"Actor: Jane Marken"

• Partie de Campagne | Blu Ray | (11/09/2023) from £16.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Finally released in 1946, ten years after it was made, Jean Renoir's Partie de campagne was hailed as an unfinished masterpiece. Since then, his masterly adaptation of a Maupassant story has grown in reputation to the point where it is now considered by many to be Renoir's best-loved film. On an idyllic country picnic, a young girl leaves her family and fiancé for a while, and succumbs to an all-too-brief romance. Shot on location on the banks of two small tributaries of the Seine, Renoir's sensuous tribute to the countryside and to the river has seldom been surpassed. In its bittersweet lyricism, its tenderness and poetic feel for nature, its tolerant satire of bourgeois conventions and its poignant sense of the transience of innocence and love, Partie de campagne seems to distil the essence of all that is most personal of Renoir's art. Product Features Restored in 2K and presented in High Definition Audio commentary by film historian Philip Kemp Un tournage à la campagne, an eighty-nine-minute 1994 compilation of outtakes from the film Screen tests (silent) Newly commissioned artwork by Jennifer Dionisi Other extras TBC

• And God Created Woman | DVD | (26/07/2004) from £17.55   |  Saving you £2.44 (13.90%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Roger Vadim's directorial debut And God Created Woman is more titillation than continental cool, but it broke box-office records and censorship taboos in its teasing display of sex and eroticism in the sunny vacation playground of the Saint-Tropez seashore. Vadim ushered in the era of continental attitudes toward sex and christened the voluptuous Brigitte Bardot (his wife) the world's original sex kitten: earthy, innocent, and all fleshy curves. Bardot is Juliette, a pouty child-woman orphan prone to nude sunbathing and playful flirting. Though pursued by a rich widower (Curt Jurgens) and attracted to the brawny fisherman Antoine (Christian Marquand), she marries Antoine's shy younger brother Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant), an earnest, innocent kid hardly older than she but far less worldly. Despite her sincere efforts to "be good," Juliette gives in to Michel's advances, setting off a chain of events that ends in fraternal conflict. Vadim keeps the display of skin this side of an R rating, but only barely, teasing the male audience with skimpy outfits, barely concealing sheets, and often conveniently arranged scenery. Bohemian Bardot frolics through the film with nary a self-conscious moment, culminating in a passionate mambo, her pent-up frustration and sexual confusion exploding in a mad dance as bongos pound away on the soundtrack. Who needed Viagra in the '50s when Bardot was around? --Sean Axmaker

• Partie De Campagne | DVD | (25/08/2003) from £14.49   |  Saving you £1.50 (10.35%)   |  RRP £15.99

  An adaptation of a story by Guy de Maupassant which tells the tale of a young girl on an idyllic country picnic who leaves her family and fiance for a while and embarks on an all to brief romance. Includes discarded takes and screen tests. Shot on location on the banks of two small tributaries of the Seine Renoir's sensuous tribute to the countryside - and to the river - has seldom been surpassed. In its bittersweet lyricism its tenderness and poetic feel for nature its tolera

• Les Enfants Du Paradis | DVD | (25/09/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A film which regularly charts high in critics' polls of the best films of all time, director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert's masterpiece Les Enfants du Paradis is as solid a landmark in French film history as the Eiffel Tower is on the Parisian landscape. And at 187 minutes running time, it's a massy edifice indeed, built from a rambunctious cast of characters--ranging from pickpockets and prostitutes to aristocrats and actors--whose lives intersect around the Theatre des Funambules, a popular Parisian theatre on the Boulevard du Crime, during the 1840s. (The title refers to the poor who can only afford seats in the upper galleries of the theatre.) The heart of the plot is a love story between mime artiste Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault) and streetwalker Garance (the magnificent, sand-paper-voiced Arletty). When Garance is falsely accused of pickpocketing, Baptiste provides a mimed alibi for her to the police (one of the film's most famous set pieces). The rose she later throws him in gratitude sets off a romantic obsession, one of several that structure the film, as do love triangles, duels, and tortured confessions of feeling. Thematically, Les Enfant du Paradis gnaws over typically French cinematic preoccupations: illusion and reality, the nature of performance, the indomitable spirit of the proletariat and so on, all made the more charged and poignant when you know the film was shot during the Nazi occupation. (One actor, Robert Le Vigan, was reportedly a Nazi collaborator and disappeared during the filming under mysterious circumstances and so had to be replaced by Pierre Renoir.) --Leslie Felperin