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Also Known As: The Slap (English), Die Ohrfeige (German) |
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| Year of first release: 1974 | |
| Director: Claude Pinoteau (La Boum 1 & 2, Le Silencieux) | |
| Actors: Lino Ventura (Les Tontons Flingueurs), Annie Girardot (La Zizanie), Isabelle Adjani (L'Été Meurtrier), Francis Perrin | |
| Country: F, I | |
| Genre: Drama, Comedy, Romance | |
| Conditions of visioning: 24.06.2014, DVD, Home cinema | |
| Synopsis: Jean (Ventura) and his partner are raising his 18 year old daughter (Adjani) while her mother (Girardot) lives in Australia. | |
| Review: I bought a Lino Ventura DVD box-set containing Le Silencieux, La Gifle, La 7ème cible and a documentary on Lino Ventura seen by the director Claude Pinoteau. While the other two movies are polars, this one is different but by the same director. I wanted to classify it as Drama but it would be a light one then, and I have seen it tagged with Comedy and Romance, why not, a little. Actually it is the simple story of an 18 year old girl at a critical time in her life, in her studies, in her love life, in the relationship with her parents. And at that age life revolves around little moments of drama, comedy and romance. The girl is played wonderfully by Isabelle Adjani for her first movie in a leading role and probably the one that started her career. A famous trivia is that the slap she received by Lino Ventura, supposed to be fake, ended up being a real one by accident, and Ventura being an ex-wrestler she must have felt it quite hard! About the slap, it is the title of the movie and the moment is short an unimpressive as such, but what is brilliant in this movie is the succession of events and the tension rising up to the slap, as well as the events it triggers, as if it had unlocked the young girl who was apparently stuck in her life until that moment. The couple Ventura/Adjani is touching and their reactions believable so that when things go bad, you really feel like you don't ever want to have a teenage daughter to care for. This seems to be hell. I found the last third of the movie (actually not long after the slap) to be a bit too elliptic, but this was probably done on purpose to keep the rhythm in a movie that would have otherwise been too long. For this second movie that I watch in the aforementioned box-set, as for the first, the image and sound quality are very good for a DVD. It is only a pity that those movies don't exist in Blu-ray yet. I am sure it would render the facial expression of the actors even better. I am thinking in particular about the very last moments of the movie, focused on Ventura's face. |
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Rating: 9 /10
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More than entertainment, an Art.
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
La Gifle (1974)
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I have watched the documentary mentionned in this post on 25.06.2014. I feared it would reveal elements of the third film by Claude Pinoteau of this DVD box-set (La 7ème cible), but it did not because in fact the title of the documentary is not Ventura by Pinoteau but Ventura by Ventura because the documentary was put together by his daughter Clélia Ventura, and is not focused on the three movies by Pinoteau at all. The documentary is mostly composed on interviews of Lino Ventura at different periods, with also a few interventions by directors and actors that worked with him, including Pinoteau.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing exceptional in the editing of the documentary, but it does give a good overview (although maybe too short) of the exceptional career of this pilar of French cinema that didn't consider himself as an actor. He has been rarely interviewed as he didn't want to expose his private life. In the course of the selected interviews, we hear him giving his vision of life and cinema, without any double-talk. He tells us frankly about which roles he thinks he can accept or not, about what allows him to be so natural on screen, about what he thinks of the French new wave, of actors who want to be always shot up close, and of the immense respect he had for Jean Gabin who taught him a lot since their first movie together Touchez pas au Grisbi
Like I said after watching a documentary about Louis de Funès in my post on his movie Carambolages, I am glad to have learned about the life of the great actor that was Lino Ventura.