Viellard, Eric

Boyfriends and Girlfriends

The title of Eric Rohmer's sixth and final film in his Comedies and Proverbs series, Boyfriends and Girlfriends, makes much more sense in its original French form: L'ami de mon amie (The Friend of My Friend). In this series, each stand-alone film is based on a proverb, in this case, "the friends of my friends are my friends." Thus when conservative 24-year-old Blanche (the beautiful and talented Emmanuelle Chaulet) is befriended by wild-child 22-year-old Lea (the exotic Sophie Renoir), they find themselves each tempted by the love interests of the other. Fabien (Eric Viellard) is Lea's long-term beau, into windsurfing and hiking, which fills Lea with ennui; she'd much rather party all night. Blanche is besotted with Alexandre (François-Eric Gendron), a ladies' man who barely acknowledges her existence and who is dating Adrienne (Anne-Laure Meury). But of course, as things always go, Fabien is enamoured with the sporty Blanche, and Alexandre finds Lea irresistible.

In typical Rohmer fashion, the film is heavy on dialogue and light on action. By stripping away the veneer--no unusual camera work, no elaborate settings, no pounding soundtrack--Rohmer is able to effectively focus on the empty lives of the modern suburbanites (they all live in a spanking-clean suburb of Paris, Clergy-Pontoise, where the sparseness of the apartments and streets echoes their lives) and his New Wave influences show in the simple theme, the fickle nature of the heart. Yet his characters are immensely likable and their situations comical and ordinary enough for the viewer to relate to. This is an excellent entry into the world of Eric Rohmer for the New Wave neophyte and a refreshing, lighter outing for those who are already fans. --Jenny Brown

The Lady and the Duke

Seeing a film by the great Eric Rohmer was once notoriously likened to "watching paint dry"; in the haunting The Lady and the Duke, it's as if paint has come to life. To re-create France in the 1790s, Rohmer staged his intimate scenes against blue screens where his digital footage would be blended with backgrounds from Romantic paintings and eerily pure perspective drawings of 18th-century streets, rooflines, and landscapes. This cost-effective technique pays rich dividends, creating a Masterpiece Theatre-type world of such quaintness, it seems impervious to the bloody Reign of Terror crowding in ever more insistently from just offscreen. That's a rough analogue for the precariously privileged existence of our sympathetic main characters: Grace Elliott (Lucy Russell), a Scotswoman relocated to France, and Philippe, duc d'Orléans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), her close friend and former lover, who's also King Louis XVI's cousin. As in so many Rohmer works, much of the film consists of conversations marking milestones in this pair's now-platonic, yet still intellectually passionate, relationship. But this time the issues truly are life-and-death. --Richard T. Jameson

Oasis of the Zombies

Robert, a student at an English university, receives word of his father's unexpected death and returns home to Africa. While reading his father's dairies, Robert learns of the obsession that led to his death: $6,000,000 in Nazi gold that remains buried at an oasis in the Sahara desert, protected by the restless, rotting souls who died protecting it. Using his inheritance, Robert bands together with three fellow students to wrest the unclaimed fortune from the dunes of the dead!

The Lady and the Duke [Region 2]

Seeing a film by the great Eric Rohmer was once notoriously likened to "watching paint dry"; in the haunting The Lady and the Duke, it's as if paint has come to life. To re-create France in the 1790s, Rohmer staged his intimate scenes against blue screens where his digital footage would be blended with backgrounds from Romantic paintings and eerily pure perspective drawings of 18th-century streets, rooflines, and landscapes. This cost-effective technique pays rich dividends, creating a Masterpiece Theatre-type world of such quaintness, it seems impervious to the bloody Reign of Terror crowding in ever more insistently from just offscreen. That's a rough analogue for the precariously privileged existence of our sympathetic main characters: Grace Elliott (Lucy Russell), a Scotswoman relocated to France, and Philippe, duc d'Orléans (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), her close friend and former lover, who's also King Louis XVI's cousin. As in so many Rohmer works, much of the film consists of conversations marking milestones in this pair's now-platonic, yet still intellectually passionate, relationship. But this time the issues truly are life-and-death. --Richard T. Jameson