A collection of European T.V. commercials directed by a variety of well-known directors from across Europe and the U.S. Compiled and produced by Jean-Marie Boursicot.

A collection of European T.V. commercials directed by a variety of well-known directors from across Europe and the U.S. Compiled and produced by Jean-Marie Boursicot.

由法国新浪潮电影的重要人物克劳德·夏布洛（Claude Chabrol)执导。希区柯克是他仰慕的一位导演，作品亦受其影响。

This black comedy is based on the dastardly deeds of French serial killer Henri-Desire Landru, who wined, dined, scammed, and dismembered over 10 women during WW I. He obtained his victims by placing ads in the Personals section of the paper. He then chose wealthy dowagers in their fifties. First he would woo them to his villa. Then he would con them into forking over their fortunes. Finally he would kill them, chop them up, and immolate the pieces. He is finally captured after he is recognized by the sister of one of the victims. Landru swears that he is not a psychotic killer, that he only did it so he could continue to support his family in the bourgeoisie style that they were accustomed to. During his trial, Landru refused to plead for himself one way or the other; he showed no remorse at all. He was guillotined on February 25, 1922."

陌生男子自稱罪犯，找上度假中的警探貝拉米。貝拉米一面求證男子的話，也探訪他的妻子與情婦；另方面讓他頭痛不已的弟弟也來會合。貝拉米原本不以為意，直到看見弟弟與妻子存在某種曖昧…

It is based on upon the memoir Mémoires d'un agent secret de la France libre et La Ligne de démarcation by Gilbert Renault under his pseudonym Colonel Rémy. A small village in the Jura is split by the river Loue which creates the line of demarcation between Nazi occupied France and freedom. A French officer, Pierre, is released by the Nazi soldiers to find his chateau converted into a German command centre. Whilst he is obliged to co-operate with the enemy, his wife Mary supports the resistance movement and is willing to risk her life for it. The Nazis step up their activity against the resistance, insisting that any who attempt to cross the line of demarcation will be shot. When his wife is arrested, Pierre decides to switch his allegiance.

In this exemplary adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel, director Claude Chabrol creates possibly his darkest and most introspective work, in which he explores some of his favourite themes – most notably the idea of a deadly threat hiding beneath a mask of bourgeois respectability. The film is set in a small Breton village where it appears to rain continually and where the hours of night appear to outnumber those of daylight quite substantially. This claustrophobic location lends the film an oppressive, suffocating atmosphere, which is strikingly evocative of the mood of Simenon’s novels. A streak of the driest black comedy permeates the film, making it both oddly amusing and intensely disturbing, a quite different tone to most of Chabrol’s other thrillers.
The drama revolves around two men – a hat-maker and a tailor – who live opposite each other but who appear to inhabit totally different worlds. Each man is, in his own way, a prisoner of his own making – the hat-maker is forced to live alone in order to conceal the fact that he killed his wife; the tailor is stifled by the large family who lives with him in his confined house. Each man secretly envies the other, and so a sinister attraction begins to draw them together – with ultimately tragic consequences for both of them. Chabrol’s mastery of the psychological thriller genre enables him to tell this story effectively, using deceptively simple cinematography and surprisingly very little dialogue. Towards that end, he is admirably served by his lead actors, Michel Serrault and Charles Aznavour.
In a career spanning fifty years, Michel Serrault has acquired a reputation as one of France’s most versatile and talented character actors. In Les Fantômes du chapelier, he gives one of his most distinctive and memorable performances – indeed it could be said that it his portrayal of the hat-maker Labbé which carries the film and contributes most to it its poignancy and quirky comic slant. Serrault shows an extraordinary ability when it comes to playing characters who are either mad or bad: whilst he manages to frighten, he is also able to arouse sympathy. This is readily apparent in his performance of the hat-maker in this film – even when he is murdering his victims, you cannot help having more sympathy for him than for the women he is disposing of (with an ease which is more comical than shocking). As the film develops, we are drawn further and further into the hat-maker’s troubled world – rather like the tailor who observes him from across the street – and what we are most struck by his not so much his dangerous insanity but rather his tortured humanity. Without an actor of Serrault’s calibre, it is unlikely that Chabrol could have achieved this level of sophistication and depth.
Whilst the film is mostly focused on the hat-maker, the tailor also plays an important part in the film, and Charles Aznavour (in another fine performance) allows the character to function brilliantly alongside Serrault’s hat-maker. Perhaps the most important role of the tailor is to provide a kind of psychological bridge which enables the spectator to cross over into the hat-maker’s world. The idea of a voyeur spying on another world is a device Chabrol has used a number of times previously (most effectively in his 1962 film L’Oeil du malin ), but here it is crucial to the film’s development. The tailor also serves as a contrast with the hat-maker – one is well-mannered yet a perpetual outsider; the other is irritable yet an accepted member of the community. Although one man lives alone and the other in a large family, both experience a terrible solitude which leads them inexorably towards self-destruction. There are perhaps as many similarities as differences, which leads us to make some interesting speculations. Could the tailor and the hat-maker be two facets of the same individual? Or could the tailor merely be a projection of the hat-maker’s own conscience? One of the most beautiful aspects of Chabrol’s cinema is its subtle sense of ambiguity, which implies – possibly – that nothing is quite what it seems. What you see depends on who you are and where you happen to be standing – much as it does in real life. Can there ever be such a thing as an objective reality in Claude Chabrol’s universe?
Compared with some of Chabrol’s other thrillers, Les Fantômes du chapelier must appear strangely minimalist. It is certainly sparse on dialogue and the film’s dramatic moments are heavily downplayed. Chabrol’s intention is not to create a suspense thriller – that much is evident. Instead, what he offers is a palpably chilling study of a man who is driven – perhaps by the noblest of motives – to murder his crippled wife and who – alone, afraid and guilt-stricken – is drawn further and further into insanity. By keeping the traditional thriller elements to the minimum and by leaving it to the camera and setting to say far more than his actors, Chabrol manages to construct one of his most tragically poignant portraits of human fallibility.

In a small Breton town, a 10-year-old girl is found murdered. René, her art teacher, a professional painter, is the last person to have seen her alive. The inspector in charge of the investigation immediately questions him. In this small provincial town where people all know each other and regularly meet at the Bar des Amis, René is increasingly unsettled by the other inhabitants' suspicions and by the inspector's investigation. Children stop coming to him for lessons. His wife, Viviane, a district nurse, protects him and supports him with her love. However, a self-centred media-star writer adds to René's confusion...

十三个关于死神死亡的恐怖短片集，以死神翻黑桃扑克牌串联起来。每个故事都会出现一张黑桃扑克牌

1984 film by Claude Chabrol

"It is the grim story of a young man who gets Shakespearean-style revenge against the uncle who married the young fellow's mother..." ~ allmovie

This movie is only made of archive pictures: the official newsreels that were broadcasted on French movie screens during 1940 and 1944 (the Occupation). Those newsreels were controlled by the government of Vichy, which collaborated with the Nazis, so most of them are propaganda. Their purpose is to show what the disinformation was then, and perhaps more generally to evoke the problem of the power of the mass media.

Summary written by Yepok

菲利普（伯努瓦·马吉梅 Benoît Magimel 饰）是一名成功的房地产经纪人，在一场婚礼上，他邂逅了名为桑塔（劳拉·斯梅特 Laura Smet 饰）的女孩，很快，菲利普就被桑塔身上独特而又神秘的气质所深深的吸引，两人就此坠入了爱河。
一天，桑塔告诉菲利普，希望后者能够用行动来证明自己对她的爱，而这证明爱的行动非常的古怪，那就是为她杀一个人。本以为桑塔是在开玩笑的菲利普之后震惊的得知，桑塔真的杀了一个人，而这个人正是菲利普的一名客人。之后类似的事情接二连三的发生，菲利普开始对桑塔身上的疯狂和黑暗产生恐惧，然而深深的爱着她的他却无法自拔。

An unlikely friendship between a dour, working class butcher and a repressed schoolteacher coincides with a grisly series of Ripper-type murders in a provincial French town.

飞力，艾丝和女儿Elise过着很快乐的生活。为了保持极乐，飞力决定他和艾丝都可以和其它人有一手, 不过得和对方坦白事情。当飞力嫉火中烧时，计划就事与愿违了，并以悲剧收场。

The opportunistic owner (Yvonne Furneaux) of a champagne factory enlists the help of her husband (Anthony Perkins) in convincing her mentally unstable business partner (Maurice Ronet) to sell the rights to his famous last name. Soon a mysterious rash of murders occurs, with Ronet the prime suspect.

The movies Claude Chabrol made in the first ten years of his career are vastly underrated nowadays with the film under review being, arguably, the most obscure of the lot; admittedly, LES GODELUREAUX – an unwieldy single-word title if ever there was one (literally meaning "the popinjays") – could not have endeared it much to audiences. Consequently, it seems rather hard now to believe that Chabrol's more renowned colleague at the "Cahiers Du Cinema", Jean-Luc Godard, once named it among "The Top Six French Films made since the Liberation"(!) alongside Robert Bresson's PICKPOCKET, Jean Cocteau's LE TESTAMENT D'ORPHEE' and Jean Renoir's LE TESTAMENT DU DOCTEUR CORDELIER (all 1959)!!
Thematically, the film is basically Bresson/Cocteau's masterful LES DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE (1945) reworked for the "New Wave" set – though the revenge this time around is triggered by a petty incident between strangers, making the whole scheme an even more cynical one. Apart from the director himself, the film also finds some choice performers at somewhere near their best, notably the two leads: Jean-Claude Brialy (genuinely Mephistophelean, he displays a remarkable flair for melodrama throughout) and an entrancing Bernadette Lafont (peerlessly epitomizing earthy sensuality) – though some, like the reviewer of the "Films De France" website, actually felt their characters to be caricatures! Equally imperative to the success of the film is Jean Rabier's glossy black-and-white camera-work, a typically fine score by Pierre Jansen and also a clever use of overlapping sound (actually one of the revolutionary cinematic techniques characteristic of the French "Nouvelle Vague" movement).
The plot – oozing with the hedonistic/nihilistic outlook of Chabrol's regular scribe Paul Gegauff – sees the seemingly bisexual bourgeois fop Brialy sending out coquettish seductress Lafont to attract the attention of a young man (well-played by virtual unknown and future director Charles Belmont) who had spited him at the very start of the film. Subsequently, the newly-minted trio becomes virtually inseparable ensuring an invasion of the latter's domestic life (which embarrasses him no end, since he is still in the custody of a strict and wealthy uncle) – as much as they force him into their own private chaos (which involves not only an omnipresent homosexual valet by Brialy's side but a nerdy soon-to-be-wed cousin whom Lafont has no qualms about seducing in front of her current boyfriend, Belmont)!
Although at one point a ménage-a'-trois between the three leads is implied, some of their shenanigans are fairly harmless – such as disrupting an art exhibition with the dissemination of sneezing powder, or an upper-class soiree' by incorporating into the program both a sultry dance (performed by none other than a dark-haired Stephane Audran!) and an eccentric ditty sung by a pathetic ex-vaudevillian lady. However, the bacchanal in the style of Ancient Rome, togas and all – held at Belmont's house, having charged Lafont with its upkeep while he is away on business (in the same vein, Luis Bunuel's contemporaneous VIRIDIANA [1961], would feature a famously blasphemous parody of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper") – has more severe repercussions; this sequence is cleverly, and amusingly, cross-cut by Chabrol with the most formal of restaurant dinners being consumed by the oblivious Belmont and his uncle!
Eventually, the schemer feels vindicated and confesses to having taken the young man 'for a ride' and that Lafont (whom the boy had genuinely fallen for and was even planning to marry) had been his tormentor's mistress all along. However, in keeping with the film's darkly humorous tone (boasting a couple of bona-fide howlers along the way), the coda shows that, though obviously broken-hearted at first, Belmont has picked himself up by the time we next see him a year later and is consoling himself with a plain-looking girl; in fact, running by chance into Lafont on a pier, it is rather the latter who is unable to mature – being seemingly involved in yet another romantic scam (with a high-ranking Naval officer, no less)…

根据艾利瑞·克恩同名小说改编。性格孤僻的富豪戴尔和他的年轻的妻子爱兰娜生活在一起。养子夏拉是个雕刻家，总是产生自己谋杀过别人的幻想。爱兰娜和夏拉有一段私情，这使得他们陷入了一场可怕的阴谋。他们的朋友保尔非常理智，但是也卷入这一串神秘的事件中。最后，一切终于真相大白。导演精心安排呈现给观众一部处处充满悬疑、扣人心弦的影片。