Didier Flamand Movies

Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Michel Gauché, a stunt double and trickster who is crazy in love with his former fiancee, work-mate, and fellow stunt performer Jane (Raquel Welch). She, however, is so angry with him for landing her in the hospital due to a badly performed stunt that she breaks off the engagement. Belmondo also plays Bruno Ferrari, the movie star he is doubling for, an effeminate homosexual who lusts after his stuntman. Because Jane is angry with Michel, she falls into the arms of a film producer, and arranges for Michel to re-do the same stunt over and over again endlessly. She also tries to woo Bruno the movie star and discovers that he is not interested in women. Michel tries hard to win her back, sometimes pretending to be the movie star, which confuses her to no end. Just as she is about to marry a dull aristocrat, Belmondo appears in an old gorilla outfit and abducts her from the aisles of the church. Belmondo was famous for doing all his own stunts, and he continued that tradition in this film. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

The heroine in this domestic drama is a woman with middle-class angst (Jeanne Goupil) married to an acerbic film critic with little in the way of interpersonal skills. The woman has had it with endless, meaningless twaddle from each of her husband's friends about what they think, feel, or do. She needs something more than what she faces each day, and finally blows up at her husband like a pressure cooker venting steam. The aftermath is not without its effects on both husband and wife. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Based on Erskine Caldwell's novel, Le Batard could also refer to this French film born from an American novel, with the American South transformed into the south of France. An unemotive Gerard Klein is Patrice, the Paris automobile mechanic who travels to Marseille to identify the body of his loose-living and long-lost mother, who has been found murdered. After proceeding to kill off her barroom boss, he meanders around the south of France looking for sexual relationships. He comes across a teenage musician and is attracted enough to her obvious appeal to establish a more permanent liaison, taking her with him to Paris to set up housekeeping -- for she is pregnant. Soon she is driven to the limits of depression and boredom caring for their home and a new baby, and he has reached his limits of confinement and responsibility -- so he takes off again. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

In this comedy-drama, a young but sterile man suddenly wants to be a father. A friend calls this the "kangaroo complex," because male kangaroos do not have pouches to carry their offspring. So Loic (Roland Giraud, just out of his starring role in Trois Hommes et une Couffin later to be remade in the U.S. as Three Men and a Baby), goes looking for a solution to his "complex." He cannot have children himself because of a bad case of the mumps when he was in his mid-20s. That does not leave many options open to him until he accidentally comes across his old girlfriend with her 6-year-old son and notes that the little boy looks a lot like him. It does not take much to convince him that the boy is his own but once having reached that conclusion, the rest of his plan for new-found fatherhood is loaded with pitfalls. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) are angels who watch over the city of Berlin. They don't have harps or wings (well, they usually don't have wings) and they prefer overcoats to gossamer gowns. But they can travel unseen through the city, listening to people's thoughts, watching their actions and studying their lives. While they can make their presence felt in small ways, only children and other angels can see them. They spend their days serenely observing, unable to interact with people, and they feel neither pain nor joy. One day, Damiel finds his way into a circus and sees Marion (Solveig Dommartin), a high-wire artist, practicing her act; he is immediately smitten. After the owners of the circus tell the company that the show is out of money and must disband, Marion sinks into a funk, shuffling back to her trailer to ponder what to do next. As he watches her, Damiel makes a decision: he wants to be human, and he wants to be with Marion, to lift her spirits and, if need be, to share her pain. Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire is a remarkable modern fairy tale about the nature of being alive. The angels witness the gamut of human emotions, and they experience the luxury of simple pleasures (even a cup of coffee and a cigarette) as ones who've never known them. From the angels' viewpoint, Berlin is seen in gorgeous black-and-white -- strikingly beautiful but unreal; when they join the humans, the image shifts to rough but natural-looking color, and the waltz-like grace of the angels' drift through the city changes to a harsher rhythm. Peter Falk appears as himself, revealing a secret that we may not have known about the man who played Columbo, and there's also a brief but powerful appearance by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. Wings of Desire hinges on the intangible and elusive, and it builds something beautiful from those qualities. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

The oddest things come in pairs. In 1989, there were two foreign films on the market whose titles translated to Errors of Youth or Youthful Indiscretion. One was a Russian film, the other was a French picture, originally titled Erreur de Jeunesse. In this one, would-be poet Francis Frappat breezes through a number of relationships. Of paramount importance to Frappat are his attempts to seduce the lovely Muni (as she billed herself). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Two young men have left their obscure Balkan country to earn some money as "guest workers" in western Europe. On their way back home, they attempt to change trains in Paris but encounter surprising difficulties from the ticket authorities there. It seems that political changes have rendered their homeland nonexistent, and their passports are no good. Before long, they are stranded in Paris without passports, without a country, and soon even their luggage is stolen. Their fumbling efforts to straighten out the mess result in the French press getting into the act, labeling them as Russian spies. The Parisian expatriate community takes them into its bosom, and romance blooms between one of the lads and a Spanish hatmaker, before they finally achieve a (highly improbable) solution for their difficulties. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

This remake of Luis Bunuel's El (1952), which in turn was based on Mercedes Pinto's book, puts a new spin on the tale by making the protagonist a mad woman married to an equally insane man. The original story focused mainly on the husband's jealousy of his unusually beautiful "trophy wife." The wife is Delia, who spends most of her time living alone in the midst of her husband's vast mansion which is filled with fantastic sculptures and rare architecture. Her husband values her more as a piece of living art than a real person and jealously guards her thusly. He is convinced that she is always philandering or thinking about it. Delia does not know what to do. He has crushed her spirit and she fears his mental instability and bears his insistence that they make love in the moonlight beside the pool with quiet dignity. Inside, she worries about their son. Her inability to interact with others and to escape the situation begins taking its toll and eventually, she too begins to lose her tenuous grip on sanity. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In 1917, the French army used a brutal technique in its attempt to prevent mutinies by its increasingly disaffected soldiers. After lining a unit up on parade, one randomly chosen soldier would be required to step forward and he would be shot, as an example to the others that refusal to fight would not be tolerated. He would go down on the record books as having been a traitor to his country. The general known as "the butcher of Hurlus" was particularly enthusiastic in his use of this technique. This film is an adaptation of Jean Amila's novel Le Boucher des Hurlus. The story, set in the aftermath of the war, concerns Michel (Stanislas Crevillen), a young man orphaned in this manner. He lives with his mother until she collapses under the wave of vituperation from the women in her community, who consider her murdered husband to have been a traitor. When he is sent to an orphanage, he discovers that many of the children in it are there for the same reason he is. Michel decides to escape his captivity and kill the general who ordered his father's death. He and the other children like him are able to get away from the orphanage, in the course of their journeys, they tour the grim battlefields of the recent war. Together, they return to Paris, determined to exact their revenge. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide