The cinemas remaining closed due to the Covid-19 epidemic, the Culture of the “World” department offers you, every Wednesday in “La Matinale”, a selection of films to see in replay, VOD or on the platforms.
Le Monde
Thunderous bar pillars, lovers who tear each other apart, quads in search of another life… alcohol fuels all their excesses. And the history of cinema is full of these magnificent and desperate characters under the influence.
“A monkey in winter” (1962), exoticism at the bottom of a glass
The coast Norman, terminus of motionless journeys. It is at Stella, a small pension emptied by the off-season, that Albert Quentin (Jean Gabin), former quartermaster of the Far Eastern expeditionary force and Gabriel Fouquet (Jean-Paul Belmondo) meet imaginative advertising . The first has sworn to stop drinking, the second drowns every evening the sorrow of an unhappy affair and his cowardice in front of a little girl left in a boarding school. When he was drunk, Quentin would go down the Yang-Tsé-Kiang in a junk; when he has a blow in the nose, Fouquet dreams of Spain and arenas, arched back, black eyes.
Antoine Blondin, author of the eponymous book (ed. La Table Ronde, 1959), Michel Audiard, dialogue writer and co-scriptwriter, and Henri Verneuil, director, have transformed two wrecks into poets of the biture, into “princes of the cooked”. Talkative and thunderous, they believe they are “on the familiar terms with angels” when their mediocre peers get stuck in everyday life. A very “anar of the right” vision, typical of Audiard and Blondin.
But this ode to the freedom to dream bigger than one’s destiny ends, a few bottles later, in Lisieux, sub-prefecture from Calvados and the homeland of Thérèse (“I am not dying, I am entering into life”, wrote the future saint). Quentin and Fouquet, (re) sober, enter winter. Philippe Ridet
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (1967), game of massacre in the dead of night
Martha (Liz Taylor) and George (Richard Burton), married for twenty years , go home after a drunken evening. A young couple is about to join them, Nick (George Segal) and Honey (Sandy Dennis), quite soaked too. The night is likely to be long. It will be cruel and heartbreaking. We know it from the first scenes that do not make a quarter, putting the nerves alive. Insults, invective, sarcastic provocations set the tone and take the spectator hostage to the looming cyclone. Which comes loaded with a pile of garbage.
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