trolljente2002

I watched this movie a couple of days ago in a small independent cinema in Paris. It was my last evening in the French capital and the best good-bye I could have chosen. These twenty episodes made me relive the impressions I had collected in Paris in a heart-warming manner without drifting off into kitsch or sentimental schmaltz. Each episode is full of surprise, strong emotions and suggestive pictures and each short-film is directed according to the rules of a good short story. To me this kind of movie demands a lot more talent and qualities of a director and a story board writer than any epic two hours drama and all of them succeeded in their task excellently! The stories were chosen carefully with regard to their matching Arrondissement and express the respective flair perfectly. Each episode was seen from a different ankle, had a different topic, a different style and still the twenty stories result in a harmonic orchestra of films. The most outstanding advantage with the concept of an episode movie in my opinion is based in the fact that you can switch in between a large variety of feelings and moods without the danger of overload, just the other way round: the melange of sadness, melancholy, pure joy, despair, wrath, anxiety, curiosity or passion gives this movie a unique freshness and harmony. And not to forget the all over topic of love! Love between the characters, love between the characters and Paris and also the love of the directors and actors/actresses for this project. I don't want to go into the details of the episodes since there are so many, but I must highlight the range of world famous actors and actresses from all over the world and their approach to this project. Some played with their image, some broke it completely and some interpreted the stereotypes connected with their home country or the roles they had played before, so intertextuality was given all through the movie. All in all I can absolutely recommend this great collage and will be looking forward to its release on DVD.

I've seen this movie on TV some days ago. I knew a little about the plot from some cinema advertisement but had no clue about the end. So I was positively surprised by it. Usually the ménage à trois ends tragically, but here the viewer's imagination may to some extension finish the story individually. I had read bad comments about this movie in the French press and while watching it myself I really wondered what for? Two of France's most popular actresses and a typical French topic is obviously not enough to satisfy the critics nowadays. OK, the descriptions of sex which actually had not taken place at all seem a bit too long and too monotonous in the beginning, but after having seen the complete movie the viewer should have understood the meaning of that this kind of telling about fictional sex only serves to keep Catherine's attention as long as possible. If the stories would have been too good and exiting she might have tried to explore her new insights at once and by this Catherine would have stopped her deal with "Nathalie" too soon. I was most fascinated by the actresses' capability of shaping such a tension concerning their relation ship on the screen. It becomes clear quite soon that there's more in between these two women than just a client-customer deal but you never know who will take the next step. Fanny Ardant's facial expression for desire is legendary, just have a look at her in "Eight women". If there's somebody who knows to seduce convincingly on the screen, it's her. This movie may have been designed more for TV-broadcasting than in cinemas, but it's a nice piece of erotic entertainment.