Jean-Paul Rouve Movies

Laetitia Casta stars in director Gilles Legrand's drama concerning an Edwardian-era girl whose fate becomes permanently intertwined with that of the last wolf pack on Mont Blanc. Angele (Casta) is a child who lives in a French Alpine town with her taxidermist father Leon (Patrick Chesnais). Shortly after Leon receives a pile of wolf corpses that he plans to stuff, Angele notices an orphaned black cub descending from the mountains in search of his family. Angele realizes that trappers will kill the cub if they find him, so she quietly releases him back into the wild. Years later, following World War I, a local family named The Garcins have struck it rich from business at their foundry; Leon named the Garcin patriarch, Albert, Angele's godfather. A benevolent and generous soul, Albert has given a local gypsy and her developmentally disabled son Guiseppe (Stefano Accorsi) a lifetime lease on a nearby mountain shack. Giuseppe guards several surviving wolves with his life, taking a special shine to the black pack leader he names Carbone. Meanwhile, Angele - who is now a young woman - longs to become a veterinarian specializing in undomesticated animals. Though the local men scoff at the idea of a female veterinarian, Angele ignores these naysayers. In order to gain some professional veterinary experience, she recruits circus owner Zhormov (Miglen Mirtchev) to fly her into the mountains that tower above her hometown, where she hopes to find wild animals. During the course of their journey, however, the plane crashes and Angele must wait as Zhormov searches for help. But sometimes help arrives in the most unexpected of forms, such as the black wolf that recognizes Angele's scent from the days when he was just a frightened pup. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

The gently evocative, nostalgia-seeped autobiographical drama A Year In My Life cinematizes writer-director Daniel Duval's recollections of his youth in 1950s France. As a thinly-veiled onscreen fictionalization of the filmmaker, Raphael Katz is Pippo, a 9-year-old boy whose parents are arrested and thrown into jail under enigmatic circumstances - leaving him in dire need of guardians. Thrown into an orphanage, he is promptly adopted by a young French farm couple: the taciturn Gustave (Jean-Paul Rouve) and his wife Cecile (Anne Brochet. Per its title, the film observes events in Pippo's life over the course of the following year, from his slight and harmless brushes with authority figures at the local school, to his decision to befriend an octogenarian widow (All Night Long's Annie Girardot) shamelessly rumored by his classmates to be a witch. Made and released in 2006, this feature represented filmmaker Duval's first major cinematic outing since the 1979 French blockbuster La Derobade. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

Two warring caveman tribes find their 800 year feud coming to a head in this French comedy featuring Gerard Depardieu and Jean Rochefort. The filthy primitives in the Dirty Hairs have yet to discover the secret of shampoo, while their counterparts the Clean Hairs keep their manes clean and tangle free. When the chief of the Dirty Hairs sends his daughter undercover to steal some shampoo from the Clean Hairs, her mission is complicated by an unforeseen crime. The Clean Hairs' healer has snapped, killing two of his own tribesmen. Of course no one suspects the healer to be a murderer, so in order to root out the culprit the chief of the Clean Hairs dispatches two of his best men - curly-haired Pierre and blond-haired Pierre. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Based on the original '60s French comic books by René Goscinny, Astérix & Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre is the big-budget sequel to the 1999 box-office hit Astérix and Obélix vs. Caesar. Empress Cleopatra (Monica Bellucci) makes a wager with Julius Caesar (played by writer/director Alain Chabat) that her people can build a beautiful palace in three months. She chooses architect Numerobis (Jamel Debbouze) for the project, which must be completed in time or he will be fed to the crocodiles. Numerobis travels to Gaul to get help from the superpowered Panoramix (Claude Rich) and the warriors Astérix (Christian Clavier) and Obélix (Gérard Depardieu), along with their faithful pet Dogmatix. They use their magic potion to make the Egyptian slave-labor population into superheroes, thereby building the palace in no time. Meanwhile, the angry architect Amonbofis (Gérard Darmon) and Julius Caesar don't want to see them succeed. At the time of its release, Astérix & Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre was the most expensive French film ever made, with a budget of $50 million. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, Rovi

Actor Guillaume Canet, best known to American audiences for his work in The Beach, makes his directorial debut with the dark comedy, Mon idole. Canet also stars in the film as Bastien, an ambitious young man working as an assistant to Philippe Letzger (Philippe Lefebvre, who co-wrote the script with Canet and Eric Naggar) the overbearing host of a raucous, exploitative Jerry Springer-like game/talk show called It's Tissue Time! in which the goal is to make the contestants cry. Bastien warms up the audience and runs errands for Letzger, in addition to coming up with helpful ideas for the network, which Letzger takes credit for. Bastien puts up with Letzger's abuse because he wants to work with his idol, the show's impossibly suave producer, Jean-Louis Broustal (François Berléand). To Bastien's surprise, Broustal stops ignoring him one day, and starts taking an interest in the young man's ideas. Bastien lives with his girlfriend, Fabienne (Clotilde Courau), who's tired of hearing about how wonderful Broustal is. And Bastien is torn when he realizes that the pretty blond he's been admiring around the office is Broustal's young wife, Clara (Diane Kruger). Things take a strange turn for Bastien when Broustal invites him out for a night on the town that quickly turns into a weekend at the couple's remote country estate. Clara quickly gets Bastien alone and beds him, and Broustal doesn't seem to mind. Broustal makes a lot of promises about Bastien's future in television, but what does the couple want from him? As the weekend progresses, their motives seem increasingly bizarre and even sinister. Mon idole was nominated for César Awards for Best First Film and for Berléand's performance. It was shown at Lincoln Center in New York as part of their 2003 Rendez-vous with French Cinema. ~ Josh Ralske, Rovi

Karnaval is set against a backdrop of intolerance and hostility in the gloomy Northern French city of Dunkirk. The story is set during carnival time, when the citizens let themselves loose for six weeks of partying, carousing and having a good time. The film centers on Larbi (Ben Abdallah), an Arab youth, and his confrontation with one of the turning points of his life. After a violent argument with his father, Larbi decides to leave the family's business and go to Marseilles for a fresh start. On his last night in the town he grew up in, he sleeps in the hallway of an apartment building, where he is disturbed by Béa (Sylvie Testud) and Christian (Clovis Cornillac), a couple having fun at the carnival. Larbi is attracted to Béa and decides to stay a few more days to try his luck. In the free atmosphere of the carnival, Larbi discovers a world that he did not know existed, a world which is about to clash with his conservative outlook, and the three lives are changed forever. First time director Thomas Vincent approached the project with a realistic perspective rooted in a social context while remaining very lyrical, an approach he admired in the films of Ken Loach. Karnaval received the Alfred Bauer Prize for a debut film at the 49th Berlin International Film Festival in 1999. ~ Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Rovi

Writer/director Olivier Dahan (Crimson Rivers II) helmed La Vie en Rose, the screen biopic of tragic French songstress Edith Piaf. Marion Cotillard portrays Piaf, the superstar once raised as a young girl by her grandmother in a Normandy bordello, then discovered on a French street corner -- as a complete unknown -- by cabaret proprietor Louis Leplée (Gérard Depardieu). The film segues breezily between various episodes from Piaf's life -- such as her lover, French boxer Marcel Cerdan's (Jean-Pierre Martins) championship bout in mid-'40s New York; her period in Hollywood during the '50s; Piaf's abandonment as a young girl by her contortionist father (and earlier by her mother, a street singer); her brushes with the law as an adult; and her 1951 car accident and subsequent morphine addiction that caused her to age well beyond her years and left her barely mobile; and, through it all, her ability (like Billie Holiday) to funnel personal tragedy and emotional struggles into her vocalizations -- dazzling audiences in the process. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi