Philippe Garrel's THE SALT OF TEARS (2019) Streaming from Film Forum
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“Philippe Garrel, a prodigy of the French cinema (whose work was first included in the New York Film Festival in 1970, when he was twenty-two), has developed a spare method, a self-imposed classicism of dramatic intimacy… [THE SALT OF TEARS] rises very high with its fusion of brusque candor and unspoken yearnings…feels like a revisitation of the austerities, aspirations, and humiliations of an earlier age, a return to primordial experiences and artistic ambitions… The film also happens to have one of the best dance scenes in the recent cinema.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker
THE SALT OF TEARS was co-written with Jean Claude Carrière, who was interviewed last year by GME president Jon Gartenberg for the Nouvelles Images d'Iran Film Festival in Vitré, France.
FILMMAKER PHILIPPE GARREL
According to Maximilian Le Cain, writing in Senses of Cinema, "Garrel’s films are made up of moments, moments of day-to-day intimacy or alienation, often elliptically linked. Quiet conversations and silences between friends and lovers. And thought. Few other directors have made reflection so central to their filmmaking and almost none have captured it with such unforced grace. It is a cinema of contemplation rather than narrative. He shoots with the most basic means in an elegant, portrait like style. Sometimes he uses quite long takes, always with very little cutting around in a scene and often none at all. Scenes are filmed with a stillness and a patience that do the exact opposite of what most effective narrative cinema does, that is, to grab audiences and manipulate them into a state of false emotion." L’ENFANT SECRET received a Personal Choice DVD Award from Juror Miguel Marias at the 2019 edition of the Il Cinema Ritrovato DVD Awards.
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