By Ali Naderzad - July 17, 2010
I remember the handsome blue eyes, the self-effacing gaze, his turns in France's generational films. Bernard Giraudeau played alongside actors such as Sophie Marceau and Jean Gabin and was directed by Raul Ruiz and Nicole Garcia. At first he was known for his turn as a seducer, later playing more tortured characters.
Towards the end of his rich career in the arts (his filmography spanned thirty one years) Giraudeau became a pillar of the theatre world as well as an accomplished writer and traveler, even finding time to devote himself to political militancy. On stage he appeared in plays by Shakespeare and Beckett.
He never shied away from talking publicly of the cancer that proved fatal, ever since the announcement was first made ten years ago. "I've learned a lot from the disease, I've written new pages." In interviews, however, he quickly deflates the attention that's given him in general.
I remember the handsome blue eyes, the self-effacing gaze, his turns in France's generational films. Bernard Giraudeau played alongside actors such as Sophie Marceau and Jean Gabin and was directed by Raul Ruiz and Nicole Garcia. At first he was known for his turn as a seducer, later playing more tortured characters.
Towards the end of his rich career in the arts (his filmography spanned thirty one years) Giraudeau became a pillar of the theatre world as well as an accomplished writer and traveler, even finding time to devote himself to political militancy. On stage he appeared in plays by Shakespeare and Beckett.
He never shied away from talking publicly of the cancer that proved fatal, ever since the announcement was first made ten years ago. "I've learned a lot from the disease, I've written new pages." In interviews, however, he quickly deflates the attention that's given him in general.
- 7/17/2010
- by Screen Comment
- Screen Comment
PARIS -- Star power is the name of the game for French commercial network TF1, which on Monday unveiled a schedule that is rich with specially commissioned French fiction formats featuring local and international stars. This year's diverse crop of French fiction includes Julie Chevalier de Maupin, a 17th century drama set in Versailles starring Pierre Arditi and Sarah Biasini in the title role. Emmanuelle Beart, Tcheky Karyo, Vincent Elbaz and Heino Ferch will star in D'Artagnan et les 3 mousquetaires, an adaptation of The Three Musketeers. Gerard Depardieu will play Volpone, the 15th century Italian adventurer and crook, while Bernard Giraudeau plays an ace detective trying to crack a murder in Dans la tete du tueur (In the Killer's Head). Also scheduled for the coming year is Premier Secours, a fiction series about medical and fire emergency services in Paris.
- 8/31/2004
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Leave it to the French to create a dark psychological drama that mainly revolves around the intricacies of dining on gourmet cuisine. Bernard Rapp's "A Matter of Taste", about a waiter recruited as a food taster for an upper-class businessman, might not succeed in fully developing the myriad themes of class differences, sexuality, etc., that it wishes to explore, but there's no denying that it is as elegant as the sharp clothes and extravagant meals enjoyed by its central characters. "Taste" is a critical and popular hit in France, where it received five Cesar Award nominations.
Told in distracting flashback style, the story revolves around the bizarre relationship that develops between Nicolas (Jean-Pierre Lorit), a handsome, carefree waiter, and Frederic (Bernard Giraudeau), an imperious and wealthy business mogul. They meet when Frederic, being waited on by Nicolas, suddenly asks him to taste his food for him. When Nicolas is able to name every ingredient in the dish, the impressed Frederic offers him a job as his official food taster, with one of his chief responsibilities being to determine if any dish contains seafood or cheese, two items to which Frederic is deathly allergic.
Despite the objections of his bourgeois-hating girlfriend Beatrice (Florence Thomassin), Nicolas quickly takes to his new position, especially since he soon gets to enjoy the same high-flying lifestyle as his employer. Unfortunately, his role quickly takes on disturbing ramifications, as Frederic seems intent on making his food taster a personal clone, even to the extent of first starving and then poisoning him in order that Nicolas share his own food preferences. The two eventually become embroiled in a sinister, psychologically interdependent relationship that, needless to say, doesn't end well.
While the film seems initially promising in its audacious explorations of obsession and identity, the screenplay doesn't sufficiently develop its ideas into a coherent whole. Torn between its comedic, dramatic and satirical elements, it doesn't truly succeed on any level, though there are more than a few quietly chilling and perversely funny moments along the way. Adding greatly to the film's overall impact are the two lead performances, with Giraudeau particularly memorable as the supremely officious Frederic.
A MATTER OF TASTE
Attitude Films
Director: Bernard Rapp
Screenwriters: Gilles Taurand, Bernard Rapp
Producers: Catherine Dussart, Chantal Perrin
Director of photography: Gerard de Battista
Editor: Juliettte Wilfling
Original music: Jean-Philippe Goude
Production designer: Francoise Comtet
Color/stereo
Cast:
Frederic Delamont: Bernard Giraudeau
Nicolas Riviere: Jean-Pierre Lorit
Beatrice: Florence Thomassin
Rene Rousset: Charles Berling
Magistrate: Jean-Pierre Leaud
Running time -- 90 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Told in distracting flashback style, the story revolves around the bizarre relationship that develops between Nicolas (Jean-Pierre Lorit), a handsome, carefree waiter, and Frederic (Bernard Giraudeau), an imperious and wealthy business mogul. They meet when Frederic, being waited on by Nicolas, suddenly asks him to taste his food for him. When Nicolas is able to name every ingredient in the dish, the impressed Frederic offers him a job as his official food taster, with one of his chief responsibilities being to determine if any dish contains seafood or cheese, two items to which Frederic is deathly allergic.
Despite the objections of his bourgeois-hating girlfriend Beatrice (Florence Thomassin), Nicolas quickly takes to his new position, especially since he soon gets to enjoy the same high-flying lifestyle as his employer. Unfortunately, his role quickly takes on disturbing ramifications, as Frederic seems intent on making his food taster a personal clone, even to the extent of first starving and then poisoning him in order that Nicolas share his own food preferences. The two eventually become embroiled in a sinister, psychologically interdependent relationship that, needless to say, doesn't end well.
While the film seems initially promising in its audacious explorations of obsession and identity, the screenplay doesn't sufficiently develop its ideas into a coherent whole. Torn between its comedic, dramatic and satirical elements, it doesn't truly succeed on any level, though there are more than a few quietly chilling and perversely funny moments along the way. Adding greatly to the film's overall impact are the two lead performances, with Giraudeau particularly memorable as the supremely officious Frederic.
A MATTER OF TASTE
Attitude Films
Director: Bernard Rapp
Screenwriters: Gilles Taurand, Bernard Rapp
Producers: Catherine Dussart, Chantal Perrin
Director of photography: Gerard de Battista
Editor: Juliettte Wilfling
Original music: Jean-Philippe Goude
Production designer: Francoise Comtet
Color/stereo
Cast:
Frederic Delamont: Bernard Giraudeau
Nicolas Riviere: Jean-Pierre Lorit
Beatrice: Florence Thomassin
Rene Rousset: Charles Berling
Magistrate: Jean-Pierre Leaud
Running time -- 90 minutes
No MPAA rating...
PARIS -- The 19th Paris Film Festival, which runs March 29-April 6, will open with a premiere screening of Frederic Schoendoerffer's spy thriller Secret Agents, starring Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, organizers said Thursday. The festival's competition lineup, made up of seven first or second films from tyro directors, includes the psychological thriller Hypnotic, from British director Nick Willing; the war-reporter drama Deadlines, directed by Ludi Boeken and Michael A. Lerner, and the romantic comedy Danny Deckchair, from Australian Jeff Balsmeyer. The main competition jury is presided by local actor-director-writer-producer Bernard Giraudeau, atop a panel of mostly local industry figures.
- 3/19/2004
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
PARIS -- Raoul Ruiz will return to his Chilean roots with Livre a Rendre (A Book of Influence), Elezevir Films, the French co-producers of the 3.2 million ($3.8 million) French-Italian-Spanish-Romanian project, said Friday. The film, which starts in 1932 with a chance encounter between a Chilean pilot and a 10-year-old boy, explores a theme close to writer-director Ruiz's heart. A former political activist, Ruiz fled his native Chile in 1973 to seek exile in Paris. The project unfolds over decades to span the horrors of World War II, in which the pilot participates, to the atrocities of the Pinochet era. It will star Bernard Giraudeau, who played in Ruiz's That Day, Spanish actress Marisa Paredes and French actors Gregoire Colin and Marianne Denicourt. The European co-production, which has received funding from film finance body Eurimages, will be shot in France and Romania starting March 2004. Co-producers include Denis Carot and Marie Masmonteil for Paris-based Elzevir Films; Spanish producer Marta Esteban, who recently set up new production company Impossible Films; Paulo Maria Spina of Italy's Revolver; and Ion Marinescu of Romania's Atlantis Film.
- 11/28/2003
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
In Competition
CANNES -- "Ce Jour-la" (That Day) is at once a tribute to Swiss author-playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt, a meditation on the tragedy of the former Chilean military dictatorship and an absurdist comedy with shades of Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty.
In other words, Chilean-born French filmmaker Raoul Ruiz is up to his old tricks. This is rarified cinema for lovers of the cerebral and surreal. Yet Ruiz's films -- he has made some 75 in the past 30 years -- play art houses the world over and are mainstays In Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. "Ce Jour-la" will certainly please his admirers but is unlikely to convert many others to his peculiar brand of surrealism.
The story is set in an imaginary Switzerland, where military convoys rumble along country roads and two police inspectors quietly watch yet do nothing as monstrous crimes are committed.
There are two key figures: One is an ethereal beauty, Livia (Elsa Zylberstein), her face calm yet alert like a Modigliani portrait. She is ... not normal but hates the word "insane." She is an innocent, and she is an heiress. The other is Emil Pointpiorot (Bernard Giraudeau) -- "Emil with no accent and no final E," he constantly instructs. Emil is allowed to escape from a lunatic asylum so he will kill the heiress, an unfortunate but necessary arrangement by her father (Michel Piccoli) as the only possible way to resolve his business debts.
But a funny thing happens on the way to Livia's rendezvous with death. In one day, a day she believes to be "the best day of my life," she is the unwitting instrument of the fatal demise of several family members. Meanwhile, Emil develops a tender protectiveness toward his presumed victim. Gradually, he kills the remaining members of the scheming family in their country estate.
The two assemble a macabre Final Supper, a dining table of the dead, consisting of the corpses of those who meant to harm the heiress but met their own comeuppance instead.
Clearly, the dreamlike plot is never meant to work on a literal level. It helps to know that Ruiz, a leading figure in theater and later film in his native land, fled Chile after the 1973 fascist coup. Indirectly, he speaks here of the cruelties and torments of Chile in the dark years that followed.
Is also helps to know of his admiration of Durrenmatt, who burrowed beneath the placid surface of Swiss neutrality to explore the conflicts and contradictions of that national identity.
The film opens itself up to many interpretations about madness at the personal level and madness at the level of the state. Ruiz's actors deliver delectable performances, full of wit and subtle irony. Murder scenes are played with humor, each death a study in the absurd, each a little morality play with exquisite comic timings that kid the standard murder scenes of Hollywood movies. Livia tries to stop Emil's rampage -- "That's generally not done!" she admonishes -- but accepts each death as a love offering by her now gently obsessed admirer.
Cinematographer Acacio De Almedia achieves a cool, pristine crispness, an almost painterly beauty where faces stand out and we can read the bewilderment in people's eyes, the bewilderment of the mad, who suddenly see more lucidly than the sane.
CE JOUR-LA
A Gemini Films/Light Night Production/France 3 Cinema co-production
Credits:
Screenwriter-director: Raoul Ruiz
Producers: Paulo Branco, Patricia Plattner
Director of photography: Acacio De Almedia
Production designer: Bruno Beauge
Costume designer: Claire Gerard-Hirne
Music: Jorge Arriagada
Editor: Valeria Sarmiento
Cast:
Pointpiorot: Bernard Giraudeau: Livia: Elsa Zylberstein
Raufer: Jean-Luc Bidieu
Harald: Michel Piccoli
Treffle: Jean-Francois Balmer
Ritter: Christian Vadim
Roland: Laurent Malet
Hubus: Rufus
Running time -- 105 minutes
No MPAA rating...
CANNES -- "Ce Jour-la" (That Day) is at once a tribute to Swiss author-playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt, a meditation on the tragedy of the former Chilean military dictatorship and an absurdist comedy with shades of Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty.
In other words, Chilean-born French filmmaker Raoul Ruiz is up to his old tricks. This is rarified cinema for lovers of the cerebral and surreal. Yet Ruiz's films -- he has made some 75 in the past 30 years -- play art houses the world over and are mainstays In Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. "Ce Jour-la" will certainly please his admirers but is unlikely to convert many others to his peculiar brand of surrealism.
The story is set in an imaginary Switzerland, where military convoys rumble along country roads and two police inspectors quietly watch yet do nothing as monstrous crimes are committed.
There are two key figures: One is an ethereal beauty, Livia (Elsa Zylberstein), her face calm yet alert like a Modigliani portrait. She is ... not normal but hates the word "insane." She is an innocent, and she is an heiress. The other is Emil Pointpiorot (Bernard Giraudeau) -- "Emil with no accent and no final E," he constantly instructs. Emil is allowed to escape from a lunatic asylum so he will kill the heiress, an unfortunate but necessary arrangement by her father (Michel Piccoli) as the only possible way to resolve his business debts.
But a funny thing happens on the way to Livia's rendezvous with death. In one day, a day she believes to be "the best day of my life," she is the unwitting instrument of the fatal demise of several family members. Meanwhile, Emil develops a tender protectiveness toward his presumed victim. Gradually, he kills the remaining members of the scheming family in their country estate.
The two assemble a macabre Final Supper, a dining table of the dead, consisting of the corpses of those who meant to harm the heiress but met their own comeuppance instead.
Clearly, the dreamlike plot is never meant to work on a literal level. It helps to know that Ruiz, a leading figure in theater and later film in his native land, fled Chile after the 1973 fascist coup. Indirectly, he speaks here of the cruelties and torments of Chile in the dark years that followed.
Is also helps to know of his admiration of Durrenmatt, who burrowed beneath the placid surface of Swiss neutrality to explore the conflicts and contradictions of that national identity.
The film opens itself up to many interpretations about madness at the personal level and madness at the level of the state. Ruiz's actors deliver delectable performances, full of wit and subtle irony. Murder scenes are played with humor, each death a study in the absurd, each a little morality play with exquisite comic timings that kid the standard murder scenes of Hollywood movies. Livia tries to stop Emil's rampage -- "That's generally not done!" she admonishes -- but accepts each death as a love offering by her now gently obsessed admirer.
Cinematographer Acacio De Almedia achieves a cool, pristine crispness, an almost painterly beauty where faces stand out and we can read the bewilderment in people's eyes, the bewilderment of the mad, who suddenly see more lucidly than the sane.
CE JOUR-LA
A Gemini Films/Light Night Production/France 3 Cinema co-production
Credits:
Screenwriter-director: Raoul Ruiz
Producers: Paulo Branco, Patricia Plattner
Director of photography: Acacio De Almedia
Production designer: Bruno Beauge
Costume designer: Claire Gerard-Hirne
Music: Jorge Arriagada
Editor: Valeria Sarmiento
Cast:
Pointpiorot: Bernard Giraudeau: Livia: Elsa Zylberstein
Raufer: Jean-Luc Bidieu
Harald: Michel Piccoli
Treffle: Jean-Francois Balmer
Ritter: Christian Vadim
Roland: Laurent Malet
Hubus: Rufus
Running time -- 105 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 5/16/2003
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
PARIS -- French director Claude Miller will begin shooting next week on "La petite Lili" (Little Lili), a contemporary adaptation of Anton Chekov's "The Seagull," the film's publicist said Tuesday. Produced by the director's wife, Annie Miller, through their company Les Films de la Boissiere, the screenplay was written by Claude Miller and Julien Boivent. The seven-week shoot will start on an island off Brittany before moving to Paris and into studios. The movie is being shot using HD digital cameras. "Lili" stars Ludivine Sagnier ("Huit femmes") and Robinson Stevenin, who won this year's Cesar Award for best male newcomer for his role in "Mauvais Genre" (Bad Company). Nicole Garcia ("L'Adversaire"), Bernard Giraudeau, Julie Depardieu and Michel Piccoli co-star.
- 8/28/2002
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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