louise says with a sigh to a friend about her affair with Remi. She is nothing if not earnest, refusing to recognize that a miss, in her case, is as good as a mile.



Their schedules don't blend well. Remi likes to rise early, do setting-up exercises and play tennis before having breakfast and going off to the office. Louise prefers to stay up late, go to parties that bore Remi - ''dancing is bad for the circulation,'' he says - and meet new people, particularly new men.



She longs, she says at one point, for ''the pain of loneliness.'' She feels hemmed in, even by her platonic, married lover Octave (Fabrice Luchini), a totally self-absorbed writer, whose self-absorption cannot comprehend why Louise, if she is bored by Remi, continues to refuse to sleep with him. ''That would ruin everything,'' says Louise with immense patience to the impatient Octave.



Louise is very good at convincing herself that what she does is to insure the happiness of everyone else. Remi accepts this only with great difficulty when she announces that she has taken a small flat for herself in Paris. It will provide her with the solitude she seeks, she explains to Remi, but, more importantly, it will mean that when she stays out late at the parties he doesn't enjoy, she won't wake him on her return to the suburbs.



As in all Rohmer films, Louise, Remi and Octave talk well and at length, with utter sincerity, analyzing themselves and their lives thoroughly and, for the most part, wrongly.



The comedy of ''Full Moon in Paris'' is not knee-slapping. It grows out of these small but important contradictions between the reality of the characters' lives and the manner in which they perceive themselves. In this new film, the comedy accumulates to the point where the conclusion is both extremely funny and sorrowful, though scarcely tragic.



Miss Ogier, who is the daughter of Bulle Ogier and looks more like Bulle Ogier's sister than her daughter, is a skinny, angular beauty, with deep- set, elegantly lidded eyes that express Louise's determination, foolishness, intelligence, gaiety and sadness within any single frame of film. She's the quintessential Rohmer woman.



The men in her life - none is a villain - are almost as funny and complex, especially Mr. Luchini as Octave who, in the course of a cafe rendezvous with Louise, gets so carried away by the wisdom of his own words that he must take out his notebook and write them down before he forgets them. A brief, comic appearance is made by Christian Vadim as Bastien, a sexy musician with whom Louise, up to then faithful to Remi, ''goes all the way,'' which is how her French dialogue is translated by the English subtitles.



''Full Moon in Paris'' ranks with the very best of Rohmer. Enlightened self-deception is the system in this tiny universe, and it's invigoratingly comic to behold.