Clotilde Hesme Movies

Portuguese filmmaker Raúl Ruiz directed this epic-scale adaptation of Camilo Castelo Branco's historical novel about people looking for truth behind each other's facades in 19th century Portugal. Father Dinis (Adriano Luz) is a man of faith who often finds himself trading one personality for another as he serves different people in different ways. When João (João Luís Arrais), a teenager born out of wedlock and raised in an orphanage, begins asking questions about his parents, Dinis arranges for him to be introduced to his mother, who turns out to be a wealthy countess, Angela (Maria João Bastos). While Angela is married, her jealous and short-tempered husband is not the father, and when word spreads that she is carrying another man's child, the Marquis of Montezelos (Rui Morisson) arranges for the biological father to be killed and hires an outlaw named the Knife-Eater (Ricardo Pereira) to murder the child after it is born. However, the plan goes awry, and in time the Knife-Eater redeems himself; meanwhile, the unexpected connections between the characters evolve with the passage of time. Mistérios de Lisboa (aka Mysteries of Lisbon) was an official selection at the 2010 New York Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Though Love Songs (aka Les Chansons d'Amour) is not a film operetta per se, director Christophe Honoré and composer/lyricist/vocalist Alex Beaupain use that film to pay homage to the French movie musical as conceived by Jacques Demy in his classic Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1967). The Honoré film concerns a series of hopelessly romantic Parisian characters who are unable to convey their feelings to one another in everyday situations, and who thus use musical numbers as outlets -- as vehicles of emotional expression. Beaupain composed the score; a number of the songs that are included appeared on one of his solo albums. The individual stories covered in the film tell age-worn tales as old as time: the loss of love, the discovery of new love, the impossibility of mutual love. The film stars Louis Garrel, Ludivine Sagnier, Chiara Mastroianni, Clotilde Hesme, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, Brigitte Roüan, Jean-Marie Winling, and Yannick Renier. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

Touted in many circles as a response to The Dreamers (2003) -- Bernardo Bertolucci's ode to Paris in May 1968 -- Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers (aka Les Amants Réguliers) explores the same events cinematically but undertakes a wholly unique aesthetic and temporal approach. The director follows his central characters, a young man named François and his clique of friends, as they experience the aftermath of the events and grapple with their attempts to understand what has just occurred. Garrel's familiarity with The Dreamers came by default; his son, Louis, starred in that earlier work, and plays François in this film. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi