Les volets bleus (1987) User Reviews

Well-acted though somewhat cliched French short

[Davian_X · 5/10 · 2 March 2023]

Kinda half-baked short finds Brigitte Lahaie meeting up with former college lover Jacques Mandrea and trying to rekindle their affair. The film is little more than the two walking around a seaside town and then going back to Mandrea's college apartment (the one with The Blue Shutters) and trading a lot of Catherine Breillat-style banter. This is a typical French convention, but the problem is it starts to get exhausting after a while - it's affected and people don't really talk like this (nor is the film caustic enough, cf. Breillat, to make it that memorable). Lahaie is constantly forced to flip emotions on a dime, going from flirtatious to bitter and resentful over and over again. It's an effective trick the first time or two, but the problem is it's all the short's got from an emotional standpoint. The piece is well made and shows promise, both from the creative team as well as the two leads, who each give nice performances. I'd love to see them all attempt a script that had a few more tricks up its sleeve.

cute bizarre short-haired creature

[figueroafernando · 8/10 · 4 August 2023]

The close similarity of this short with the passwords of Rohmer and Bresson is extraordinary. Voilá, all the stratagems of the pleasant evasion of the peak of voluptuousness and eroticism in a couple who, by chance? (Rohmer) run into each other on the street; the perversely spontaneous but believable dialogues where she, Anne, equips her virginity and also the aimless vane of her self-love, while he, a boy who glances at the ladies and assumes that he has been courting for 3 months, spoiled child and gourmet Full of ephemeral relationships, he accepts that the female voice predominates - Anne's domain - as a tacit authority in the fortuitous meeting, and the superstition regarding cards, the spontaneous mood of the couple in the form of a flaneur, sneaks in (Rohmer again). By Marseilles (Rohmer and Bresson) and the romance interrupted to press chance; in fact, starting with the musicians with the guitar, it seemed to me that Bresson (Quatre nuit d'un réveur) achieved hegemony. "Ten years more, ten years less, Please get me a train, so i can escape, go far way", isn't the lyrics succinct and simple enough for there to be magic hocus-pocus? For this reason, lying in bed after her shower is the re-beginning of the ritual, from years ago between the couple who was about to re-separate, and from the current moment in the apartment. Between the four walls it is not assumed that they love each other but neither are they going to make love; It doesn't follow with certainty that she wants it, but it doesn't follow with certainty that he's going to beg her. The last part, however, reminded me of that piece by Michel Deville that so many disliked and I was completely pleased with: NUIT D'ÉTÉ EN VILLE.