Francoise Lebrun Movies

The hectic life which Clare (Francoise Lebrun) lives during two special days is the focus of this comedy. While doing market research, quizzing women at various locations about their makeup needs and wishes, she sees a young man have a motorcycle accident, and takes him to the hospital. The man, however, is actually a girl. Later, when a racist shop-owner insults a foreign customer in her presence, she has a flamboyant fit of indignation. Similarly dramatic brief encounters, including one romantic assignation, punctuate Clare's life during the two days. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Henri Natange (Richard Berry) and Cecile Delvert (Francoise Lebrun) are both newly divorced, and going through the painful adjustments of regaining a lost equilibrium while trying to keep up with their jobs. Both work at a Parisian newspaper and find themselves thrown together as the paper undergoes its own transformation into the computer age. Along with the paper's transition into a new life of sorts, with the attendant retraining of personnel, Henri and Cecile have to undergo a kind of "retraining" if their mutual attraction is to lead anywhere at all. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Françoise Canavaggia (Danielle Darrieux) heads back to Toulon in 1963 with murderous plans for the people who now inhabit the villa that had once been hers. After arriving in Toulon, Françoise meets up with her sister and a niece, both adding to her tendency toward self-analysis. But with images of the present and past mixed with memories and fantasies of the past -- and excerpts from speeches by Petain and De Gaulle combined with psychological and philosophical ramblings -- director Paul Vecchiali has created complexities that many an audience will never figure out. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Sixteen passengers aboard a Paris tour bus bound for Normandy provide the framework for this French ensemble drama. The trip takes 48 hours; in that time the disparate passengers begin forming a unique bond. Among the riders are a pair of snobs who have decided to "slum it" and take the bus; a country rube; a Jewish electrician and his beautiful black lover; a Romanian woman who wants to see a special mountain; a Japanese student researching dragons; a boorish middle-class couple, and "Mademoiselle Kleenex," so dubbed by the others because she never stops crying. En route, they begin to get to know each other, and almost immediately begin showing their character flaws. That night they are robbed on a lonely road and this brings them together on their shared odyssey. The next day they stop to see a sight, and there, one of them tries to kill himself leaving the others to wonder why as they are carted down to the police station to make their statements. During the evening, the passengers have a picnic on the grounds of a great chateau. There they hold a makeshift talent show. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The astonishing true-life story of Jean-Dominic Bauby -- a man who held the world in his palm, lost everything to sudden paralysis at 43 years old, and somehow found the strength to rebound -- first touched the world in Bauby's best-selling autobiography The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (aka La Scaphandre et la Papillon), then in Jean-Jacques Beineix's half-hour 1997 documentary of Bauby at work, released under the same title, and, ten years after that, in this Cannes-selected docudrama, helmed by Julian Schnabel (Basquiat) and adapted from the memoir by Ronald Harwood (Cromwell). The Schnabel/Harwood picture follows Bauby's story to the letter -- his instantaneous descent from a wealthy and congenial playboy and the editor of French Elle, to a bed-bound, hospitalized stroke victim with an inactive brain stem that made it impossible for him to speak or move a muscle of his body. This prison, as it were, became a kind of "diving bell" for Bauby -- one with no means of escape. With the editor's mind unaffected, his only solace lay in the "butterfly" of his seemingly depthless fantasies and memories. Because of Bauby's physical restriction, he only possessed one channel for communication with the outside world: ocular activity. By moving his eyes and blinking, he not only began to interact again with the world around him, but -- astonishingly -- authored the said memoir via a code used to signify specific letters of the alphabet. In Schnabel's picture, Mathieu Amalric tackles the difficult role of Bauby; the film co-stars Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze, Anne Consigny, and Patrick Chesnais. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

Meet the Celliers: despite their appearances as an ordinary and seemingly unremarkable French family, a host of severe dysfunctions linger just beneath the surface that continue to upset their lives and threaten to tear everyone apart. Patriarch Henry (Patrick Chesnais), an ex-corporate manager, evinces signs of extreme, multi-leveled regression; his wife Mady (Charlotte Rampling), a sexagenarian housewife, spreads wicked gossip about their two girls; daughter Alice (Mathilde Seigner, still rebounding from two abortions, obsessively paints drug-addled Madonnas; and that's only the beginning. The family's future takes an unusual turn when a mysterious stranger, the jaded, loner policeman Jacques (Olivier Marchal) turns up and wields dramatic influence over everyone. This newcomer succeeds in drawing out long buried neuroses and hang-ups and exacerbating virtually every conflict in the household. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

A man dealing with a variety of crises learns his brother may have even more troubles than he does in this drama from director Denis Dercourt. Mathieu Guibert (Vincent Perez) is a musician who has sunk into a swamp of anxiety and depression, aggravated by a difficult relationship with his booking agent and former wife Jeanne (Anne Marivin) and the news that his mother (Francoise Lebrun) has been diagnosed with cancer. When Mathieu's mother warns him that his brother Paul (Jeremie Renier) has developed some strange hobbies, Mathieu looks in on him and learns Paul has joined a group that reenacts military campaigns from the era of Napoleon. Mathieu regards Paul's new pastime as eccentric but not dangerous until he meets a self-proclaimed Captain (Aurelien Recoing) who challenges Mathieu to a duel -- using real weapons. Demain des l'aube (aka Tomorrow At Dawn) was an official selection at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, where it was screened as part of the "Un Certain Regard" program. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide