Annie Girardot Movies
More handsome than beautiful, versatile Annie Girardot was one of the most popular female stars in France during the 1970s. Girardot typically played strong-willed, independent, hard-working, and often lonely women, imbuing her characters with an earthiness and reality that endeared her with women undergoing similar daily struggles. It is small wonder, then, that Girardot became one of the symbols of the early-'70s feminist movement in France.
Girardot made her professional debut with the distinguished Comedie-Francaise theater troupe in 1954 after she graduated with honors from the Conservatoire de Paris. She remained with the troupe through 1957, occasionally taking time off to perform on radio, television, and in Parisian nightclubs. She made an inauspicious film debut in Trieze a Table in 1955. In early roles, Girardot was typically cast as doomed women of dubious origins in dark films, but she didn't make much impact until she played Nadia, a prostitute whom meets a tragic end in Luchino Visconti's Rocco et Ses Freres (Rocco and His Brothers) (1960). During filming she became romantically linked with co-star Renato Salvatori, who played the character who stabbed her character 13 times. They married, but divorced many years later.
Through the early '60s, Girardot played leads in a few Italian pictures directed by either Visconti or Marco Ferreri. Girardot also played leads in numerous run-of-the-mill French films. After 15 years, Girardot finally became a star when she was cast as the tragic teacher Danielle in Andre Cayatte's Mourir d'Aimer (Death of Love) (1970), the fact-based tale of a middle-aged teacher whose affair with a much younger student made her the object of bourgeoisie ridicule and harassment and led her to suicide. Though she appeared in many dramas during the '60s and '70s, Girardot never forgot her Comedie Francaise experiences and proved herself an adept comedienne in such films as La Vielle Fille (1971), Cause Toujours Tu M'Interesses (1979), and Tendre Poulet (1977). Through the '70s and into the early 1980s, she worked with some of her country's best directors, and she also occasionally turned up with supporting roles in English-language productions, such as a memorable turn as the French teacher in the Gene Hackman-Barbra Streisand comedy All Night Long (1981). By the mid-late '80s however, her career was in sharp decline and her film appearances became sporadic. In 1995, Girardot did experience a brief comeback playing a peasant wife in Claude Lelouch's Les Misérables. The role won her a Cesar (the French Oscar) for Best Actress. Upon accepting the award, a joyous and tearful Girardot expressed her happiness that she had not been forgotten. She also offered her heartfelt thanks to her many film industry colleagues.
In subsequent years, Girardot predominantly retired from the screen. She developed Alzheimer's Disease, which further crippled her inability to act. Upon the actress's death at age 79 in Paris, French president Nicolas Sarkozy referenced one of her final projects - her participation in a documentary about Alzheimer's - as a testament to the strength of her magnanimity. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
- 2006
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
- Starring:
- Jean-Paul Rouve, Anne Brochet, (more)
- 2006
This French-language feature, starring and directed by the acclaimed blues maestro Richard Bohringer, was loosely adapted from the musician's roman-a-clef, and almost completely omits a central narrative. In it, a young writer pursues an idolized artist through the various experiences and exotic locales of his continual wanderings, from Paris to Mareille to Africa. Bohringer thus attempts to capture various moods and feelings, with a heavy emphasis on nocturnal events. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
Paranoia grips a bourgeois European family when a series of menacing videotapes begin turning up on their doorstep in Piano Teacher director Michael Haneke's dark drama. From the outside, Georges (Daniel Auteuil), Anne (Juliette Binoche), and son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky) are the typical middle-class European family, but when a series of mysterious videotapes accompanied by morbid drawings reveal that someone has been monitoring their house, Georges begins to suspect that his past has come back to haunt him. It was during France's occupation of Algeria that Georges wronged a young Algerian boy named Majid (Maurice Bénichou), and as the enraged father and husband begins tracking down his former friend, the line between victim and predator becomes increasingly blurred. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
- Starring:
- Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, (more)
- 2002
Legendary Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti's life and remarkable cinematic achievements are investigated in depth in Adam Low's 2002 documentary produced by the BBC entitled The Life and Times of Count Luchino Visconti. Born into Italian aristocracy in 1906, Visconti's life was one of discontented listlessness until he took a position on French director Jean Renoir's 1936 film Une Partie de Campagne. This development would greatly influence the young Italian's own entry -- not to mention his entire career -- into filmmaking, starting in 1943 with Ossessione, which was simultaneously his directorial debut and the masterwork that launched the Italian neorealist movement. Many of Visconti's colleagues and contemporaries are interviewed by Low, including such luminaries as Claudia Cardinale, Farley Granger, Franco Zeffirelli, and Helmut Berger. The Life and Times of Count Luchino Visconti premiered at the 2002 London Film Festival in connection with a Visconti retrospective produced by the British Film Institute in 2003. ~ Ryan Shriver, Rovi
- Starring:
- Helmut Berger, Meralda Caracciolo Di Melito, (more)
How far is a man willing to go to be with the woman he wants? Erika (Isabelle Huppert) is a veteran piano instructor at a famous music conservatory in Vienna. Erika is highly respected for her remarkable talent and strong discipline, but she's also known to be a harsh taskmistress and does not suffer fools gladly; among her students, Erika's class is considered a highly rewarding challenge, but difficult to weather. Erika seems to get her stern and unforgiving nature from her mother (Annie Girardot), with whom she still lives, and without a husband or a lover, Erika satisfies her strong but frequently perverse sexual appetites through extreme porn videos, voyeurism, and masturbatory practices that sometimes involve pain and self-mutilation. Erika discovers she has attracted the attentions of one of her students, Walter (Benoit Maginel), a gifted and good-looking young man who does not seem at all put off by her icy personality. She refuses to acknowledge Walter's romantic overtures, but when he rises to the defense of a fellow student after a recital, Erika is enraged, and Walter pursues her, finally following her as she storms off to the women's room. Erika abruptly approaches Walter in a rough sexual fashion, but refuses to fully satisfy him until he is willing to allow her to control the relationship. When Walter becomes aware of just how much pain and humiliation is involved in Erika's erotic bill of fare, he refuses to participate, but in time his attraction to her causes him to weaken, and he begins to accede to her sexual demands. La Pianiste was shown in competition at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, where Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Maginel were named Best Actress and Best Actor, and writer/director Michael Haneke received the Jury's Grand Prize. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Starring:
- Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, (more)
- 1998
In this erotic French-Italian-Spanish drama, Max (Georges Corraface), having spent a decade behind bars on a murder conviction, exits the prison a free man. Mysterious museum-worker Mila (Anna Galiena) is parked at the prison gate and speaks to him from her car. Mila is married to businessman Simon (Jean-Marc Barr), who doesn't satisfy her sexually. Later, when Max descends into a basement cafe to use the rest-room, he spots Mila at a pay phone, approaches her, and they have sex amid the rest-room urinals. Max gives her his phone number, and they rendezvous at an upscale hotel. When Max begins following Mila and spying on her, he makes a startling discovery -- her husband is his own brother. Shown at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Bhob Stewart, Rovi
- Starring:
- Georges Corraface, Jean-Marc Barr, (more)
- 1998
Jacques Leduc directed and co-scripted (with Jacques Marcotte) this Canadian-French co-production, a drama about an aging Montreal woman, Caroline (Annie Girardot), in her 60s and contemplating impending death. She destroys old correspondence, cleans her apartment by putting furniture in the street, and looks back on her life (as revealed via flashbacks and a film crew interviewing her daughters). Caroline's brief marriage to an Englishman gave her one daughter, successful businesswoman Rachel (Domini Blythe), and an affair with a rebel in the Congo resulted in her other daughter Myriam (Sheila Rose). Further memories rise to the surface when Caroline joins her long-time friend Maureen (France Castel) for a black-tie reception where their community work in Africa brings them an Order of Canada award. Music by avant-garde Montreal composer Jean Derome. Shown at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Bhob Stewart, Rovi
- Starring:
- Annie Girardot, France Castel, (more)
- 1997
Based on the sprawling novel by Vicki Baum, this convoluted melodrama follows nine people whose lives converge during the days leading up to the tragic August 14, 1937 "Bloody Sunday" bombing in which a major downtown Shanghai hotel was demolished by the Japanese, an event that launched the Sino-Japanese War. The guests include Helen Russell, an enigmatic Russian noblewoman, her alcoholic British spouse Bobbie and Sir Kingsdale Smith, a royal emissary. Other guests are Hutchinson, a wheelchair-bound travel writer and the gossipy Mme. Tissaud. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
- Starring:
- Agnieszka Wagner, Annie Girardot, (more)
- 1995
- R
Not a strict adaptation of the oft-filmed Victor Hugo classic, director Claude Lelouch's ambitious epic instead focuses on the story of two men, a father and a son, whose life stories bear striking similarities to Hugo's character Jean Valjean. The father is Henri Fortin (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a chauffeur (in 1900) wrongly accused of his employer's murder. Like Valjean, he is subjected to a harsh and unfair prison sentence. While Henri vainly attempts to escape his unjust fate, his family suffers, with his wife forced to raise their young son alone. The film jumps ahead several decades to show the adult life of this son (also Belmondo), a former boxer turned furniture mover who agrees to help smuggle a Jewish lawyer (Michel Boujenah) out of France during the Nazi occupation. Along the way, the lawyer reads to the younger Fortin from Les Misérables, and Fortin begins to imagine himself in the role of Jean Valjean, on the run from the obsessive Inspector Javert. ~ Judd Blaise, Rovi
- Starring:
- Jean-Paul Belmondo, Michel Boujenah, (more)
- 1994
Four clever girls who tire of their mundane lives turn to a life of crime in this light-hearted French comedy. Cecile, an electronics teacher, has a terribly overdrawn checking account. Bijou, after giving birth to her third child is abruptly abandoned by her abusive spouse. Lola has recently served a prison term. Now she's a bus driver, but she can't afford rent and is homeless. Muriel, a ditzy waitress is indebted to her restaurant manger. She is trying to have a baby with her husband who is in a wheelchair. Lola and Bijou begin their exploits after happening into a store during a robbery. When the clerk suddenly leaves to pursue the crooks, the duo help themselves to the cash-filled till. Next, they raid a sex shop, and so it begins. The women keep their criminal lives a secret. During the day, they are the wives, mothers, and upstanding citizens they always were. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
- Starring:
- Catherine Jacob, Clémentine Célarié, (more)
- 1993
Based on a novel by Mary Higgins Clark, the film explores the life of an art-gallery manager (Carol Higgins Clark) who marries a famous Canadian painter (Perry King). After moving her two young daughters to his mansion, she soon comes to the frightening realization that he is much more than the garden-variety tortured artist. ~ John Bush, Rovi
- Starring:
- Perry King, Carol Higgins Clark, (more)
- 1991
In this frequently surrealistic romp, a satire on sex, politics, and the business of filmmaking, two young women get together after discovering sufficient provocations in their lives to deliberately set out to wreak havoc in the world around them. Joelle (Anouk Grinberg) has just been thrown out of a moving car by her abusive man-friend, when Camille (Charlotte Gainsbourg) encounters her. Joelle's bitter exclamation Merci la Vie, or "thank you, life" echoes something of Camille's feelings, and the two decide to go on a rampage, picking up and seducing numerous men and then doing things like destroying their cars. Eventually, they set their sights on a "higher" goal and decide to do in an entire town. Meanwhile, it becomes evident that a sinister medical researcher, Dr. Worms (Gérard Depardieu), has infected promiscuous Joelle with a sexually transmitted disease he invented for the sole purpose of becoming the man who finds its cure, which he hopes will make him beloved, famous and rich. At some point, an elaborate series of flashbacks enter the story, and in one sequence, Camille attempts to persuade her feuding parents to get back together long enough to conceive her. Reviewers noted that logic is not a strong point in this film, but they found its fast pace and bright performances vastly entertaining. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
- Starring:
- Charlotte Gainsbourg, Anouk Grinberg, (more)
- 1990
In this somewhat odd exploration of human romantic difficulties, the people in the film are all put under extra stress by the fact that on the day in question, they have lost an hour to daylight savings time. In addition, it is a full moon. Neither factor improves their response to the mild stresses they experience, which have been building up for several years. The beginning of the film shows a number of couples getting married, and follows them and a few others a few years later, on the day of the time change. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
- Starring:
- Gérard Lanvin, Patrick Chesnais, (more)
- 1989
The very busy actor Michel Serrault lends his talents to the depiction of a monstre sacree of French literature, the extremely repugnant but very clever Paul Leautaud, who was famous for his rude, clever observations and his epigrams. Although unkempt and very mean, his rapier-like wit and strong lust were sufficiently magnetic that at the time of this film he was engaged in a long-term relationship with his equally vile mistress (Annie Girardot), and a new relationship with a librarian (Aurore Clement) who is a fan of his writing. The story is based on the author's personal diaries from the period. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
- Starring:
- Michel Serrault, Annie Girardot, (more)
- 1989
Nicole (Agnes Soral) is sent up the river for infanticide in this routine woman-in-prison feature. There she meets Marthe (Annie Girardot), a fellow murderess who receives special treatment from the warden Dessombes (Marie-Christine Barrault). The warden frames Nelly (Bernadette Lafont) for drug possession and has her thrown into solitary confinement. Sabien (Corinne Touzet) is a newcomer convicted of armed robbery who latches on to the lesbian Lucie (Milva), a longtime prisoner slated for release. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi
- Starring:
- Marie-Christine Barrault, Agnes Soral, (more)
- 1988
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, Rovi
- Starring:
- Annie Girardot, Sabine Azéma, (more)
The last days in the life of fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his family are told from the point of view of his ill-fated son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano (Anthony Hopkins) in this crammed, two-hour historical biography. Originally filmed as a four-part miniseries, the two-hour reduction leaves a very speeded-up view of the time between the Allied landing in Italy and Mussolini's death. As events worsen for the dictator (shown shuffling around in slippers at home like a domesticated pet) he begins to lose his support, including that of his son-in-law Galeazzo. After the German army frees him from a brief detention by Partisan forces, the dictator orders Galeazzo's execution. Italy has obviously lost the war, but Mussolini seems to be living in his own small world. Susan Sarandon plays Mussolini's daughter and Galeazzo's wife, Bob Hoskins is the dictator, and Barbara De Rossi is Mussolini's doomed mistress, Claretta.
~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
- Starring:
- Anthony Hopkins, Susan Sarandon, (more)
- 1985
This melodrama, set in WW II during the French occupation, tells the story of the members of a Jewish family who flee the Germans and end up hiding in the country manse of two aristocrats. Unfortunately, the Gestapo finds them and they are sent to a concentration camp. The film then leaps ahead to 1985 where the daughter of the couple begins believing that her dead brother has been reincarnated as a famed pianist. She feels this is so because both of them love Rachmaninoff's "Concerto No. 2". ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
- Starring:
- Evelyne Bouix, Jean-Louis Trintignant, (more)
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