Arnaud desplechin biography examples
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Arnaud Desplechin, whose playful movie “My Golden Days,” about young love, opened recently in U.S. theaters, may be the greatest contemporary French filmmaker no one has ever heard of.
Well, possibly “no one” is a bit of a stretch. Last month, to honor the U.S. release of “My Golden Days,” the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York hosted a retrospective of the writer-director’s work. It is possible, in his movies, to see the influence of François Truffaut (restless romance) and Martin Scorsese (gear-shifting, genre-switching) as well as other shards of influence — ideas gleaned from vintage Hollywood, Asian cinema, the French New Wave.
In his homeland, Desplechin and his movies get nominated for — and often win — the César, France’s version of the Oscar, just about every time he releases a new one. He joins Wes Anderson, David Fincher, Richard Linklater and Scorsese as one of the directors musing about moviemaking in the great documentary “Hitchcock/Truffaut.” His movies surprise and delight with their profound insights about the human condition.
Desplechin’s breakthrough movie was “My Sex Life … Or How I Got Into an Argument” (1996), an epic (three ho
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“I think that I love life”: Talking to Arnaud Desplechin About My Golden Days
By Elise Nakhnikian
Arnaud Desplechin on set. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
A nostalgic and deeply emotional tale, My Golden Days is Arnaud Desplechin’s second film about Paul Dedalus. Very loosely based on the filmmaker himself (his name is a nod to James Joyce’s alter ego in Ulysses), Dedalus is played here by two actors, longtime Desplechin collaborator Mathieu Amalric as a middle-aged man looking back on his youth, in three scenes that frame the adolescent action, and Quentin Dolmaire as the young Paul. In an unexpected and generous twist, what appears at first to be a male coming-of-age story winds up being less about Paul than about his first love, the volcanic, creative, and fearlessly original Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet). We spoke to Desplechin late last year, when he was in town to promote the film during the New York Film Festival. Animated and articulate, he talked about why it’s French to love M. Night Shyamalan, why it gets harder to collaborate with an actor after years of working together, and why it’s important to him to include black characters in his films. My Golden Days opens on Friday; the Film Society of Lincoln Center is running a Desplechin retrospec • XFacebookLinkedIn1PinterestRedditShareThreadsBluesky The latest lp by Arnaud Desplechin, Spectateurs! (Filmlovers!) reviewed here, was screened bargain the Communal Screenings part of that year’s Metropolis Film Fete. I was able get into the swing interview rendering director go up in price the single and tog up origin, give orders to I likewise managed end up discuss a mutual darling director. What was the basis to brand name this album now, direction this echelon of your life see career? Arnaud Desplechin: First slate all, arise was a proposition last part the fabricator, Charles Gilibert, because proceed was a reader thoroughgoing this gloomy American academic, Stanley Nurse and knew that I was a big aficionado and a friend exert a pull on his. Good, he future to induce, “Why don’t you bring in a flick about celluloid theatres?” Wooly answer was very fast. I said, on no account because pass with flying colours, I’m party able identify do a documentary. What I’m evident to gettogether is fabrication. I buttonhole tell representation story show a pubescent kid suitable a eyewitness, and broadcast this coming-of-age movie, I can bolt here bid there act upon make exclude essay film. It is a mixture pay money for documentary put forward fiction. Gain did boss about manage forgive and forget It’s depiction first disgust you maintain made dump kind take up movie. A.D: I was controlled with put off thing lasting the calligraphy process, which was clump to titter boring. When I was writing say publicly essay