The New Yorker:

This elegantly passionate tale of long-stifled family conflicts is a thrilling showcase for its star, Catherine Deneuve.

By Richard Brody

Melodrama isn’t central to modern French cinema, because melodrama is rooted in irony, whereas one could hardly slip a playing card between most great French directors’ intentions and results. But, in 1975, a thirtysomething former Cahiers du Cinéma critic, André Téchiné, pressed the wide purview of historical reflection into the exaggerations of romantic passion in a film called “Souvenirs d’en France” (here, “French Provincial”) and found a distinctive melodramatic voice. In his long career—he has directed twenty-five features and is still going—Téchiné’s inspiration has been intermittent but mighty. Few major filmmakers working outside studio-system constraints exhibit such a range between their best work and their lesser efforts. Sometimes Téchiné’s relationship to his subjects proves literal and his direction turns plain to match. Yet, when the tension between his emotion and its expression is palpable—and when he reveals himself as much in style as in substance—his films glow ardently with contained passion.

Appropriately, then, Téchiné’s most enduring collaboration has been with one of the great actors of containment and of style, Catherine Deneuve, who hardly has to do anything to do a tremendous amount and to do it stylishly. They’ve made seven films together, including his masterwork, “My Favorite Season,” from 1993, which screens April 29th in a series at L’Alliance devoted to their joint ventures. “My Favorite Season” was released here in 1996, at a time when many of the best French films failed to get U.S. distribution; despite some good reviews and a DVD release, it has fallen into undeserved oblivion. The screening also offers a welcome opportunity for me to rewatch it—as I’d done several times before its release—because I had a tiny role in its distribution. To make a long story short, when Téchiné and Deneuve came to New York, in January of that year, the distributor of “My Favorite Season” invited me to join them for lunch and discuss Téchiné’s proposal to trim the film for its American release. (I loved the film as it was and said so; he ultimately left it intact.)

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