Author: Philippe Vigneres

A white-dressed, white-faced clown hoots with laughter as he makes a huge ball spinning on his right hand: is this film a comedy? Such a funny image as an establishing shot suggests it but the narrative proves to be instead disquieting and tragic. Tragic it is, as a typical melodrama…

The titular touristic itinerary used to be made in Asia by well-off travelers from the British Empire, taking them through a string of great cities of the continent’s southeastern and eastern parts, a costly, fashionable, and dazzling adventure experienced in posh grand hotels and thanks…

The title is a bold association: on the one hand Greek mythology and on the other a famous occult tale, which the film tinkers with. As the Encyclopedia Britannica explains, “the Flying Dutchman, in European maritime legend is a specter ship doomed to sail forever; its…

He writes, she reads. “Sans Soleil” aims to record the experience of a cameraman traveling around the world and imparting his ideas and sentiments to a woman he loves living in France. But from the beginning the narration appears more complex than a simple reading of texts over edited…

In a definitely counter-intuitive and baffling way this adaptation of the “Ramayana”, the famous Indian epic and religious poem, starts in San Francisco in the bedroom of an American couple with their cat waking up and right away demanding food before they start their morning their routine…

Quietly sitting in the lush grass, a young black cat stares in the river – is it wondering if the image is his, or is it reckoning to catch a fish, or is it engrossed by the flow, unless it is the sparkle and the reflections? The establishing shot of “Flow” is mirrored in part by…

A tall and strong man, looking definitely unswerving and forbidding, walks down a hill briskly and reaches a fence made up of barbed wire. He tries hard to pass through the wires without scratching already shabby clothes. The camera lingers on his bumbling effort which makes his face scrawling…

The hands are what matters. Lead character Martin LaSalle is introduced while he is writing his memoirs, the camera pointedly focused on the hand holding the fountain pen rushing through the blank page. His life has depended on how deft and nimble and just audacious his hands could be: his is…

It is difficult to guess where this odd crown, with its main circle ornamented with loops pointing upwards, made of a material that is hard to recognize, but perhaps it is just iron, comes from and has become the cherished property of the titular character. She keeps it carefully within reach in her…

Jeanne d’Arc, or Joan of Arc, is an extraordinary and mythic figure of the last years of the One Hundred Years War. Born in 1412 in a family of rather poor peasants, she claims to hear voices from three saints and on their advice decides to leave her village and the life of an ordinary countryside girl…

The film starts with a long closeup on the puffy and tired face of an old man whose stare is vacant, even lifeless. He is Huzur Biswambhar Roy, a Bengali zamindar, that is an aristocrat owning huge tracts of lands, controlling the people living on his lands and collecting taxes for the government who…

Surging high in their red incandescence in a dark environment the flames seem to devour the screen and it is against the bright menace that the whitish titles appear. A world is burning, the world where the narrator, the aggrieved young woman who first appear in the film, used to live peacefully but…

With a runtime of 83 minutes and little eye-catching effects in its shooting and editing and instead a gracefully straightforward camerawork, which nevertheless is not immune to irony and at the end to lyricism, the last movie directed by veteran American filmmaker John Huston doe not seem…

The film kicks off with a somber note, as lead character Grace Pudel mourns the best friend she had, a feisty and eccentric octogenarian lady, Pinky, whose health has deteriorated fast, falling victim to the Alzheimer’s disease. Sitting on a bench in the small garden of her departed friend, she talks…

It looks like they are eerie though disturbing statues but the more the camera lingers over the bodies and the closer it captures telling details, like a pair of shoes in relative good shape fitting the feet of lifelike legs, the more it rather looks like they are cadavers. The initial images are not a tour in a…