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Mrs. Géquil is a delicate woman, at least in the eyes of her patronizing husband (played by José Garcia) as well as, perhaps, in the eyes of her boss and the vast majority of the students in her class. However, if the Robert Louis Stevenson reference in the title hasn’t led you to this conclusion already, then perhaps the casting of Isabelle Huppert in the lead role just might: she will not be referred to as delicate for very long. Mrs. Hyde, a socially bellicose, darkly humorous farce with aesthetic and spiritual echoes of both giallo horror and recent Kaurismäki, is the latest work of film critic-turned-actor-turned-director Serge Bozon. He’s a filmmaker who has, in the past, used similarly absurdist tropes — although never through such a playfully pseudo-supernatural façade — to talk about issues of class and gender politics in contemporary France, evidenced in Tip Top (also with Huppert) and La France.

The physics-teacher protagonist of Mrs. Hyde (Madame Hyde), an offbeat, gender-swapped update of the classic Robert Louis Stevenson tale of split identities, explains to one of her students that in science, sometimes you can’t think in a straight line so you need a detour to get to your answer. Much the same applies to the cinema of idiosyncratic oddball Serge Bozon (La France), which is clearly the opposite of realistic — the titular protagonist is here sometimes literally incandescent after being hit by lightning — but which often manages to say more about the state of France and French or even...

Madame Hyde

Director: Serge Bozon

Writers: Serge Bozon, Axelle Ropert

Serge Bozon’s sophomore effort, Tip Top (2013) was among our favorite 2014 Us theatrical releases, and still remains an underappreciated title. Bozon, whose first film was 2007’s offbeat wartime musical La France, has become an increasingly unpredictable talent, and we’re highly anticipating his recently announced third feature, Madame Hyde, a loose adaptation of the famous Robert Louis Stevenson short story, adapted famously by many auteurs (Rouben Mamoulian, Victor Fleming, and Walerian Borowczyk included). Along with his regular co-scribe Axelle Ropert, Bozon reunites with Isabelle Huppert (who starred in Tip Top), who portrays Mrs. Gequil, a shy teacher at a vocational college who experiences weird urges following a failed experiment. Bozon’s film aims to be a contemporary portrait of the education system and the relationship between teachers and student. Notably, this is the third pairing of Huppert and Depardieu following...

6. After Vanda? New DirectionsWeekend 6 - March 7 - 9The films explored over the course of the past five Harvard-Gulbenkian programs have boldly, brilliantly anticipated and defined new directions explored by 21st century world cinema. Aesthetically, politically and formally, the films of Reis-Cordeiro, Rocha, Dias, Viegas and Mozos have each in their own way pioneered new modes of narrative cinema, at times radically intermingling of fiction and non-fiction while always searching always for a new relationship between sound and image, between poetry and politics. In Tras-os-montes and Mudar de vida, we see clearly anticipated the brand of “docu-fiction” so important in world cinema today. In Dias 48, nuanced meta-cinema becomes a way to interrogate the political meaning of the image at its most profoundly level. In Viegas’ Gloria and Mozos Xavier, meanwhile, we discover a new kind of cinematic sensorium—an emotional tactility—as well as an alternate concept of film history told...

After receiving a limited run only in New York City in mid-December of 2014, Serge Bozon’s bizarre new film Tip Top comes to Blu-ray courtesy of Kino Lorber. A socially conscious dark comedy that features the delicious pairing of Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Kiberlain as two incredibly awkward female investigators, it’s bound to be one of those titles that garners a slow-burn cult following.

The most visible member of a small coterie of filmmakers operating independently outside of the French film system, including names like Marc Fitoussi, Axelle Ropert, Jean-Paul Civeyrac, each with several credits to his name, though generally without international distribution. Critic Scott Foundas penned a succinct and incredibly worthwhile write-up on this group several years back, not too long after Bozon’s third feature La France (2007) broke through the distribution fog. Discussing terms like New New Wave, etc, and the dangers of bracketing clusters of filmmakers with such labels,...

Wild Life (Vie sauvage) director Cédric Kahn Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The night after the Us premiere of Benoît Jacquot's 3 Hearts (3 Coeurs) starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Chiara Mastroianni and Benoît Poelvoorde, I met up with Wild Life (Vie Sauvage) director Cédric Kahn for a conversation on his film, starring Mathieu Kassovitz and Céline Sallette. The suspense of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket mixes with Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest and turns into a "paranoiac world". Working with Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, choices and his role in Axelle Ropert's Miss And The Doctors came up.

20th Anniversary of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at the IFC Center

Nathalie Baye, Frédéric Tellier - SK1 (L’Affaire SK1); Mélanie Laurent - Breathe (Respire); Christophe Honoré - Métamorphoses; Cédric Jimenez - The Connection (La French) with Gilles Lellouche and writer Audrey Diwan; and Abd Al Malik - May Allah Bless France (Qu’Allah Bénisse La France!

Les Anarchistes

Director: Elie Wajeman // Writers: Elie Wajeman, Gaelle Mace

Elie Wajeman’s directorial debut, Aliyah, landed at Cannes in 2012 in the Director’s Fortnight. An interesting character study that headlined Pio Marmai as a drug dealer hoping to start afresh in Israel also co-starred Adele Haenel and Cedric Kahn. Wajeman’s latest is a period piece, and he’s cast two hot commodities in the leads, Tahar Rahim and from Blue is the Warmest Color, Adele Exarchopoulos. Set in 1899 Paris, a young police sergeant is chosen to infiltrate a group of anarchists, an opportunity he sees to rise through the ranks. However, he soon finds himself becoming attached to the group.

Cast: Tahar Rahim, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Cedric Kahn

Producers: 24 Mai Production’s Lola Gans (La France), France 2 Cinema, Mars Films

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available

Release Date: We’re expecting Wajeman to be ready in time for Cannes, and...

Vive La France!: Bozon Returns With a Strangeness

Actor turned director Serge Bozon is the most visible member of a small coterie of filmmakers operating independently outside of the French film system, including names like Marc Fitoussi, Axelle Ropert, Jean-Paul Civeyrac, each with several credits to his name, though generally without international distribution. Critic Scott Foundas penned a succinct and incredibly worthwhile write-up on this group several years back, not too long after Bozon’s third feature La France (2007) broke through the distribution fog. Discussing terms like New New Wave, etc, and the dangers of bracketing clusters of filmmakers with such labels, there is a distinct flavor to their films as we witness slick sidestepping and reinvention of narrative form and motif, at least enough to note a similar temperament amongst their works (perhaps something more like Frayed Wave works better). Bozon’s latest genre mash, Tip Top, which...

Blue in the Face: Amalric’s Simenon Adaptation an Exquisite Enigma

Though actor/director Mathieu Amalric’s last directorial effort, On Tour (2010), landed him a Best Director win at the Cannes Film Festival, it never received Us distribution. Thankfully, his latest effort, an adaptation of Georges Simenon’s novel The Blue Room, won’t be subjected to the same neglect, as it’s an elegantly staged exercise of what could have easily been a straightforward nourish tale of adultery and murder. Pared down to a regal running time of barely eighty minutes, Amalric’s film is cinema of sensation, a puzzle of subtlety detailed accents and various, deliberate textures. Swift and intoxicating, by the time its final implications have been announced, what’s left is a sense of paralytic comprehension, a goading motivation for a second viewing. It’s depiction of an adulterous affair is icy, complicated, isolating, but...

The 5th Jagran Film Festival, to be held from September 22-28 in Mumbai, will host a Retrospective of Bimal Roy. His films, Sujata, Do Bigha Zameen, Madhumati, Devdas and Bandini will be screened at the festival.

This will mark the final leg of Jagran Film Festival which has traveled across 16 cities. The films will be screened at PVR Andheri and Cinemax Versova.

The festival will open with The Woods are Still Green, an Austrian feature film directed by Marko Nabersnik, set during the first World War.

The festival will present a special section of films on the First World War on the occasion of the war’s centennial. The films to be screened include Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion) directed by Jean Renoir, La France directed by Serge Bozon ​and Jules and Jim (Jules et Jim) directed by François Truffaut.

The Indian section of the festival will screen films like Highway,...

Exclusive: Kino Lorber has acquired Us rights from Rezo Films to Serge Bozon’s Directors’ Fortnight 2013 selection Tip Top starring Isabelle Huppert.

Serge Bozon’s follow-up to La France, which Kino Lorber also distributed in the Us, stars Huppert and Sandrine Kiberlain as detectives on the case of a dead Algerian informant.

Tip Top will receive its Us premiere at next month’s Rendez-Vous With French Cinema in New York.

Kino Lorber plans a theatrical release follows by VOD and digital roll-out.

The distributor recently picked up Agnieszka Holland’s Burning Bush, about Czech student Jan Palach’s self-immolation protest against Soviet occupation. The film will screen at New York’s Film Forum on June 11.

My Friend Victoria (Mon amie Victoria)

Director: Jean-Paul Civeyrac

Writers: Jean-Paul Civeyrac

Producer(s): Les Films Pelleas

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available

Cast: Catherine Mouchet, Pascal Greggory, Aurore Broutin

Director Jean-Paul Civeyrac has debuted his films at notable festivals for years now, yet his works don’t seem to get Us distribution. Now, with his 8th feature, he turns to Doris Lessing for inspiration, a British author whose works seem to be an inspiration for many French directors (last year Anne Fontaine made her English language debut with Adore, an adaptation of a Lessing story). Mouchet and Broutin are actresses that have popped up in a number of notable features, while Pascal Greggory is always a welcome addition to any cast (he also headlined 2007’s La France, from Civeyrac’s contemporary, Serge Bozon).

Gist: Based on the novel by Doris Lessing, Victoria, an 8 year-old black girl from a poor background,...

Tip Top (Serge Bozon, France)

Quinzaine Des RÉALISATEURS

After a wait of 6 years, Serge Bozon has followed up his expansive and beautiful La France with a far more modestly scaled what's-it: Tip Top, a pseudo-detective film at once burlesque and jabbing, adapted from one of a series of novels by Welsh author Bill James. It overlaps not just genres (crime, comedy) but production "genres" or types; in the sense that a minimalist Rotterdam arthouse movie is a "festival film," Tip Top feels both a distinctly auteurist film from Bozon, and a strange lower-middle range product of Euro-financing (France, Luxembourg, Belgium) involving a certain specific combination of border-crossing actors, regional locations, and a deadpan, glammed up smalltown modesty. It makes for variegated film texture combining the poetic and the mundane, complicated considerably by an unabashedly ethno-political context.

The crime investigated by internal affairs detectives Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Kiberlain, that of...

Bill James's crime thriller is sexed-up and transplanted to France, with Isabelle Huppert in the lead. But the odd mix of bloody murder and comedy couplings means the movie belies its title

Tip Top – based on a crime thriller by British novelist Bill James – is a topsy-turvy sex comedy tarted up as cop drama. It's silly and wacky and rude and glib. A Punch and Judy show playing out on the set of Silent Witness.

Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Kiberlain play Esther Lafarge and Sally Marinelli, two internal affairs investigators parachuted into the police department in Villeneuve, Lille to uncover the mole who caused the death of an Algerian informant. They're joined by the snitch's handler, Inspector Mendes (François Damiens) - who's keen to shift the focus of the investigation from his shady dealings with his new shill (Aymen Saïdi) towards his chances of hopping in the sack with one or both women.

#23. Serge Bozon’s Tip Top

Gist: Based on the novel by British author Bill James, Tip Top follows two female police inspectors from the police’s complaints and discipline branch as they investigate the death of an informant at a provincial police station. While they get along fine as partners, their private lives are very different. While man-hungry Sally (Sandrine Kiberlain) and the spousal abuser Esther (Isabelle Huppert) investigate, they are spied upon by reporting officer, Robert (Francois Damiens).

Prediction: Bozon’s followup to his well received 2007 debut, La France (which won the Prix Jean Vigo for Best French Film debut), will most likely end up in Un Certain Regard, and probably make this another multiple entry year for perennial legend Huppert.

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Back in February, Dmitry Martov and Larysa Smirnova spoke with Serge Bozon and Pascale Bodet about, among many other things, Beaubourg: la dernière major!, a series of presentations they staged at the Centre Pompidou in November looking back on 100 years of French cinema. Now, as Bozon arrives in New York for a gaggle of events — Free Radicals: Serge Bozon and the New French Cinema, a series of screenings beginning tonight at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and running through Monday, a panel discussion on Friday and Serge Bozon Presents, an evening of three films at Anthology Film Archives — there's an eagerness to draw parallels between this New French Cinema and the New Wave that broke in the late 50s and early 60s. Just as Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, Chabrol and all had begun writing criticism for Cahiers du cinéma before picking up a camera, so, too, are these...

April 13-18

Fifty years after Jean-Luc Godard, Serge Bozon and the .young turks. of Cahiers du cinéma resolved that the best way to criticize movies was to make their own films. The result was the creation of another exciting .new wave. of critic-filmmakers, hailing from the iconoclastic film magazine La lettre du cinéma(1997-2005), boldly storming the gates of the French film establishment.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center brings writer, director, actor and DJ, Serge Bozon to New York to present this first major North American survey of films by the Lettre du cinéma circle as well as to curate and present a series of screenings of rarities (along with Anthology Film Archives) that have influenced his work. Also introducing and discussing their films will be his fellow filmmakers, Jean-Charles Fitoussi and Aurélia Georges. And if that weren.t enough, Bozon will also put his DJ skills on display,...

By Dmitry Martov and Larysa Smirnova

The new film by Serge Bozon, L'Imprésario, is scheduled to have its world premiere this evening at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The location is quite appropriate since the film was shot there — within the walls of Beaubourg, just a few months ago, in November of 2010. Before leaping to analogies with a handful of other recent and not-so-recent movies taking place in museums and even sponsored by them (Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark, Olivier Assayas's L'heure d'été and Tsai Ming-liang's Visage), there are a few aspects of L'Imprésario to consider. Rather than a lavish extravaganza, the film is short (45 minutes), shot on video with next to no budget, in about a week, in a "primitive mode of representation" (to borrow Noël Burch's phrase describing the films made before — roughly — 1908, which were characterized by the "autarchy of the tableau…, horizontal and frontal camera placement,...

We at Mubi think that celebrating the films of 2010 should be a celebration of film viewing in 2010. Since all film and video is "old" one way or another, we present Out of a Past, a small (re-) collection of some of our favorite of 2010's retrospective viewings.

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Something of a preferential order.

A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1991)

I was ready to be let down after hearing so much praise for so long, but this film’s reputation doesn’t do it justice. For one, you cannot summarize or condense the growing rings of significance that accrue as the four hours tick past, no matter how simple a story we have here. But it’s not just the “modern novel” structure that so impressed me (though it did) as much as how the film was shot, and lit. It’s not flashy, it’s not even as outright gorgeous...

Pascal Greggory, Sylvie Testud in La France Lorber Films, a division of the recently formed Kino Lorber, will be releasing La France (2007), the latest film from acclaimed writer-director Serge Bozon (Mods, L’amitié) on DVD. Described as a "war film and musical, elegiac and avant-garde, cerebral and poignant" by the New York Times‘ Nathan Lee, La France was an official selection at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight section. Additionally, the film earned Bozon the 2007 Prix Jean Vigo. In the cast: Pascal Greggory and Sylvie Testud of La Vie en Rose. With a prebook date of March 9, La France is set to become available to consumers on April [...]...

MEXICO CITY -- Intimidades de Shakespeare y Victor Hugo, a documentary about a serial killer in Mexico City, scored three awards at the fifth edition of the Mexico City International Contemporary Film Festival.

Yulene Olaizola's Intimidades won the International Federation of Film Critics' prize, the Audience Award, and the Kodak Prize at the film fest's closing ceremony Saturday evening here in the nation's capital.

Also coming up big was the Mexican drama Parque Via, from first-time director Enrique Rivero. Parque Via, the first production of upstart shingle Una Comunion, walked away with the Audience Award and best Latin American picture. It tells the story of a hermetic caretaker looking after an abandoned Mexico City home.

Best director went to French director Serge Bozon for his WWI drama La France. Also receiving kudos was Liberation Day, a drama about genocide in Rwanda from Korean-American filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung. Chilean helmer Jose Luis Torres Leiva's El Cielo, la Tierra y la Lluvia garnered the Mexico City FICCO Prize, and the festival gave best documentary to Carlos Casas' Hunters Since the Beginning of Time.

For best Latin American documentary, the FIPRESCI jury selected Calle Santa Fe, a story about a political activist returning to Chile from exile.

• The Festival du Nouveau Cinema is a staple event for the hardcore Montreal cinephile – it’s an event that quality-wise collects the edgier, controversial fair from the international film circuit and in recent years has started to promote not only new media film forms but the local (Quebecois) auteur cinema. Now in its 36th edition, the fest has snared some of the top must see, prize-winning flicks that will usually not spend one day in a megaplex theater. Starting today and running until the 21st of the month, the globe trotting Claude Chamberlan and the youthful programming team have once again insured the quality control of the event – nabbing some controversial films that aren’t even shown in their country of origin and some Cannes prize winners that I personally hope get a release in the U.S.The film fest opener is Durs à cuire – a docu debut

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