Event

SERIE NOIRE in 35mm

Monday, September 4 @ 7:00 PM / Music Box Theatre
SÉRIE NOIRE
Directed by Alain Corneau 1979
In French with English subtitles
What do you get when French avant-garde novelist Georges Perec (La disparition, a 300-page book without the letter e) adapts a work of red-blooded American crime literature like Jim Thompsons A HELL OF A WOMAN? From one angle Alain Corneaus Série noire, named for an infamous series of French paperback pulps, is simply an exemplary neo-noir but thats almost too timid. With its archetypally spare characters cruising through a brutalist concrete landscape, this movie is proudly post-noir, post-punk, post-everything. Patrick Dewære (Hôtel des Amériques, Préparez vos mouchoirs) stars as hapless door-to-door salesman Franck Poupart, just the type of schmuck to be drawn into a murder plot by an old widows mute niece (Marie Trintignant). Without a second thought, writes Pacific Film Archive curator emeritus Steve Seid, you buy his worn-out, deranged lowlife toying with oblivion. In an era when classic American crime fiction was being re-interpreted as a haven for ex-hippies and burnt-out head shop denizens, this Transatlantic translation is surprisingly faithful to the spirit of the original. (KW)
111 min Prospectacle/Gaumont 35mm from Institut français, Permission Rialto Pictures
Special thanks to the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York
Preceded by: Trailer Reel: 70s Neo-Noir and Not-Noir