Change Your Image
lmthz
Reviews
Irène (2002)
Girl meets boy, and falls in love
Here is another example of sentimental comedy. Yep, you might say, well, here's just one more girl-meets-boy situation, but... The main character, Irene, or Irène as it is spelled in French, is a not-that-young girl, living what seems a free life, and why not, apparently enjoying her life. Her friends (girls!) comfort her in living her life as it is. But... When love strikes, no one is ever able to know in advance where or when it will. So does Irène, who then has to question her attitude toward men in general and toward this particular one. This movie is the first "long" by director Eric Calbérac. It features nicely described characters, be they Irène's parents or workmates. Though dealing with a classical situation, it is worth seeing, it being without any pretense, as it does not put forward any theory about the rite of mating among civilized human beings. The characters are but ordinary people, they live nearly ordinary lives, and fall normally in love. It reminds me of my own feelings when I met the love of my life, with whom I wanted to live and whom I did miss every second we were apart. When I see this movie, I fall in love again, and I want everyone around me to be in love. Thanks a lot, Irène, and Eric Calbérac as well for making me feel like this. By the way, I'm French too. Will any one from abroad venture into commenting this film?
Joyeux Noël (2005)
I heard of this episode when I was a schoolboy
My comment comes in late, as I saw the film in last November, but I just bought the DVD and so I once again had the deep pleasure to watch a most excellent movie . I had very briefly heard of the WWI episode it describes in upper school when I was a boy in the late sixties. In those days, there was no discussing the official History of France, and such events as shown in this film would only be named to impress us with the "obscene" behaviour of soldiers having completely lost their sense of reality and military discipline. So it went. And for years I have been wondering how French soldiers could have been induced into fraternizing with our German arch-enemy. Those soldiers were supposed to be "heroes"; how they might be perceived by us kids was not relevant, and neither did we know how we should see their heroism. It had never dawned on us that the Germans might have been anything but "monsters". My grandmother had always been telling us a lot of dreadful stories from the two World Wars she had had to live through, and how no good could ever occur from the Germans. Fortunately, as I grew older, I got a much better understanding of human nature, and meeting people from other countries helped me grasp the fact that men tend to be much the same everywhere, especially so in Western Europe, where for centuries the frontiers have been moved around . From the very first time when I heard of the film, I had been willing to see it, and to have my 15-year old son see it with me. Wow! We both found it deeply human, and to top it all anti militarist without any of the usual slogans and anti-war-cries that were fashionable in the past. It even tells that the Germans were not the infant-eaters my grandmother used to tell us they were. We all are brothers, and wars are a nonsense. I really love this movie, you know.