#cinematography by Philippe Agostini

[byneddiedingo]

Simone Simon and Daniel Gélin in Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, 1952)

Cast: Claude Dauphin, Gaby Morlay, Madeleine Renaud, Ginette Leclerc, Mila Parély, Danielle Darrieux, Pierre Brasseur, Jean Gabin, Jean Servais, Daniel Gélin, Simone Simon, Paul Azaïs. Screenplay: Jacques Natanson, Max Ophüls, based on stories by Guy de Maupassant. Cinematography: Philippe Agostini, Christian Matras. Production design: Jean d’Aubonne. Film editing: Léonide Azar. Music: Joe Hajos. 

Pleasure, as the poets never tire of telling us, is inextricable from pain.  Le Plaisir is an anthology film dramatizing three stories by Guy de Maupassant that center on what has been called the pleasure-pain perplex. An elderly man nearly dances himself to death in an attempt to recapture his youth. The patrons of a brothel quarrel and even come to blows when they discover that it is closed. An artist marries his mistress to atone for his cruelty to her. Max Ophüls brings all of his elegant technique to the stories, including his characteristic restless camera, which prowls around the wonderful sets by Jean d'Eaubonne, who received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for art direction. It's also, like Ophuls's La Ronde (1950), an all-star production -- if your stars are French. Claude Dauphin plays the doctor who treats the youth-seeking dancer; Madeleine Renaud is the madame of the brothel, Danielle Darrieux is one of her "girls," and Jean Gabin plays the madame's brother, who invites her to bring the girls to the country for his daughter's first communion, hence the temporary closure of the brothel; Daniel Gélin is the artist, Simone Simon his model/mistress, and Jean Servais his friend who also narrates the final section. Of the three segments of the film, the middle one is the longest and I think the most successful, moving from the raucous opening scene in which the men of the small Normandy town discover the brothel closed into a comic train ride to the country, which is as fetchingly pastoral a setting as you could wish. The sequence climaxes with the filles de joie dissolving in tears at the first communion -- the little church in which it takes place is one of d'Eaubonne's most inspired sets -- then returning to town and a joyous welcome. Ophuls never lets us inside the brothel: We see it only as voyeurs, through the windows. Nothing of this segment is "realistic" in the least, making the melancholy first and last segments more important in establishing the film's theme and tone. The first segment does its part to set up the course of the film as a whole, beginning with a riotous opening as tout Paris flocks to the opening of a dance hall, a pleasure palace, followed by scenes of lively dancing, then the collapse of the elderly patron, who is wearing a frozen and rather creepy mask of youth, and concluding with the bleakness of his normal existence, tended by his aging wife, who is fittingly played by Gaby Morlay, once a silent film gamine. The final segment is the bleakest of all, as the film concludes with the artist pushing his wheelchair-bound wife along the seashore, penance for having provoked her suicide attempt.

[nostalgiepourmoi]

María Casares in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, 1945. Directed by Robert Bresson. 

[movierx]

Le mariage de Chiffon (1942) dir. Claude Autant-Lara

Cinematography: Philippe Agostini and Jean Isnard

[keeptheemptinessaway]

Les Dames du bois de Boulogne, Robert Bresson (1945)

Cinematography: Philippe Agostini | France

[cinema-tv-etc]

Lettres d'amour      1942

Running time     110 min. Country     France France Director     Claude Autant-Lara Screenwriter     Jean Aurenche, Maurice Blondeau (Novel: Jean Aurenche) Music     Maurice Yvain Cinematography      Philippe Agostini (B&W) Cast Odette Joyeux, François Périer, Simone Renant, Jacqueline Champi, Jean `Parédès, Ariane Murator, André Alerme, Julen Carette, Robert Vattier, Jean Debucourt, Robert Arnoux, Léo Malet

Synopsis / Plot France, 1855. Zélie Fontaine, a twenty-odd-year-old widow and the post mistress of the small provincial town of Argenson, has accepted to receive love letters to Hortense de la Jacquerie, the prefect's wife, under her name. But Hortense decides to break up with her lover, François du Portal. François will not hear of it and, with a view to regaining her love, manages to be appointed deputy prosecutor in Argenson. Trouble can't help following.

https://www.filmaffinity.com/en/film345169.html

[junkielee]

[Film Review] The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne (1945)

Title: The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne Original Title: Les dames du Bois de Boulogne Year: 1945 Country: France Language: French Genre: Drama, Romance Director: Robert Bresson Writers: Robert Bresson Jean Cocteau based on the novel by Denis Diderot Music: Jean-Jacques Grünenwald Cinematography: Philippe Agostini Cast: María Casares Paul Bernard Elina Labourdette Lucienne Bogaert Jean Marchat R…

[byneddiedingo]

Jules Dassin in Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955)

Cast: Jean Servais, Carl Möhner, Robert Manuel, Jules Dassin, Janine Darcey, Pierre Grasset, Robert Hossein, Magali Noël, Marcel Lupovici, Marie Sabouret, Dominque Maurin. Screenplay: Jules Dassin, René Wheeler, Auguste Le Breton, based on a novel by Le Breton. Cinematography: Philippe Agostini. Production design: Alexandre Trauner. Film editing: Roger Dwyre. Music: Georges Auric. 

The success of Rififi had a lasting effect on the "caper" or "heist" genre, which is still with us in one form or another, including the Mission: Impossible movies. Dassin's 30-minute sequence depicting the break-in and safe-cracking was hailed as a tour de force. I can't help wondering if Robert Bresson saw Rififi before he made his great 1956 film A Man Escaped, which takes a similar wordless and music-free approach to showing the preparations for Fontaine's prison break. Other than that, of course, nothing could be further from Fontaine's noble efforts to find freedom than the larcenous thuggery of Dassin's jewel thieves. Dassin knows, of course, that audiences respond positively to cleverness and skill, which is virtually all that his quartet of thieves have going for them. Tony (Jean Servais) is a brutal ex-con who beats his former mistress (Marie Sabouret) with a belt; Jo (Carl Möhner) is a swaggering, handsome guy for whom Tony took the rap for an earlier heist because Jo has a wife and child; Mario (Robert Manuel) is an easy-going ne'er-do-well; and César (Dassin under the pseudonym Perlo Vita) is a professional safe-cracker. Dassin manipulates us into thinking of these guys as heroes, if only because the gang led by Pierre Grutter (Marcel Lupovici), who wants to muscle in on their ill-gotten gains, is even worse. In the end, both sides are wiped out, but not before Jo's little boy (Dominique Maurin) is kidnapped and held for ransom. The final sequence of the film is particularly harrowing, especially to contemporary viewers used to mandated seatbelts and conscientious childproofing: A dying Tony drives the 5-year-old boy across Paris in an open convertible as the delighted kid stands on and even clambers over the seats of the speeding car. For all its unpleasantness, Rififi is as memorable as it was influential. It led to countless imitations, usually more light-hearted, including Dassin's own Topkapi (1964). It also revived Dassin's career, which had been at a standstill after he was blacklisted in Hollywood; Rififi's international success was a defiant nose-thumbing directed at HUAC's witch hunts.

[byneddiedingo]

Maria Casares in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Robert Bresson, 1945)

Cast: Paul Bernard, Maria Casares, Elina Labourdette, Lucienne Bogaert, Jean Marchat, Yvette Etiévant. Screenplay: Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, based on a novel by Denis Diderot. Cinematography: Philippe Agostini. Production design: Max Douy. Film editing: Jean Feyte. Music: Jean-Jacques Grünenwald. 

I doubt that I would have recognized Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne as a film by Robert Bresson if I hadn't already known it was the second feature film of his career. Its milieu, the haute bourgeoisie, is far removed from the priests, peasants, pickpockets, and prison escapees of his great later films, which also relied on non-professional actors instead of the established professionals of this film. There is even a rather lush score by Jean-Jacques Grünewald, instead of the reliance on ambient sound characteristic of the more familiar films. Clearly, something happened to Bresson's aesthetic in the six years that separate Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne from Diary of a Country Priest (1951). And yet there's something in the restraint with which Bresson films this updating of a story by Denis Diderot and in the clarity of moral vision with which he imbues it that keeps it "Bressonian." Diderot's 18th-century story is of an age with Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liasons Dangereuses, which has been filmed half a dozen times. Diderot's and Laclos's stories both turn on the failure of the best-laid plans of vengeful lovers: Erotic obsession becomes a two-edged sword. With the help of Jean Cocteau's dialogue and well-judged performances by Maria Casares, Paul Bernard, and Elina Labourdette, Bresson maintains the tension of withheld revelations throughout the narrative in which Hélène (Casares) manipulates her former lover Jean (Bernard) into marrying Agnès (Labourdette), who is not the "impeccable" woman Hélène deceives Jean into believing her to be. The dénouement, in which Jean, having learned the truth, finds himself trapped inside his own automobile, is brilliantly staged. And even the bittersweet sort-of-happy ending feels right, if only because Bresson has revealed the inescapable cruelty of the milieu in which it takes place. I suspect that even if Bresson had gone on in this vein, rather than carving out for himself his unique place in film history, he would still be regarded as an important filmmaker.

[byneddiedingo]

Nathalie Nattier, Yves Montand, and Jean Vilar in Les Portes de la Nuit (Marcel Carné, 1945) Cast: Yves Montand, Nathalie Nattier, Pierre Brasseur, Jean Vilar, Serge Reggiani, Saturnin Fabre, Raymond Bussières, Sylvia Bataille, Christian Simon, Julien Carette, Dany Robin, Jean Maxime. Screenplay: Jacques Prévert. Cinematography: Philippe Agostini, Production design: Alexandre Trauner. Film editing: Jean Feyte, Marthe Gottié. Music: Joseph Kosma. Marcel Carné's Les Portes de la Nuit was a flop in postwar France, and its poetically vague title may indicate some of the reasons why. The film attempts to walk a line between whimsy and tragedy, its vision of life in postwar Paris a little too suffused with romantic melancholy for audiences grappling with the day-to-day uncertainties of existence. The setting is February 1945, after the liberation of Paris but before the end of the war, a period that feels like a kind of limbo. A homeless man (Jean Vilar) with the gift of foreseeing other people's fates walks through the streets, first encountering our protagonist, Jean Diego (Yves Montand), a former member of the Resistance, on the Métro, Jean is going to see the wife of Raymond Lécuyer, a fellow Resistance fighter, to tell her that her husband is dead. But when he breaks the news, she bursts out laughing, whereupon the door opens to reveal a very much alive Lécuyer (Raymond Bussières), who wants to know what's so funny. Jean, it turns out, had been captured along with Lécuyer and had overheard the orders sending him to the firing squad, but the execution didn't take place. Eventually, the plot will reveal who ratted on Lécuyer, and the homeless man will predict the rat's fate. But this story of the clash of Resistance and collaboration takes a secondary place in the film to the romance that develops between Jean and the beautiful Malou (Nathalie Nattier), the wife of Georges (Pierre Brasseur), who made his fortune in armaments during the war, as the film turns into a muddle of coincidences. Carné was a great director, and even this weakling among his films gives us something to watch, including a performance by the 25-year-old Yves Montand. He's a bit too young for the role, given that Jean was supposed to be a soldier of fortune before the war, but he was Carné's second choice after Jean Gabin, whom the director wanted to co-star with Marlene Dietrich as Malou. After starting to work with Carné, Gabin and Dietrich bowed out and went on to make Martin Roumagnac with Georges Lacombe instead -- not the most felicitous of choices. The other major distinction of Les Portes de la Nuit is the score by Joseph Kosma, which introduced his song "Les Feuilles Mortes," better known in the States as "Autumn Leaves," with lyrics by Johnny Mercer replacing the original ones by Jacques Prévert.

[keeptheemptinessaway]

Les Dames du bois de Boulogne, Robert Bresson (1945)

Cinematography: Philippe Agostini | France

[keeptheemptinessaway]

Les Dames du bois de Boulogne, Robert Bresson (1945)

Cinematography: Philippe Agostini | France