Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 255: Thu Sep 12

L'Amour Braque (Zulawski, 1985): Horse Hospital, 7.30pm



This screening is part of the Scalarama season which runs throughout September. Scalarama is the  follow-up to Scala Forever and Scala Beyond and brings together all types of different cinemas, venues, film clubs, societies, pop-ups and festivals to encourage and champion repertory and community cinema, and be the UK’s widest and most inclusive film event.

Here is a link to the full calendar of films being shown and here is the Scalarama Facebook page. There's a very good article about the background to the season here at Mostly Film.

Here's the Horse Hospital's introduction: After the successful bank robbery Micky hopes to take back his girlfriend Mary who has been taken from him by the brothers Venin. On the way to Paris he meets one Leon, a neurotic and dreamer, whom he and his associates consider an idiot. Leon can hardly understand what Micky is up to but he follows him everywhere and soon falls in love with Mary ...

The business of physical expressing those thoughts and feelings which we sometimes struggle to put into words is at the heart of Andrzej Zulawski’s cinema. It is the essence of Isabelle Adjani’s infamous subway freakout in the director’s most famous film, Possession. However, never is it more clear than in Zulawski’s most misunderstood film, L’Amour braque. Transposing Dostoevsky’s The Idiot from nineteenth century Saint Petersburg to twentieth century Paris – Zulawski’s most frenzied film charts the consequences of a holy innocent cut loose in a cruel, cynical world. Sophie Marceau, here in her first adult role, plays Marie, a beautiful but damaged young prostitute torn between the all-consuming passion of a brutal hoodlum (TchĂ©ky Karyo) and the kindness of a penniless Hungarian emigre (Francis Huster), who is quite possibly insane…Daniel Bird

Here (and above) is an extract.


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