François Ozon’s POTICHE, which will open tomorrow at The Paris (4 West 58 Street). Nominated for four Césars, and a bona fide critical and box office hit in France, POTICHE reunites French cinema legends Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu in Francois Ozon’s new comedy about a submissive, housebound ‘trophy housewife’ (or "potiche") who steps in to manage her wealthy husband's umbrella factory after the workers go on strike and take him hostage.
Do not miss also in April "Of Gods and Men", Des hommes et des Dieux
Starring Lambert Wilson and Michel Lonsdale
Xavier Beauvois’s film, a Grand Prix winner at Cannes last year, is a dramatic interpretation of actual events — some known, others guessed at — that could have been a foursquare tale of Christian martyrdom. Instead, it’s something stranger, deeper, and richer: an experience that takes us right up to the edge of human experience and peers into the unknown.
Eight French Christian monks live in harmony with their Muslim brothers in a monastery perched in the mountains of North Africa in the 1990s. When a crew of foreign workers is massacred by an Islamic fundamentalist group, fear sweeps though the region. The army offers them protection, but the monks refuse. Should they leave? Despite the growing menace in their midst, they slowly realize that they have no choice but to stay… come what may. This film is loosely based on the life of the Cistercian monks of Tibhirine in Algeria, from 1993 until their kidnapping in 1996.
