A MATTER OF RESISTANCE /
La Vie de chateau
World Premiere (restored version) • Comedy/Romance • France, 1966
DCP • 1.66 • Mono • B&W • 93 min
Directed by: Jean-Paul Rappeneau
Written by: Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Alain Cavalier, Claude Sautet, Daniel Boulanger
Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme
Film Editing: Pierre Gillette
Original Score: Michel Legrand
Produced by: Ancinex, Cobela Films, Les Productions de la Guéville
Cast: Catherine Deneuve (Marie), Claude Brasseur (Dimanche), Philippe Noiret (Jérôme), Henri Garcin (Julien)
International Sales: TF1 International • tf1international.com
The setting for this classic farce is a tumbledown country estate in Normandy, 1944, shortly before D-Day. Young Catherine Deneuve plays Marie, a fitfully bored lady of the house taken to wistful dreams of an exciting life in Paris, and exalted flirtations with some of the hunkier locals. Her husband, Jérôme, is a meek fusspot 20 years her senior, preoccupied with his apple orchards and placating his taskmistress mother. The answer to Marie’s prayers falls from the sky, in the form of Julien, a rakish officer of the French Resistance, here to scout for enemy artillery. And just when things start to get complicated, Kommandant Klopstock requisitions the chateau as a German garrison in order to pursue Marie himself. As sworn enemies do battle for Marie’s favors, one man remembers that there’s a real war raging all around them. COLCOA is proud to showcase this meticulously restored recipient of the 1966 Louis Delluc Prize in conjunction with the U.S. Premiere of director Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s latest film, Families.
They say tragedy plus time equals comedy, but in the early 1960s, the tragedies of WWII were still too fresh on the minds of most French to even consider portraying the Nazi occupation comically. Then writer/director Jean-Paul Rappeneau came along. Rappeneau hit upon the idea shortly after he gained a foothold in the business as a writer, collaborating with Louis Malle on the screen adaptation of Zazie dans le metro (1960). Rappeneau pitched the idea to producer Robert Dorfmann who couldn’t get the project off the ground, but took the concept of a WWII comedy to Gérard Oury, and the result, Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At! became an international hit in the months following this film’s release. Rappeneau’s rapid-fire screwball comedy owes much to Hollywood masters Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch. On set, he often recited the lines for his actors in an effort to get them to pick up the pace. His masterpiece Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) received 10 César Awards, including Best Director, and was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar®. Rappeneau’s latest film, Families, is his first since 1995’s The Horseman on the Roof,
QUOTES:
“The charm of his picture lies in the casual kookiness of his characters, plus the random and childlike unreality of the lovely, fragile, dead-panned Miss Deneuve.”
– Bosley Crowther, New York Times
“…one of Rappeneau's most entertaining and stylistically inspired films.”
– James Travers, Films De France
