Carole Laure Movies

In this offbeat comedy-drama, based on the play Beyond Mozambique by George F. Walker, six desperate characters try to sort out their next move in a dangerous inner-city neighborhood after the brutal murder of the mayor throws the city into chaos. Rita (Carole Laure) is a former porn star trying to re-establish herself as a performance artist; Rocco (Nigel Bennett) is a slightly mad doctor who performs odd experiments with organs from the recently deceased; Olga (Veronique Flaguais) is Rocco's Russian spouse who is none too happy with her husband's recent work; Petru (Paul Ahmarani) is a boy from Romania who has been adopted by Rocco and Olga (and has a strange interest in the body parts Rocco collects); a reporter (Andrew Tarbet) has uncovered some disturbing information about the mayor; and a police officer (Tom Bernett) tries to sort out what's going on when he happens by on horseback. Rats & Rabbits was directed by Lewis Furey, a former composer whose wife is leading lady Carole Laure; while Furey composed the score for several of Laure's films, this time around she returned the favor, assembling the film's techno-meets-classical background music. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Nathalie Monnier (Marie Fugain) is 14, her parents are splitting up, and what's worse, their apartment is going to be put up for sale. Just about everything in her life is about to be shattered. So it makes a bit of sense that she is receptive to the possibility of selling her soul for the chance to keep all this from happening. Just as her parents are (of course) getting back together, she wins the lottery and is able to buy their old apartment. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Ania Francos, this tragi-comedy follows the diagnosis and internment of lawyer Lola Friedlander (Carole Laure) in the cancer ward of a large clinic. There Lola encounters Marie-Aude (Jeanne Moreau) and Cathy (Dominique Labourier), two very different patients from opposite walks of life who each contribute to Lola's adjustment. Given that the doctor at this clinic is a media-star, there is a certain aura of unreality to the story that also permeates some of the episodes involving subsidiary characters like Lola's boyfriend or her archetypal Jewish family. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

In this fantasy-drama-romance, forbidden love between an angel (Carole Laure) and a singer (Nick Mancuso) is set against the singer's attempts to resuscitate a fading theater. During the period of one night, the singer is visited by three different guardian angels out to help him succeed in putting together a stunning show (a show that will include some of Canada's best dancers). One of the angels (Laure) takes a liking to the singer, and that gives rise to musical numbers on the nature of the creative genius and the conflicts that can arise between art, artifice, and real life. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

This is a rather complex thriller that fails to deliver very much suspense or fear, in spite of the requisite shock scenes and mystery over who is perpetrating them. The story opens with a pending marriage, tragically aborted when the groom dies under suspicious circumstances, and continues several years later when Nathalie (Carole Laure), a single mother, receives "breather" phone calls and finds the bloody heart of an animal on her car seat. That is followed by another such donation sent to her workplace and labeled as the heart of her little daughter. Although gruesome, these incidents alone are not enough to create an atmosphere of foreboding, anxiety, or apprehension -- as Nathalie seems just a few steps from unconcerned. If she is not affected, any tension created by the scenario is diffused, leaving the audience in neutral. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

This low-grade thriller centers around Frank Waite (Art Hindle), a sports-car salesman who is suddenly mean-tempered when his wife Lee (Shannon Tweed) becomes turned off by sex, and Anouk Van Derlin, the sex therapist they decide to see (Carole Laure). As Anouk starts to bring out the suppressed sexual fantasies of the couple, their sex life is much better -- but both Lee and Frank are not completely at ease with their new, unrestrained relationship. In the meantime, a series of stabbings occurs in the city that may or may not be related to a transvestite neighbor of the Waites. But as the murders continue, some of the victims turn out to be friends or acquaintances of the couple -- and the guessing game to identify the real killer begins. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Therese, Catherine, and Alain (Carole Laure, Brigitte Fossey, and Bernard Giraudeau) are three friends who undergo several personal trials and tribulations over an eight-year period in which all three try to hang on to their original visions of who they are and what they want out of life. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Pauline (Carole Laure), an attractive woman, becomes the obsession of a killer, Jacques (Richard Berry) who has murdered several women. He breaks into her apartment, makes her strip, does not touch her, and leaves. Ravic (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is the police inspector trying to track down the killer and when he sees Pauline, he develops an equally neurotic obsession for the woman. The two men, police inspector and criminal, are headed for a final show-down in Pauline's apartment, and only one of them will walk out alive. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Two francophones have become roommates in Montreal. One is from France, the other is from Quebec. Their love-lives revolve around affairs with married men who leave them on the weekends for their families in the countryside. Nicole thinks she has finally found a "live one" when she discovers that the doctor she has met is single and American. She returns with him to the U.S., but soon returns to her friend Lucie, who has had yet another affair with a married man. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

After many years of managing a trucking concern for his lover Dominique (Marie Dubois), Savin (Yves Montand) is planning to leave her for the girl who is bearing his child. Hysterical, Dominique threatens suicide then goes to a meeting between Savin and the girl and tries everything she can think of to get them to break up, from bribery to abuse. Frustrated by her failure to budge the two, she climbs onto a parapet overlooking a cliff, and falls to her death. Though they did not have a hand in her fall, Savin insists that they lie about the encounter. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Like his WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Dusan Makavejev's controversial 1974 feature Sweet Movie is firmly rooted in the principles of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. In cinematic terms, this means bombarding the audience with an onset of imagery so visceral, disgusting and repellent that it "awakens" the viewer in a Brechtian manner by "short-circuiting" the audience's reactions. Sweet Movie interweaves two narratives. One begins with a trip to the "Miss World Virginity Contest," whose winner, Miss Monde 1984 (Carole Laure) is auctioned off to Mr. Kapital (Animal House's John Vernon), a Texas oil billionaire with an odd perversion. Instead of deflowering her on her wedding night, he sterilizes the terrified girl's body with rubbing alcohol and showers her in urine with his massive gold-plated penis, while an audience watches bemusedly through his bedroom window. She later escapes from her bridegroom, in a suitcase, and winds up at a wild Viennese commune whose participants indulge in public defecation and a food orgy that wraps with a massive display of gurgling, yakking, and vomiting. At the tale's conclusion, Miss Monde shoots a television commercial that involves writhing nude in a giant vat of chocolate, with which she is completely drenched from head to toe, as the cameras roll. The second story involves a woman, Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal) piloting a candy-filled boat down a river, with a massive papier-mache head of Lenin on the prow and a lover in-tow who is a refugee from the Battleship Potemkin. She eventually does a seductive striptease and seduces a pack of children, then makes love to her paramour in a vat of sugar and stabs him through the heart. Throughout the film, Makavejev includes shock cuts to Nazi autopsy footage and medical experimentation footage, some of which involves physical abuse of infants under the guise of "baby gymnastics." Although it has its admirers, Sweet Movie is something of an acquired taste. And that's putting it kindly. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi