FILM NOIR SERIES
Celebrating its 10th anniversary, the most popular COLCOA series is back with three premieres of films dedicated to the famous genre, symbol of the mutual influence of French and American cinemas.
Friday April 24 - 5:00 pm – Truffaut Theater
NEXT TIME I’LL AIM FOR THE HEART (La Prochaine fois je viserai le cœur)
West Coast Premiere
Consider the case of Franck Neuhart, aka the “Oise Killer” – a monster that terrorizes a region north of Paris in 1978. He begins by running girls over with his car, young girls, the ones who excite him. He graduates to gunning down hitchhikers at random. He can’t be caught. He is everywhere and nowhere. He is cold, meticulous, brilliant. He is also a policeman. A model officer assigned to solve his own murders. Based on the real-life Alain Lamare, Franck is portrayed by Guillaume Canet in a performance memorable for its chilling understatement. Set in a grainy winter landscape, this matter-of-fact tale walks us through the daily life of Franck without any pretense to psychological insights, focusing instead on the suspense of the situation. The result is a maddeningly tense thriller with a masterful touch. Written and directed by Cédric Anger.
Friday April 24 - 7:15pm – Truffaut Theater
West Coast Premiere
Confidently striding in where William Friedkin’s The French Connection left off, The Connection answers with the lesser known but equally thrilling true-crime saga of French magistrate Pierre Michel’s obsessive six year battle to make the streets of Marseille safe from Gaëtan Zampa, the infamous drug kingpin known as “La French,” played by Mesrine’s Gilles Lellouche. In 1975, Zampa’s hydra-tentacled heroin distribution ring is just one piece of an empire that includes procuring, extortion, and robbery. Michel, a man of staunch integrity and tenacity sympathetically incarnated by The Artist star Jean Dujardin, faces off against Zampa, a surprisingly anti-drug family man, but with a ruthlessness to rival Michel’s relentlessness. At first, Michel tries to play by the rules, but as his job starts to take on the pitched fury of a crusade, it dawns on him that rules don’t mean a thing against a man who has half of the city’s officials paralyzed with fear, and the other half on his payroll. Co-written and directed by Cédric Jimenez.
Friday, April 24 – 10:00 pm – Truffaut Theater
West Coast Premiere
Franck is an eager rookie homicide squad inspector. When a woman is found with her throat cut, he shrewdly unearths parallels between previously unrelated cases. Before he knows it, Franck is caught up in an eight-year obsessive hunt for SK1 – Serial Killer 1 – a man whose very existence is questioned by others. Loosely based on the investigation into real-life murderer Guy Georges, aka the Beast Of The Bastille (whose lurking disorder is deftly captured by Adama Niane), the story milks suspense from the procedural aspects of the manhunt, the false leads, dead ends, and the stifling bureaucracy of a police force hindered by dwindling budgets and a knee-jerk insistence on outdated, traditional methods. Raphaël Personnaz, Marius in Marius and Fanny (COLCOA 2014), is the perfect channel for Franck’s perseverance and anger, while Nathalie Baye checks in with a memorable turn as a public defender convinced the police don’t have a case. Co-written and directed by Frédéric Tellier.
Saturday, April 25 – 2:00 pm – Renoir Theater
A PERFECT MAN (Un homme idéal)
North American Premiere • Rerun of the opening film
It starts out innocently enough. After all, where’s the harm in rescuing a dead man’s diary, a work that was destined, without his intervention, for a landfill? And anyway, it’s he who recognized the diary’s potential as a novel, so why shouldn’t he sign the work as his own? Thus begins the meteoric rise of young Mathieu Vasseur, a heretofore-unpublished author eking out a living at his uncle’s moving company. Mathieu rides the wave as literature’s Next Big Thing, with growing concern for the mounting pressure of expectation for a second novel. But Mathieu has more urgent matters to attend to, including Alice, a woman the old Mathieu could only have dreamed about, and his desperation to keep his secret safe will leave him feeling like a man dispossessed of his own life. No matter – if this is the cost of genius, so be it. With a tip of the hat to Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, this sun-drenched thriller is elevated by the immersive performance of Pierre Niney, who has had a meteoric rise of his own, culminating in a 2015 Best Actor César for Yves Saint Laurent. Co-written and directed by Yann Gozlan.
Monday, April 27 – 5:15 pm – Truffaut Theater
IN THE NAME OF MY DAUGHTER (L'Homme qu'on aimait trop)
West Coast Premiere
This true-crime thriller set against the backdrop of the French Riviera casino wars of the 1970’s, is based on a case that has fed the French tabloid mill for three decades. Agnès Le Roux, a rebellious casino heiress returns from abroad determined to have her share of the family fortune in order to live an independent life. Her biggest obstacle is her widowed mother Renée, the Grand Dam of the last casino standing in the way of a mobbed up plan to give the entire area a Vegas-style makeover. With the mob breathing down her neck, Renée can’t find the liquidity to pay her daughter out. Agnès finds solace in the arms of Renée’s lawyer and confidant Maurice, a cold-blooded playboy with outsized ambition, and a plan to take full advantage of Agnès’ passion, leaving Renée on a 40-year quest for justice. Co-written and directed by André Téchiné.
