An epileptic girl suffers a breakdown during her first year at university, then decides to seek help from a priest in battling the troubles associated with her strict upbringing.
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Teacher and novelist François Bégaudeau plays a version of himself as he negotiates a year with his racially mixed students from a tough Parisian neighborhood.
Director:
Laurent Cantet
Stars:
François Bégaudeau,
Agame Malembo-Emene,
Angélica Sancio
A black comedy drama centered on Larry Gopnik, a Midwestern professor who watches his life unravel through multiple sudden incidents. Though seeking for meaning and answers he seems to stay stalled.
Directors:
Ethan Coen,
Joel Coen
Stars:
Michael Stuhlbarg,
Richard Kind,
Fred Melamed
A tragicomic movie which focuses on two women and their daily struggle for survival during a summer in Berlin. Katrin, a jobless single mom, and Nike, a nurse, live in the same house and ... See full summary »
The story of how the novel "Mrs. Dalloway" affects three generations of women, all of whom, in one way or another, have had to deal with suicide in their lives.
It is the 70's, and in the German countryside the epileptic Michaela Klingler joins the pedagogy course at the University against the will of her pious mother, Marianne. However her father Karl Klingler rents her a room in the sorority house and Michaela travels to Tübingen. As the semester progresses, Michaela befriends her former high school friend, Hanna Imhof, who forces her to seek medical help. When Michaela has a crisis, she stops taking her medication and believes she is possessed by demons, and her health gets worse. She decides to seek out a priest, Martin Borchert, who believes in exorcism whereas the progressive parochial priest Gerhard Landauer tries to convince her to go to a psychologist. Written by
Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
At first I thought the cinematography was stunning, beautifully shot and the period was captured perfectly - I felt like I was watching a film shot in 1972 and it brought back early memories of the 70s.
The script was wonderfully subtle, there was absolutely no judgements about the characters. It would have been very easy to show the mother as a cruel an twisted woman but instead you could empathise with her, she thought she was doing the best for her daughter and that made the whole thing more tragic but also more real and beautiful.
To me the central message of the film was that life, however short is something to celebrate. The girl makes references to St Katarina who only lived a short time but did many wonderful things. She may not have escaped her strict and cruel mother for long but at least she did it and had a wonderful time for a while.
I kept having to tell myself they were actors. The depiction of the girl's first kiss at college was unlike any other I've seen. They captured the clumsiness and true feeling of the situation perfectly.
And finally the soundtrack - you'd think that deep purple wrote 'Anthem' for this film. Earlier we see her dancing ecstatically to the track when she's finally free at college and then we later see the relevance when it's used to play out at the end of the film.
I'm not sure I'll ever see a better film that this and I recommend it to anyone who occasionally likes to be moved by a movie.
29 of 36 people found this review helpful.
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Phew this is hard to put into words.
At first I thought the cinematography was stunning, beautifully shot and the period was captured perfectly - I felt like I was watching a film shot in 1972 and it brought back early memories of the 70s.
The script was wonderfully subtle, there was absolutely no judgements about the characters. It would have been very easy to show the mother as a cruel an twisted woman but instead you could empathise with her, she thought she was doing the best for her daughter and that made the whole thing more tragic but also more real and beautiful.
To me the central message of the film was that life, however short is something to celebrate. The girl makes references to St Katarina who only lived a short time but did many wonderful things. She may not have escaped her strict and cruel mother for long but at least she did it and had a wonderful time for a while.
I kept having to tell myself they were actors. The depiction of the girl's first kiss at college was unlike any other I've seen. They captured the clumsiness and true feeling of the situation perfectly.
And finally the soundtrack - you'd think that deep purple wrote 'Anthem' for this film. Earlier we see her dancing ecstatically to the track when she's finally free at college and then we later see the relevance when it's used to play out at the end of the film.
I'm not sure I'll ever see a better film that this and I recommend it to anyone who occasionally likes to be moved by a movie.