Sabine Azéma Movies

Alain Resnais, one of the towering figures of the French New Wave, demonstrates he still has plenty to say in this drama based on a novel by Christian Gailly. Marguerite (Sabine Azéma) is a successful dentist with a busy practice and an offbeat hobby, flying small airplanes. One day, while running errands, Marguerite loses her wallet, and it's found by Georges (André Dussollier), a seemingly happy man with a wife, Suzanne (Anne Consigny), and two children (Vladimir Consigny and Sara Forestier). As Georges looks through the wallet and examines the photos of Marguerite, he finds he's fascinated with her and her life, and soon his curiosity about her becomes an obsession. Georges' attempts to integrate himself into Marguerite's life begin to alarm her, and she hires a private security team (Mathieu Amalric and Michel Vuillermoz) to keep him away, but Georges is determined that his new love for her will not be denied. Les Herbes Folles (aka Wild Grass) received its world premiere at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

An elderly couple and their grown-up children must deal with the consequences of advancing age in this comedy-drama from France. Sarah (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and her husband Francois (Arie Elmaleh) are a happy couple in their early forties who are facing with a dilemma not uncommon to folks their age -- what to do about Sarah's parents. While her mother Genevieve (Bulle Ogier) and father Solomon (Jean-Pierre Marielle) divorced when she was a teenager, they remain friends and see one another on a regular basis, while also staying close to their children. However, Genevieve has grown increasingly eccentric, and she's developed a bad habit of giving all her money to strangers, leaving her unable to pay her faithful servant Mr. Mootoosamy (Bakary Sangare). Holocaust survivor Solomon, meanwhile, is in sound body and mind beyond his fondness for tap dancing along with old movie musicals, but he can't understand why he can no longer get insurance just because he's eighty years old, though a new romance with college professor Violette (Sabine Azema) brightens his mood considerably. Faut Que Ca Danse! (aka Gotta Dance!) also stars Daniel Emilfork, Judith Chemla and Nicholas Maura; jazz great Artie Shepp provided the musical score. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A man who thinks he's found an easy ride through the Army during World War I has his world turned upside down when facial injuries render him unrecognizable in this wartime drama. In the summer of 1914, Adrien Fournier (Eric Caravaca) is an engineer conscripted into the French Army, where he is made a lieutenant and assigned to join a group of soldiers helping to design and build a bridge to move troops near the front lines. While scouting a suitable location for the bridge, Fournier and his fellows are caught in the middle of an attack, and a shell explodes in his face. Fournier survives the attack, but while his limbs and his body suffer only minimal damage, his face is torn to shreds -- only landing in the mud prevents him from bleeding to death (the dried muck seals off a number of key blood vessels severed by the blast). It is some time before Fournier can be moved to an Army hospital, and he cannot talk through his ruined mouth, communicating with notes scratched onto a small chalkboard. Fournier finds himself in a special hospital wing for officers who've suffered severe injuries (a relatively comfortable area a good bit different from the crowded and spartan wards for common foot soldiers), and as a dedicated surgeon (Andre Dussollier) struggles to rebuild Fournier's face with the primitive means available to him, the once-handsome engineer ponders an uncertain future. Commiserating with Fournier are Alain (Jean-Michel Portal), his best friend from college; Pierre (Gregori Derangere) and Henri (Denis Podalydes), a pair of fellow officers also suffering facial injuries; and Anais (Sabine Azema), a patient and warm-hearted nurse who brings hope to the hospital's most severely injured men. La Chambre Des Officiers was screened in competition at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Noted French screenwriter Daniele Thompson makes her directorial debut with this lighthearted romantic comedy. After the December 21st funeral of Yvette's (Francoise Fabian) second husband, she is consoled by the three daughters from her first marriage to Stanislas (Claude Rich), a Russian-Jewish violinist. The oldest, Lorba (Sabine Azema), lives with her father and makes a living by singing ballads in a Russian cabaret, Sonia (Emmanuelle Beart) is a fastidious middle-class housewife, and Yvette's youngest, Milla (Charlotte Gainsbourg), is a go-getting businesswoman. As Christmas celebrations gather steam, Louba learns that at age 42, she is unexpectedly pregnant by Gilbert, her married lover of 12 years. Meanwhile, Sonia develops a habit of taking five-finger discounts while shopping, and Milla takes up with a mysterious drifter who lives as a boarder in Stanislas' house. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

Lots of people wish they could be someone else, but a French businessman decides to do something about it in this satirical comedy. Francis Bergeade (Michel Serrault) runs a factory in a small town that makes toilet seats. With his employees on strike and his wife plundering his bank account as she plans their daughter's wedding, Francis's life isn't much fun; his one real pleasure is eating and drinking well, in the company of his friend Gerard (Eddy Mitchell). One evening, Francis is watching a television show about people who've gone missing, and he sees the sad story of Dolores (Carmen Maura), a woman living on a beautiful farm in the South of France who has no idea where her husband has gone. When a picture of Dolores's husband is shown, Francis is amazed to discover that it looks just like him. He soon steps forward and poses as Dolores's husband, leaving his wife to wonder where he is. However, she doesn't seem all that worried, since before long she's having an affair with Gerard. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

This French thriller begins with a flashback to a small village dance where a six-year-old girl is kidnapped and killed. Seventeen years later the murder remains unsolved. The girl's parents Caroline and Chris have gone on with separate lives Caroline remarried and had another daughter while Chris became an alcoholic. The two are thrown back together when each begin receiving strange messages that imply their daughter has returned from the dead for vengeance. They contact a police detective (the lover of Caroline's best friend) who finds the case intriguing and decides to reopen it. Unfortunately, as soon as he begins questioning the old suspects, people begin to die. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Since Smoking and No Smoking, though they are separate films, were conceived (and shown) in tandem, and since they are both based on a closely connected set of plays by the English dramatist Alan Ayckbourn, they are considered together here. When the two films were shown in France, viewers invariably reported preferring the second one they saw, whichever one that was. The original plays covered eight separate stories, which have been pared down to three each for these movies. At a certain point in the story of each movie, the three female characters (all played by Sabine Azema) and the three male characters (all played by Pierre Arditi) have their lives skilfully recapped in terms of "what might have happened" if they made or failed to make certain choices. For example, No Smoking focuses chiefly on the relationship between the mild-mannered Miles Coombes and his infinitely more aggressive and ambitious wife Rowena. Reviewers were overwhelmed by the amazing fact that not only did director Alain Resnais successfully carry off this complex premise twice, but that he succeeded in creating powerful entertainments each time. In fact, the two films have begun showing up on "must-see" lists all over the place. In 1993, competing together as one film, they won most of the major awards (Césars) of the French Academy of Cinema. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

This film is based on a short novel by Russian author Anton Chekhov, with the settings changed to 1870 France. It concerns the romantic frustration of two extremely pleasant and civilized people. Alexandre (Jacques Villaret) is a middle-aged bachelor, pleasant and well-to-do, who fears the prospect of a lonely old age. With that in mind, he proposes to Julia (Sabine Azema), the beautiful and young only daughter of the town doctor. Given the lack of any real acquaintance between them, when she accepts his proposal, he is surprised. Once they are married, he is bitterly disappointed to discover that Julia married him because she also fears a lonely old age. Unskilled in matters of the heart, he had hoped and imagined that she was at least a little in love with him. When a financial reverse looms on the horizon, he throws himself into work and ignores his relationship with his new wife, who gradually has come to love him, though he remains unaware of this fact. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

In this reportedly autobiographical piece, Michel Legrand makes his directorial debut. He is much better known for his orchestral scores for other movies. In this story, he is fourteen and living in Paris under the German occupation. It is June of 1944, and he and his mother, along with a young woman (who despite her youth is nearly twice his age), steal some bicycles at the train station and cycle their way to a town on the seaside at Normandy just as the invasion is getting underway. Curiously, the woman finds time to initiate the boy into sexual life in an unlikely location: under a bush in a field littered with corpses of the newly dead. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

This portrayal of the reunion of an estranged father and daughter is set against the backdrop of a theatrical production. The father Pierre (Michel Piccoli) is the artistic director of a theater, and when his daughter Manon (Sandrine Bonnaire) lets him know that she is coming to see him after a year's absence, Pierre decides to prepare for the meeting. He goes to the theater with his girlfriend Ariane (Sabine Azema) and has the actresses in his troupe act out different aspects of his daughter's character. Unfortunately, this is not adequate preparation, for when Manon does show up, nothing goes quite as he imagined. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide