Arnaud Desplechin

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MichaelB
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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#26 Post by MichaelB » Thu May 14, 2009 6:37 pm

They didn't come from out of nowhere - effectively they're the old Artificial Eye team operating under a new name.

Thankfully, Artificial Eye's new management also seems to be maintaining high standards, so everyone's benefiting.

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FerdinandGriffon
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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#27 Post by FerdinandGriffon » Sun Jun 28, 2009 12:52 am

Didn't know of anywhere better to post this, so here goes.

Desplechin will be putting in an appearance at BAM on July 1st to introduce and discuss screenings of The Royal Tenenbaums and La Sirene du Mississippi. I'm hoping he'll be able to shed some light on the latter film, I've never been able to get anything out of it other than a mild headache.

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Fiery Angel
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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#28 Post by Fiery Angel » Sun Jun 28, 2009 9:35 am

FerdinandGriffon wrote:Didn't know of anywhere better to post this, so here goes.

Desplechin will be putting in an appearance at BAM on July 1st to introduce and discuss screenings of The Royal Tenenbaums and La Sirene du Mississippi. I'm hoping he'll be able to shed some light on the latter film, I've never been able to get anything out of it other than a mild headache.
I'd say that about the former film too!

Nothing
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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#29 Post by Nothing » Mon Jun 29, 2009 3:49 am

MichaelB wrote:They didn't come from out of nowhere - effectively they're the old Artificial Eye team operating under a new name.
Not without Andi Engel they're not, sadly.

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domino harvey
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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#30 Post by domino harvey » Sat Jul 10, 2010 1:03 pm

Are there any good English-language articles or even books about Desplechin? After importing the Cahiers set with Comment je me suis disputé… (ma vie sexuelle), I'm totally head over heels

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domino harvey
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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#31 Post by domino harvey » Sat Jul 10, 2010 7:22 pm

The other Cahiers set wasn't in stock at Amazon.fr when I placed my order (still isn't), but it's on my list. I have the Artificial Eye of Kings and Queen in storage, unwatched, but I went ahead and ordered the super-cheap R1 last night after being knocked on my ass by Ma vie sexuelle. Haven't gotten to the second disc with Esther Khan yet (except to confirm that the subs are optional), but I will shortly-- though I kind of just want to go back and rewatch Ma vie sexuelle again and again first. Clearly A Christmas Tale was no fluke!
Last edited by domino harvey on Sat Jul 10, 2010 7:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Matt
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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#32 Post by Matt » Sat Jul 10, 2010 7:24 pm

david hare wrote:You might find Esther Khan a slog, however - I did.
As did I.

I don't know of any good books or articles, but Desplechin's interviews are always interesting. Just Google, you'll find several. Also, his interview with Deneuve is very good. The documentary on Criterion's A Christmas Tale is also a decent overview.

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mikkelmark
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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#33 Post by mikkelmark » Sun Jul 11, 2010 4:04 am

You can watch Desplechins "The Sentinel" and "Life of the Dead" on mubi. I might not be a great deal, but I had to do it last year, also after going Desplechin bonanza after seing "Ma vie de sexuelle". Think he peaks on "Kings and Queen", followed by "Ma vie de sexuelle", followed by "Christmas tale" with the rest being less good.

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foggy eyes
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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#34 Post by foggy eyes » Sun Jul 11, 2010 11:16 am

david hare wrote:You might find Esther Khan a slog, however - I did.
nah, his best film!
dominoharvey wrote:Are there any good English-language articles or even books about Desplechin?
Not much. Best I've read have been Nathan Lee in Film Comment [41.3, May 2005, p.22-25] + an interview in Cineaste, "One idea every 15 seconds" [30.2, April 2005, p.31-37]. Bunch of stuff online too, like this and this.

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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#35 Post by domino harvey » Sat Nov 20, 2010 8:15 am

Terrible interviewer prompts weird answers and a revelation of Desplechin's next film:
Next project.

It’s on the internet now. Often they are writing lies, but this time it’s what I’m doing, an adaptation of a book, a scientific book [Georges Devereux’s Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian]. It has to do with the superheroes thing. Actually it’s sort of a biopic. It happened once, just once, that a French guy, he was not born in France, but still a French guy, was living in US, and, let’s say, it’s not that simple, that he was the worst psychoanalyst on Earth. He was not allowed to be a psychoanalyst, he had no papers, he was too wild, too bizarre…

He was not a scholar.

Yah. At one point he wrote a thesis about sexual behaviors of American Indians. So he got this job, because just after the war there was an Indian who was an alcoholic, had a hard time and was believed to be schizophrenic. So we have this bad analyst, a bad Jew, a bad Frenchman that meets this bad Indian, this bad father. They have discourse together for almost one year and because the psychoanalyst had just one patient and one working hour each day, he wrote every line spoken by his patient. From the first hello to the last goodbye. He’s the only psychoanalyst on earth where there is all the material available. I guess it’s a film about friendship, a friendship in the desert between this odd French psychoanalyst and this alcoholic Indian.

Desplechin’s ‘one flew over the cuckoo’s nest’.

It’s not against the psychiatry.

Sure, let’s forget repression, as Foucault would say. Sometimes you sound Deleuzian, would you touch up psychoanalysis with schizoanalysis?

No, it will be strictly Lacanian. But Lacan was not that straight, so…

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Murdoch
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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#36 Post by Murdoch » Sat Nov 20, 2010 1:54 pm

Interviewer wrote:The elitism of Howard Hawks comes to mind. It usually needs homo suckers, like the fiancé of His Girl Friday
Homo suckers?

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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#37 Post by domino harvey » Sat Nov 20, 2010 2:19 pm

Sucker as in born every minute, I think. Don't look at me, I didn't say it

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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#38 Post by domino harvey » Mon Jan 06, 2020 3:48 am

Nearly ten years after buying the double feature (oh how the unwatched piles stack up over time— light a prayer candle for kevyip, this is my year for heeding him), I watched Esther Kahn and dear lord, sign me up for the minority who find it a masterpiece! I can believe its stormy reception because it is so Desplechin-y— Long, winding, unpredictable, erratic, beautiful, well-observed, and filled with such a wealth of unexpected and un-anticipatable character beats— and of course the last forty minutes or so devolve into an unexpected and deeply uncomfortable direction of
SpoilerShow
self-mutilation
that seems to dare an audience even sort of not on its wavelength to walk out / hit eject. But I doubt without checking that anything the NYFF accepted the year this got booted from the festival was better than this. That OOP Cahiers double movie DVD set is worth how ever much it’s going for on the second hand market, especially since it’s like twenty minutes longer than the US release. Even at nearly three hours, like all Desplechin films, it could easily be longer, but I can’t possibly imagine it shorter

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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#39 Post by yoshimori » Mon Jan 06, 2020 12:31 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Mon Jan 06, 2020 3:48 am
sign me up for the minority who find it a masterpiece!
Welcome to the club. I suspect you've seen Rois et reine, my other favorite Desplechin along with Leo acts in "In the Company of Men". Where are the blus of these? Jeez.

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domino harvey
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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#40 Post by domino harvey » Mon Jan 06, 2020 4:02 pm

I’ve seen it, yes, though I kinda want to do a revisit of it and every other Desplechin movie now (plus get caught up on the rest of my unseen titles from his oeuvre— this certainly shows you can’t trust anyone’s opinion on Desplechin but your own). I always feel like hitting restart and watching it again whenever I see one of his movies

FYI, those on back channels who don’t want to drop eighty bucks for two of the best films of recent years, the Cahiers disc packaging for Esther Kahn is off, the version on their DVD is ~156 minutes, the same as the rip up you-know-where

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Re: Arnaud Desplechin on DVD

#41 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Jan 06, 2020 5:54 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Mon Jan 06, 2020 4:02 pm
FYI, those on back channels who don’t want to drop eighty bucks for two of the best films of recent years, the Cahiers disc packaging for Esther Kahn is off, the version on their DVD is ~156 minutes, the same as the rip up you-know-where
Thanks for the head's up, I'll cancel my library order of the 142 minute DVD, unless of course those who've seen both have an unexpected recommendation for the cut version

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Arnaud Desplechin

#42 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Jan 07, 2020 7:23 pm

I've only seen a handful of Desplechin films and liked to loved everything, but after seeing Rois et reine last night, I'm at a loss for words. This film is a tangled web of unexpected narrative paths, uneven moods, the driest of humor, and the most empathy imaginable, exhibited in the strangest of ways, for such complicated characters. Mathieu Amalric's Ismaël joins the shortlist of all-time great characters that emerge from the harmonious connection of the script, director, and actor. There is so much authenticity in this unapologetically wild approach that is grounded its own internal logic, intelligent beyond belief and fearless in its attitude of facing conventions of the medium with a response of spacious freedom in words, behavior, and temperament. I'd call it aggressively graceful if that wasn't an oxymoron, but Desplechin plays by his own rules and one of the primaries is the audacity to fill his films full of such contradictory complexities to the brim, so it's fitting after all. I wish more movies took risks like this one does, with even half as much intellect and heart.

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Re: Arnaud Desplechin

#43 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Jan 08, 2020 12:45 am

Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse: Probably the ‘messiest’ Desplechin I’ve seen yet, but that doesn’t stunt its power or personal status. The entire narrative works as a subjective account of memory that is at times completely ridiculous with filtered and manipulated self-fulfilling simplified dialogue, and at other times raw and realistic as if the memory is getting away from the mind of the subject and becoming its own narrative with its own heart and intentions. Does this resemble the hidden emotional parts that are looking for a voice inside and yet cannot be made tangible in the mess of the cognitive and emotional mismatch that incongruously composes one’s psyche?

This is a complicated account of youth development that chooses to jump around and wisely refuses to explain the historical connective tissue between all significant events, except through emotion. Ultimately this is all that matters; and if Paul is revealed to be still resentful and broken all these years later, we don’t care if we’ve gotten enough of an objectively detailed logical account as to why, nor do we judge him for what a lesser film may paint as pathetic or maladaptive behavior. We’ve seen enough of the idiosyncratic moments of the two lovers together to embrace even the banal within these memories as the profound, relatable bliss that constitutes our own greatest hits and shapes our emotional and existential histories and personal truths. Another relativist position that reduces the value of expectations of traditional narrative to zero while remaining creatively entertaining and dense at once, in favor of unobstructed pathways to unrestrained doses of empathy for character, situation, viewer, and the process of memory itself, subjective reality included- maybe even most of all.

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knives
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Re: Arnaud Desplechin

#44 Post by knives » Wed Jan 08, 2020 8:14 am

I assume that means you've seen the first film. I don't think it's required, but it helps to deal with some of the nuances. As to historical tissue, I must disagree slightly. While audience understanding isn't required for audience appreciation Desplechin does give enough information to garner a depth from how that history paints his biography. This, for me, is most clear in how the film deals with Desplechin's career long obsession with Ashkenazi Jews. One souvenir makes sense best if you understand the Cold War and western Jews relations to the soviet bloc in the time of the '80s.

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Re: Arnaud Desplechin

#45 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Jan 08, 2020 8:52 am

Sorry knives I meant history as personal history not objective history- I would agree with you on that but the intention of my comments was that despite not getting a linear and connected-by-detail account of how exactly the relationship moved from harmony to resentment we fill in the pieces through the emotional eliciting empathy rather than a more filled in set of facts. It’s indicative of Desplechin‘s talents that he can shake the normative expectations in audience engagement in these subtle ways (I think it’s easier for audiences to resign such hangups if the film is more loudly declaring itself as detailing into the ‘absurd’) though it seems like enough people shrug at or are bothered by his work, unsurprisingly, where I shouldn’t speak in blanket terms!

I actually haven’t seen the first film yet, it’s last to come to me from the lib and I only read that this was its prequel last night, so I’m interested to how it’ll fit. I also had no idea Ismael’s Ghosts was a sequel to Kings and Queen until after I saw that so it’ll be a good excuse to watch everything again.

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knives
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Re: Arnaud Desplechin

#46 Post by knives » Wed Jan 08, 2020 9:44 am

I honestly think My Sex Life to be equal to his best so you're in for a treat.

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Re: Arnaud Desplechin

#47 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Jan 08, 2020 10:30 am

knives wrote:
Wed Jan 08, 2020 9:44 am
I honestly think My Sex Life to be equal to his best so you're in for a treat.
That's what I'm hearing - very excited. So far I've seen (in order of viewing, over the years): A Christmas Tale, Ismael's Ghosts, Jimmy P, and then most recently Kings and Queen, My Golden Days with My Sex Life and Esther Kahn's uncut version on deck.

What do you consider to be his other best? Any others worth seeking out specifically?

I'll be revisiting A Christmas Tale in a new context over the next week too, as I don't think I was quite ready to take in what he was putting down at the time I saw it probably five years back, though I remember liking it. I'm sure it'll make a spike.

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Re: Arnaud Desplechin

#48 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jan 08, 2020 12:07 pm

Ma vie sexuelle is my favorite Desplechin, and you just watched its sequel/prequel

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Re: Arnaud Desplechin

#49 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Jan 08, 2020 12:50 pm

Yeah, I'm aware that it's the sequel/prequel (though I didn't read that fact until just before I popped it into my player last night). I'm looking forward to it - especially since it appears to be his longest film and I can't wait to spend three hours in his milieu.

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swo17
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Re: Arnaud Desplechin

#50 Post by swo17 » Wed Jan 08, 2020 12:51 pm

Serious question, therewillbeblus: Are there like five of you?

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