Therese and Isabelle

Description

In the French countryside an elegant woman pays a nostalgic visit to her adolescent girl's school, where she passionately remembers her first fiery and forbidden romance...the story of Therese and Isabelle. The tenderness of these two lonely girls' erotic awakenings sensuously blossoms amidst the hothouse atmosphere of their repressive environment. Having both experienced the clumsy and cruel lovemaking attempts of the local lothario, Therese and Isabelle grow closer and closer to each other - until that fateful moment when they become lovers.

Average customer rating:

Paris is not for us!
At least she shoots him and not herself.
Truffaut's soft touch
death-like beauty
Keeps you simultaneously glued to the narrative and fearful of the outcome.

The Soft Skin
Starring: Laurence Badie , Nelly Benedetti , Carnero , Daniel Ceccaldi , and Jean Desailly
Manufacturer: Fox Lorber
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B00000JJHK
Release Date: 1999-10-12

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François Truffaut's cool, creamy-smooth melodrama of a doomed affair sets the lush romanticism of exciting indiscretion in a world where sudden stabs of ominous music hint at a tragedy in the making. Jean Desailly is a famous literary critic and publisher who becomes entranced with the lithe, strikingly beautiful flight attendant (Françoise Dorleac) who keeps crisscrossing his path while he's away on a speaking engagement. He's middle-aged, successful, and seemingly happily married with a wife and daughter, but he plunges ahead with an affair, careful to avoid friends and familiar places. The Soft Skin is not really a thriller, but Truffaut invests it with Hitchcockian echoes of guilt and fear of discovery, and he meticulously plots scenes with the precision of a heist film. Pulling back the veneer of chic elegance and attractive confidence, Desailly emerges not so much sordid as vain and pathetic, and his wife (Nelly Benedetti) comes into her own with her heartbreaking discovery of his lies. At once angry, hurt, and threatened, she grasps at reconciliation while sabotaging her own efforts with frustrated attacks. It's an unusual film with sudden changes in tone that do little to prepare the viewer for the dark climax: the tragic side of Truffaut's fascination with philandering men that runs throughout his career. Fans will recognize the scene with the kitten who licks off the plate set out for room service--he re-created it in Day for Night. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews:

Paris is not for us!.......2007-09-14

A successful businessman and affective husband meets an alluring airline stewardess in a flight to Lisboan. And as product of a kind invitation to dinner will emerge a torrid romance that will become an unstoppable passion, with the expected tragic consequences.

Truffaut uplifts this simple and so many times told before story to unexpected levels. The employment of the camera as a scrutinizing eye, makes we become true peeping Tom; the poetic of the images, the sublime visual eroticism in sequences of enraptured charm, the accurate use of the melancholic music, suggests and warns step by step by Hitchcokian paths, where the disturbed soul of this man never equals to the steeled determination of his lover. For her, that affair means much more than a random encounter; while his wife begins to suspect something's wrong among them.

Truffaut avoids to fall in the circumstantial anecdote, spicing of audacious narrative innovations, where the social conventions really have enmeshed this man and led him into a deep end, due his lack of self conviction and vital determination to admit the consequences once he crossed the line.

One of the main factors that nourish the narrative vigor of the film, resides in the theatrical influence (Jean Anouilh and William Shakespeare) smartly bounded with suspenseful moments that conform an outstanding and original proposal.

In fact, forty three years have elapsed since this movie was released and (with some little details here and there) the narration has not aged a bit.

And although I am not a twenty four hours hard fan of Truffaut, I have to acknowledge we are in presence of one of his best artistic achievements of his prestigious career.

Inquire and then convince by yourself. "La peau doce" is a sumptuous masterpiece!

At least she shoots him and not herself........2006-12-21

Watched Truffaut's "Soft Skin" last night. Left a chalky aftertaste in my mouth although I think it might be one of Trouffaut's best films. Let me summarize the plot:
Successful, married, middle-age academic sleeps with stewardess he meets en route to a symposium in Lisbon. Continues to sleep with her when he returns to Paris as, like most men, he doesn't want o eat turkey sandwich every night of his life. Is it love? He thinks so. My observation: midlife crisis, bored with success and complacency of domestic life. Wife confronts him, he lies and blames her on making a scene, she apologizes, he moves out. Continues to tell her that there is not another woman. Girlfriend dumps him (she is smart enough to figure out he still loves his wife and will bore with her.) His wife finds the photos of him and the girlfriend on vacation. She hasn't had one, a vacation that is, in five years. She shoots him. (At least she shoots him and not herself.) [...]

Truffaut's soft touch.......2006-03-06

La Peau Douce/The Soft Skin is a very pleasant surprise indeed. There's a tendency in much of Truffauts' later work to be over-literate, often throwing in narration that plays more like a prose recital than thought or dialog to convey what he should be doing without it, but there's none of that here. Instead, its illicit romance is told in purely cinematic terms and telling details and, despite the potentially hackneyed material, plays beautifully, whether its the title sequence of two hands caressing in the darkness, a mix-up with room keys as a prelude to seduction or the kitten and the breakfast tray that would make such a memorable comeback in Day for Night.

There's humor and humanity there too, and the hero's painful fallibility on his disastrous dirty weekend in Reihms is one of the great don't-know-whether-to-laugh-or-to-cry moments. The ending seems a bit contrived and unlikely despite being based on an actual incident, but he somehow manages to pull that off too.

Sadly, while the UK DVD includes an excellent commentary from co-writer Jean-Louis Richard and archive interviews with Truffaut and Francois Dorleac, this R1 disc comes only with trailers for various truffaut titles.

death-like beauty.......2005-10-20

Due to its prominent Sixties love ethics, black and white 'La peau douce' shows a little old-fashioned now. Nevertheless Francois Truffaut convincingly leads you through all its awkward complications, resulting from a husband-with-a-mistress. Lets you really feel every bit of tense & pain involved.

In retrospect the main fascination of this movie is to be found in the death-like beauty of its female lead Francoise Dorleac. Due to a deathly car-accident in 1967, Dorleac's movie-career was short -- yet long enough to make everyone regret the waste of her great talent. A talent in beauty, in acting, as well as in dancing.

It's all in 'La peau douce' (= the soft skin). Have yourself carried back to Sixties-Paris, and enjoy the full deploy of Dorleac's impressive capacities.

Keeps you simultaneously glued to the narrative and fearful of the outcome........2005-10-14

Both intriguing and frustrating - the latter because you want to reach into the screen and slap the protagonist on the side of the head. The plot seems to go mostly nowhere, yet is thoroughly engrossing. Character development is not thorough, but situational development is both thorough and meticulous. A great psychological exposition. Unfortunately, almost no extras.

The Radley Metzger Collection, Vol. 1 (Therese and Isabelle / The Alley Cats / Camille 2000)

Average customer rating:

Should be PG
The Films Are Classics, The Transfers Are Marginal

The Radley Metzger Collection, Vol. 1 (Therese and Isabelle / The Alley Cats / Camille 2000)
Starring: Essy Persson , Anna Gaël , Barbara Laage , Anne Vernon , and Simone Paris
Director: Radley Metzger
Manufacturer: First Run Features
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B0002ZDWTE
Release Date: 2004-11-23

Amazon.com

Therese and Isabelle
Radley Metzger's most acclaimed film is a melancholy tale of a woman wandering through the landscape of her memory to relive the joys and sorrows of the first love of her adolescence. We flash back on the young Therese (Essy Persson), who has grown up as the only person in her single mother's life, but due to her mother's abrupt marriage she has now been banished from the family home to a finishing school. Feeling abandoned, Therese becomes friends with the vivacious and lively Isabelle (Anna Gaël), but their relationship grows past friendship to love, and together they taste the forbidden fruit of sex. Based on the autobiographical novel Le Batarde by Violette Leduc, Metzger's handsome black-and-white film (elegantly shot by Hans Jura) is constructed as a prismatic set of flashbacks, constructed not in chronological order but rather along thematic lines, intercut with the adult Therese revisiting the ghosts of her past in the now-deserted school. The tasteful restraint of the first half gives way to discreet sexual explorations and finally nudity, which may be troubling to some viewers in light of the age of the characters (who are played by adults), but Metzger never exploits the situation. The poignant scenes have a tenderness and raw emotion that captures the mix of excitement, fear, and confusion of adolescence, and ultimately the film becomes about the tragedy of loss that continues to haunt the adult Therese.

Camille 2000
Radley Metzger's erotic take on Alexandre Dumas fils' tragedy The Lady of the Camellias is a hedonistic journey into decadence among the chic world of upper-crust Rome. Marguerite (Danièle Gaubert) lives off the gifts and good graces of an elderly sugar-daddy count, treating love as a game and sex as a pastime (she is "discriminating but not particular," in the words of one rival). Sweet-faced innocent Armand (Nino Castelnuovo), a young bachelor newly arrived in Rome, courts the comely beauty and wins her heart, and together they live a fairy-tale romance--until his father intervenes and Marguerite (already conveniently dying of one of those afflictions that strikes gorgeous young women who flirt out of their class) selflessly leaves Armand to his greater fate and sinks into a haze of drugs, alcohol, and promiscuous abandonment. Metzger's romantic tragedy is a fleshy delight--the camera lovingly caresses every voluptuous curve of Gaubert's face and body--with a surprisingly restrained display of nudity. Lushly photographing in seductive color in the elegant mansions of Rome, Metzger cranks up the kink in one scene, a party set in a prison turned pleasure house where dates are chained together and couples retire to a cell for privacy, but balances the erotic decadence with tasteful restraint. The art direction and cinematography are so rich that, apart from the magnetic Miss Gaubert, the characters are constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by their surroundings. But little matter--if the tragedy is less than devastating, the realization is delightfully tactile and alive.

The Alley Cats
The success of Radley Metzger's smooth, stylish erotic bonbon The Dirty Girls inspired him to try something a little more ambitious. The Alley Cats is the simple story of Leslie (petite, big-eyed brunette Anna Arthur), a frustrated young woman in the European jet set ignored by her fiancé, Logan. When she discovers he's in the middle of an affair with her best friend, Leslie decides to have a few dalliances of her own. To her surprise, she falls for a beautiful, seductive socialite and is suddenly confronted with a choice she never expected to face. Daring in its time, it feels rather dated today, as the decadent display of sexual freedom collapses in a conclusion grounded in conventional attitudes. But until then it's a lusty yet sleek look at swinging '60s Europe shot on gorgeous locations and in chic, elegantly furnished apartments in cool, crisp black-and-white widescreen, enlivened by a funky rock and jazz-influenced score. --Sean Axmaker

Description

Three erotic Radley Metzger classics in one box set : THERESE & ISABELLE, CAMILLE 2000, THE ALLEY CATS

Customer Reviews:

Should be PG.......2005-09-15

I read the reviews before buying this DVD and they gave me a completly different type of movie than what I saw. I have seen more nudity and adult mateial in a PG rated movie. You cost me badly, now I don't know what I will do with them, because I will never watch them again. Thanks for nothing.

The Films Are Classics, The Transfers Are Marginal.......2005-05-04

Own these films individually on DVD from Image Entertainment. Nice to have them in boxed sets like this though I must let Metzger fans know that the transfers from First Run are not as good as the Image versions. Where the Image versions are color saturated and sharp, the First Run transfers have murky, faded out color and soft pictures.

Still, for the price, these boxed sets aren't a bad buy.

Average customer rating:

Keep It Quiet [Region 2]
Starring: Fabrice Luchini , Isabelle Huppert , Vincent Lindon , Vahina Giocante , and Sophie Aubry
Director: Benoît Jacquot
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B00004ZCVD

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