Eric De Kuyper Movies
Director Chantal Akerman helmed this offbeat comedy about a mother and daughter who find themselves living together again for the first time in many years. Still reeling emotionally from the recent death of her husband, Catherine (Aurore Clément) has chosen to leave her old home and move in with her grown daughter, Charlotte (Sylvie Testud). While Charlotte is sympathetic, she's something less than enthusiastic; her mother's mood swings and the clutter of her collected belongings are cramping her home and her style, and when Catherine decides to revive her career as a piano teacher, the constant parade of youngsters bludgeoning the keyboard makes it all but impossible for Charlotte to complete her latest writing project. Catherine and Charlotte decide to look for more spacious living quarters, while Charlotte is also in search of her own office space. As a steady stream of prospective tenants check out their home, Charlotte makes friends with a pregnant woman looking for a new flat (Natacha Régnier), while her search for a space of her own brings Charlotte a relationship with a like-minded realtor (Jean-Pierre Marielle) and an unlikely collaborator in Michelle (Elsa Zylberstein), a poet who enjoys tinkering with Charlotte's prose. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Sylvie Testud, Aurore Clément, (more)
- 2000
Inspired by Proust's short story La Prisonniere, renowned filmmaker Chantel Akerman creates this challenging meditation on love, desire, and obsession. The film opens with grainy Super-8 footage showing Ariane (Sylvie Testud) and her female friends rollicking on a beach. Now Ariane lives in third empire splendor in the tony Parisian apartment that her rich significant other Simon (Stanislas Merhar), shares with his grandmother (Francoise Bertin). Simon proves to be a fanatically jealous lover; he subjects her to surveillance and endless questions about her whereabouts. Though Ariane acquiesces to his will, she answers his inquires vaguely to maintain at least a modicum of privacy, which only fuels Simon's suspicions that she is leading a double life as a lesbian. His pain and obsession is further compounded by his own kink: he demands that Ariane be utterly passive (sleeping or pretending to sleep) while he can never quite bring himself to actual physical coupling. When Simon tries to break off the relationship, they end up on a road trip to the sea, resulting in tragic consequences. This film was screened at the Director's Fortnight at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival and at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Stanislas Merhar, Sylvie Testud, (more)
- 1990
This meandering, erotically charged film combines many genres of music with symbolic (and occasionally explicitly sexual) imagery in a meditation on the return of the long-lost Ulysses to his male companions. Though this is clearly a film most suited for gay male audiences, it received very good reviews at the Rotterdam Film Festival and elsewhere when it was released in 1990. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- 1983
Accompanied by classical music, and once in awhile by a voiceover, men proceed to tie a bow tie, shave, cut their hair, or do other mundane activities in front of a mirror -- throughout this 110-minute film. There is no plot, dialogue, characters, or setting. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- 1983
This avant-garde film by Eric de Kuyper is not meant to have a conventional, or even an unconventional plot although it is ostensibly about a group of six men in formal attire in an English manor house, trying to prolong a party that has clearly ended. The men speak to each other in whatever language seems to suit the mood: English, Dutch, French, German, or Italian. They linger and lounge over discussions on women and are connected to a remote outside world by the telephone but not much else. Their general air of ennui and malaise has some intermissions -- as when a woman named Daisy pops in on them -- though the camera still remains static for long periods, and silences can stretch on and on, both techniques conveying the existential life of six men going nowhere. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Linda Polan
