Jean-Yves Dubois Movies

Christophe Blanc's coming-of-age film Une Grande Fille Comme Toi (A Big Girl Like You) charts the life lessons learned by a young girl living on her own in Paris. Sabine (Mercedes Cecchetto) is a large-chested, attractive 16-year-old attending a catering school. Her natural rebelliousness, along with her zest for sex, leads to her being expelled. She goes to Paris where she soaks up the party scene, but rarely worries about everyday concerns like a job. After fielding an offer to make a pornographic movie, Sabine begins to examine how she will fit into the world. A Big Girl Like You screened at the Berlin Film Festival. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi

In this comedic slice-of-life, a young man who has been away for a long time comes back home to visit his mother, an egocentric literary critic consumed by the world of books. His sister is pretty much wrapped up in herself, his father is a journalist and somewhat of a dreamer, in short, no one in his family is prepared to help him confront the major trauma of his childhood: the suicide of his brother. As the story unfolds, the young man faces these personalities in a series of humorous interludes (i.e., "shut up and eat your soup," as the title suggests in French, seems to summarize the family's attitude to his queries). Director Mathieu Amalric has a good sense of natural, human interactions that carry this film beyond the limitations of its low budget and limited, four-week shooting schedule. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

In this charming, semi-autobiographical look at his politicized past, director Gerard Mordillat focuses on the ironic, the wistful, and the sometimes ludicrous events that spin off from the Communist/anarchist upbringing of his main character, Maurice Decques (François Cluzet). Maurice's tendency to swing over to the bourgeosie in his adult career as a caterer to social gatherings of varying stature is also reflected in the woman he marries - a Czech whose family chose Paris over Moscow "because the USSR has concentration camps" as she told her shocked Communist father-in-law. When Maurice is caught in the 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, the officer who hauls him off is soon recognized as an old childhood buddy, and instead of heading to jail, the policeman/friend takes Maurice home. As the police van drives out of view, the two buddies are seen as young kids, sitting on the hood of a car and dreaming about the future. These flashbacks to his childhood occur throughout the film, with Maurice sometimes walking into and out of the scenes, as though there were no gap in time at all. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi