I Am Love
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Italy 2009 119min
04/02/11 8:00pm
London River
Director: Arched Bouchareb
UK 2009 88min
01/03/11 8:00pm-this is an error. The film will screen on 4/03/2011. Apologies for any confusion caused.
Heartbreaker
Director: Pascal Chammies
France 2010 104min
01/04/11 8:00pm
All films 7.00
(this includes 1 euro daily membership)
Subtitles and a hearing loop will be provided at all shows.
All shows subject to change.
Newcastle West Film Club
Despond Complex, Gortboy, Newcastle West
Phone: 087.687.7970
Special Thanks:
West Limerick Resources,
West Limerick Community
Development Project,
Desmond Complex
Access Cinema
Heartbreaker
Director: Pascal Chammies
France 2010 104min
01/04/11 8:00pm
Pascal Chaumeil makes a fantastic feature debut with the irresistible high-concept romantic comedy Heartbreaker, starring some of France’s most acclaimed stars, Romain Duris (The Beat That My Heart Skipped, TFF ’05) and César Award winner Vanessa Paradis (Girl on the Bridge). Alex (Duris), his sister (Julie Ferrier), and her husband (François Damiens) have a budding young business: They break hearts for a living. More specifically, they are hired to split up couples who don’t realize that they’re just not meant for one another. Who hires them? Concerned friends or over-protective family members keep them busy. But the handsome and charming Alex and his team have met the toughest couple yet, and their undefeated record—not to mention a huge payday—hangs in the balance. The mark is Juliette (Paradis), a happily engaged no-nonsense woman about to be hitched to the perfect guy. With their schemes having little effect on the impenetrable Juliette, the clock is ticking to her wedding day….
Shot in the glamour and whimsy of Monte Carlo, this charming and unique romantic comedy will have audiences buckling with laughter. Chaumeil beautifully illustrates that love and laughter are the best universal languages. – Genna Terranova / Tribeca Film Festival 2010
London River
Director: Arched Bouchareb
UK 2009 88min
01/03/11 8:00pm
Cities push strangers together, at times tragically, as in the London bombings of July 7, 2005. As hundreds went missing in the confusion of the aftermath, family and friends posted flyers all over the city with pictures of the loved ones they sought. London River moves surely toward that heartbreaking moment, but it begins on the peaceful isle of Guernsey.
Brenda Blethyn plays Mrs. Sommers, a farming woman with a simple rural routine. When her regular calls to her city-dwelling daughter go unanswered, she crosses the English Channel into the throng of north London. At first, news of the terror attacks are mere background noise to her, but as she continues to search fruitlessly for her daughter, and the unfamiliarity of her daughter’s polyglot, predominately Muslim neighbourhood begins to unsettle her, fear sets in.
At the same time, Ousmane (Sotigui Kouyaté has travelled from rural France to London to search for his son, also missing since the attacks. An African farm worker, he is equally at sea in the city. Ousmane and Elisabeth meet by chance, but it soon dawns on them that his son and her daughter were roommates, and maybe more.
Rachid Bouchareb, whose last film was the Second World War epic Indigènes, directs this more intimate story with frank tenderness. The film gathers great emotion as these two parents search for their missing children in a traumatized city, but it does so without a hint of false sentiment. Bouchareb’s camera is especially attentive to how worry and loss play on the faces of his actors, with Blethyn giving her best performance since Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies and the great Malian actor Kouyaté contrasting her quivering concern with grave calm.
Even as Bouchareb shows two strangers responding to the horror that brought them together, his portrait of London offers surprising hope. This is a city where the everyday collisions of cultures produce not only conflict but possibility. – Cameron Bailey / Toronto International Film Festival 2009
I Am Love
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Italy 2009 119min
04/02/11 8:00pm
The polished rooms of a Milanese villa ignite with anxious activity as the wealthy industrial family, the Recchis, prepare to celebrate the birthday of their patriarch. It is an occasion designed to ensconce family traditions—the handsome grandson, Edoardo, introduces his new girlfriend; his sister presents another piece of her artwork to her grandfather; and the grandfather, knowing this is his last birthday, names the successor to his empire. As the refined familial machinations unfold, the woman of the house, Emma Recchi (Swinton), skates along the tight seams of the family, exuding elegance and uncertain turbulence. Change is like a fog at sea that quickly consumes the land.
A feast for the senses, Luca Guadagnino’s magnificent film I Am Love possesses a vibrant and formally irreverent style that luminously articulates its themes of passion and constraint. Swinton turns in a stunning performance as the central muse of a tale about the irresistible draw of forbidden passion and the bittersweet victory of liberation from the constrictions of wealth and power. – 2009 Sundance Film Festival Programme
NCW Film Club 