5 Off My Head: French Kisses For Everybody

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Did that photograph of Raphaël Personnaz grab your attention? I feel as if that photograph of Raphaël Personnaz might've grabbed your attention. It grabs mine! And now that we're all good and grabbed, here's the good word - the ever wonderful Film Society of Lincoln Center here in NYC has just announced the full line-up for the annual awesomeness that is their "Rendezvous with French Cinema" series, and it's a doozy. You can see the entire line-up right here - it runs for the first two weeks of March - but I'm gonna highlight five titles that are grabbing me the hardest.

Frantz (Francois Ozon) - It's Ozon, period. I'm there. But I've been wanting to see Frantz for several months even besides, thanks to the trailer full of a shirtless mustachioed Pierre Niney running around. Watch the trailer here, with bonus gifs. 

And bonus: Niney also co-stars in the Closing Night film The Odyssey, which stars Lambert Wilson as Jacques Cousteau...

... Niney plays Lambert's son and Audrey Tatou plays his wife. The funny thing that made me laugh about this movie is I looked up its writer-director, a man named Jérôme Salle, to see what else he'd done and wham, even the director is hot:

I love the French. Anyway Salle will be there for a Q&A with The Odyssey, and Francios Ozon will be there for a Q&A with Frantz too.

Raw (Julia Ducournau) - This is the last title I expected to see popping up here in this series and I let out an audible gasp when it saw it was - this cannibal comedy has been making people literally pass out and get sick at film festivals for months now, so naturally I've been clamoring for it and clamoring for it. 

Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello) - I know a lot of people think that Bonello's last movie, 2014's fashion biopic Saint Laurent, is too long and self-indulgent, but I hate your dumb face if you think so - it's glorious. I saw it three times in the theater and I could've gone every night for a month. So whatever he did next I was gonna be excited about, but FSLC's write-up of this movie has got me literally goose-bumping. Let me just cut and paste because HELL YES:

"The audacious new film from Bertrand Bonello (Saint Laurent) unfolds in two mesmerizing segments. The first is a precision-crafted thriller, following a multi-ethnic group of millennial radicals as they carry out a mass-scale terrorist attack on Paris. The second—in which the perpetrators hide out in the consumerist mecca of a luxury department store—is the director’s coup, raising provocative questions about everything that came before. Bonello stages his apocalyptic vision with stylishly roving camerawork, blasts of hip-hop, and a lip-synced performance to Shirley Bassey’s “My Way.” This is edgy, risk-taking filmmaking that is sure to ignite debate. "

In the Forest of Siberia (Safy Nebbou) - And we get to Raphaël Personnaz, as promised! Raphaël, who we've been crushing on ever since we first saw him in a movie at the 2015 edition of Rendezvous (you'll really want to click on this link here because we have been thorough with our love), stars as a young dude who isolates himself in the wilderness... aka an excuse to stare at a man as gorgeous as Raphaël Personnaz framed against white snow while staring plaintively. I'm there. Oh and I should mention he also walks around the snow buck naked, as captured by us already in this post from October. Seeing that on the big screen? I'm REALLY there.

It's a shame I'm limiting myself to just five titles because there are even more I want to see -- Gaspard Ulliel in The Dancer! Marion Cotillard and Louis Garrel in From the Land of the Moon! Natalie Portman as a 1930s spiritualist in Planetarium!!! Basically just say goodbye to me for the first two weeks of March, is what I am saying.

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