The Garden That Tilts

Aboard the SS France during a lush Mediterranean cruise, prolific cinema verité master François Reichenbach (the “indiscreet” of the title) films its passengers. Some are real tourists, others are actors/models, making for a docufiction that is both a gorgeous travelogue and a somewhat menacing trip into voyeurism.

For the first of his three directorial features, Nolot also penned the semi-autobiographical script and stars as Jacqui, the middle-aged actor returned to his past: a place and family unseen for a decade. This homecoming to see his dying mother also stirs up deep-rooted emotions and startling truths about his upbringing.

In late 19th-century London, headstrong young Esther Kahn (Summer Phoenix), stifled by her poverty-stricken Jewish existence, sees the theater stage as a vehicle for escape. Arnaud Desplechin’s third feature, his first in English, presents an ambitious portrait of an ingénue searching for herself through the art of acting that’s both quietly contemplative and unsettlingly tense. A key work of the first quarter of the 21st century.

Ben Hecht’s farce (based on his 1944 novel) plays on the frantic nature of early ’40s Hollywood-spectacle moviemaking by injecting it with an old-fashioned, behind-the-scenes murder mystery. When the lead actor of a Gone with the Wind–sized production turns up dead, a fast-talking—and star-studded—whodunit representative of the era begins to unfold.

Idle-rich Ronald (Jean-Claude Brialy) is shamed by the harmless antics of student Arthur (Charles Belmont) and resolves to get even with him, enlisting sparky Ambroisine (Bernadette Lafont) to assist. Arthur falls for her—and the duo’s deception—resulting in a typically freewheeling Nouvelle Vague jaunt but with substantial sinister vibes.

A highly unpopular boarding school teacher with a glass eye, unkempt beard, and odd smell—whose nickname, slang for “codfish,” shares the film’s title—is put in charge of the boys left behind over Christmas. Full of Pagnolian humanity, this delicate holiday tale served as the inspiration for Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers.

Bellon’s three-part television series, broadcast in October 1974, consists of three films exploring the African religions brought to Brazil through the transatlantic slave trade in previous centuries, with Pierre Verger serving as producer and writing the commentary.

In Agnès Jaoui’s witty, bittersweet film—an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film and winner of four Césars—a discontented, married industrialist (Jean-Pierre Bacri, Jaoui’s life and creative partner who co-wrote this script) meets an actress (who’s also his new English teacher) and unexpectedly finds fresh spring in his step.