Francine Bergé Movies

A woman finds her personality taking an abrupt about-face in this comedy-drama from France. Irene (Nathalie Richard) is a bank executive who enforces fiduciary regulations with a ruthless, to-the-letter strictness. Irene notices a homeless woman wandering around Paris in a yellow raincoat; one day, while walking home from a party, the same woman attacks Irene, and she falls unconscious for 48 hours. Once she's recovered a few days later, Irene learns that the woman who attacked her was stabbed to death in the park; curious about this turn of events, Irene goes to the morgue to see the body, where she bumps into Rosa (Valerie Mairesse), a bohemian who has a small apartment overlooking the park and who occasionally checks on unidentified bodies in hopes of finding her missing sister. Since the mugging, Irene hasn't been able to relate to her husband and children, and she decides to move in with Rosa, embracing her carefree lifestyle. Confort Moderne also stars Jean-Jacques Vanier as Irene's husband Alain and Jean-Michel Noirey as Murat. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

In Oscar-winning director Sam Karmann's feature debut, full-time novelist Simon (Jean-Pierre Bacri) slowly slides off the deep end. Bored and thoroughly self-absorbed, he spends more of his time playing with a revolver and performing oral surgery on himself than on his writing. In a series of morosely defiant voice-overs, Simon ridicules everything from his grown children who he thinks he never should have bothered with fathering to his wife who is having an affair with an ears, nose, and throat specialist. In his tedium, he becomes obsessed with his psychologist's watch, supposedly the very watch that John F. Kennedy had on his wrist the day he was assassinated. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

With Life is a Bed of Roses, filmmaker Alain Resnais wanted to create a lighthearted tribute to three important French directors, each of whom defined a particular era in his country's cinema Melies (the first French filmmaker to use narrative--his most famous film is A Trip to the Moon), the impressionist L'Herbier (most famous for his inspirational avant garde work during the '20s) and Rohmer (most famed for his sextet of "Moral Tales" during the '60s). To present his chronicle of the human quest for a utopia of personal happiness and fulfillment, Resnais created two distinct narratives representing the past and present, and then interspliced them with a third more fantastical tale to provide contrast. Representing the past, the first tale centers on a monied eccentric who creates a "temple of happiness' in his chateau. There, guests are given a special potion, laid inside enormous cribs and surrounded by pleasant sensations to help them return to the blissful state of infancy. The second story takes place in the same chateau where a symposium on the techniques and philosophies of the eccentric are hotly debated and elaborated upon. Weaving its way between the two tales is the third, which represents the medieval fantasies of children in a forest who imagine the struggle between a wicked king and a brave good-hearted warrior. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

A predictable melodrama, Le Toubib is based on a novel by Jean Freustie about an unhappy surgeon and the tragedy of war. Jean-Marie (Alain Delon) has a successful practice in Paris when his marriage crumbles and he is sent to operate in a field hospital in an unspecified war zone in Europe. He is driven up the wall by Harmony (Veronique Jannot) an attractive assistant whose sunny disposition grates on the surgeon's nerves, or at least, on the one he has left. Then he discovers that Harmony is suffering from an incurable disease and the pathos begins. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Alain Delon plays Mr. Klein, a French-Catholic art dealer during the Nazi occupation. Strapped for cash, Klein takes financial advantage of his Jewish neighbors, knowing that they have no legal recourse. Ironically, Klein is himself mistaken for a missing Jew, a man who has been using Mr. Klein's name as a cover for his secret operations. As he desperately seeks out that man, he learns a bitter lesson about life in the other man's shoes. Star Delon is one of the four producers of this French feature. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Catherine (Olga-George Picot) uses her feminine wiles to survive when enemy hordes attack Paris and kill her lover. The new chief desires her for his own, but she spurns his advances long enough to consort with rebels to plan her escape. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

Pierre Clementi plays the title role in the French-filmed Benjamin. A callow teenager of the 18th century, Benjamin spends a summer with his worldly relatives on their summer estate. An orphan girl (Catherine Deneuve) living on a neighboring estate, inaugurates an affair with Benjamin. In true La Ronde fashion, the girl then sleeps with a landed-gentry (Michel Piccoli), who sleeps with a countess (Michelle Morgan), who ends up in the sack with her nephew Benjamin. Benjamin has also been released under the faintly misleading title The Diary of an Innocent Boy. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This uneven remake of the 1950 Max Ophuls feature from the play by Arthur Schnitzler takes place in Paris just before World War I instead of Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. A soldier (Claude Giraud) sleeps with a prostitute (Marie Dubois) before he seduces Rose (Anna Karina), and a willing but married Sophie (Jane Fonda). A night of drinking finds the soldier back with the prostitute again in this feature directed by Roger Vadim. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

The characters and plot convolutions of the classic silent French serial Judex are thrust into a 1960s framework in this Georges Franju concoction. Channing Pollock plays a mysterious masked avenger who kidnaps evil-banker Michel Vitold, then sets about to turn the banker's friends and loved ones against him. At first appearing to be as wicked as his captive, Pollock is actually motivated by familial love: his father had been driven to suicide by Vitold. Pollock is successful in destroying his enemy, adding spice to the program by wedding Vitold's daughter Edith Scob. In keeping with the spirit of the original serial, Pollock pops in and out of the plotline decked out in impenetrable disguises. As with his earlier horror film Eyes without a Face (1960), director Franju invests his two-dimensional material in Judex with three-dimensional characters. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi