Third Annual Classic French Film Festival

Filmed in Thiers in South Central France, each vignette of this episodic comedy/drama is seen from the point of view of a kid from two weeks to 14 years old. There is no real plot, just little scenes flowing together that deal with personal joys and pains of the children in a small town. Patrick (Georges Desmouceaux) discovers girls and helps care for his father; Sylvie (Sylvie Grizel) rebels against her parents; and Julien (Philippe Goldmann) comes from a painful home life. Although mostly focused on the perspectives of children, the film provides adults with some screen time to share their wisdom.

Calling “Small Change” a “magical film,” Roger Ebert notes that the director “recreates childhood, and yet he sees it objectively, too: He remembers not only the funny moments but the painful ones…. Truffaut has been over some of this ground before. His first feature, ‘The 400 Blows,’ told the painful story of a Paris adolescent caught between his warring parents and his own better nature. In ‘Small Change’ he returns to similar material in a sunnier mood.”

Delphine and Solange, played by real-life siblings Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac, are two sisters living in Rochefort and longing for Paris. Delphine is a dancing teacher, and Solange composes and teaches the piano. Also mooning about Rochefort are Maxence (Jacques Perrin), a poet and painter who is doing his military service, and American Andy Miller (legendary MGM star Gene Kelly), a successful composer. All are looking for love, looking for each other, unaware that their ideal partner is very close. French stars Danielle Darrieux and Michel Piccoli round out the cast of once and future lovers.

Writing in Salon, critic Stephanie Zacharek says the film “delivers two purring hours of pleasure. As well as being a love story in itself, it’s a musical love letter to the idea of musicals, to the notion that people can suddenly be so overcome with their feelings that they burst into song on the street, or pirouette across a city square.” She observes that Demy and his collaborator, composer Michel Legrand, offer a “tribute to the splashy, big-scale musicals of the ’50s, particularly Vincente Minnelli extravaganzas like ‘An American in Paris’ and ‘The Band Wagon.’ They even enlisted Gene Kelly to play one of the romantic heroes.”

Jacques Demy’s haunting romantic musical is an enchanting, one-of-a-kind experience. With a dazzling candy-colored palette, the film is basically a movie operetta, with the characters singing all the dialogue to Michel Legrand’s lovely score. The story spans five years (1957-1962) in the life of Geneviéve (Catherine Deneuve, in the role that launched her to international stardom), the teenage daughter of a woman who owns a Cherbourg umbrella shop. After Geneviéve's boyfriend, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), is drafted and sent off to Algeria, she discovers she’s pregnant and complications ensue.

Reviewing the film in 2004 – 40 years after its original release – the Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Thomas wrote: “‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’ has stood the test of time as beautifully as Deneuve and seems likely to enchant future generations as fully as it has audiences over the past four decades.” The Washington Post’s Desson Howe was similarly effusive in his praise: “‘Umbrellas’ never feels constricting or clumsy, thanks to Michel Legrand’s lilting, dynamic score, the movie’s vivid colors and an unforgettable love story. Once you settle into its special rhythms, it feels as normal as breathing. This adult fairy tale is as delicate and vibrant as its star, the young Catherine Deneuve.”

A new priest (Claude Laydu) arrives in the French country village of Ambricourt to attend to his first parish. The apathetic and hostile rural congregation rejects him immediately. Through his diary entries, the suffering young man relays a crisis of faith that threatens to drive him away from the village and from God. With his fourth film, Robert Bresson began to implement his stylistic philosophy as a filmmaker, stripping away inessential elements from his compositions, the dialogue, and the music, seeking a purity of image and sound.

David Kehr, writing in the Chicago Reader, calls “Diary of a County Priest a “spare, intense” film that represents “Robert Bresson at his greatest and most difficult, building a profound sense of a higher order through its relentless detailing of the cold, small facts of everyday life. A masterpiece, beyond question.” The New York Press’ Armond White asserts that “Bresson set a standard of moral and spiritual contemplation that few filmmakers have matched” and observes that “the visual beauty of ‘Country Priest’ is matched by its profundity.”

Acclaimed director Claude Chabrol offers this compelling true story of working-class housewife Marie (Isabelle Huppert), who performs illegal abortions in France during World War II, evading the Nazis and betraying those she loves. Brought to life by Chabrol on actual locations, “Story of Women” is an honest, original, and utterly absorbing film, which won Huppert the award as Best Actress at the 1988 Venice Film Festival.

The New York Times’ Janet Maslin describes the film as “icily haunting, beautifully delineated” and says it offers Huppert “one of her best roles.” She writes that Chabrol “makes a triumphant return to the kind of emblematic crime story that has long attracted him, in films as different as ‘Violette’ (1978) and ‘Le Boucher’ (1971).”