Rosa von Praunheim, provocative pioneer of gay cinema, dies aged 83

The film-maker, whose 1971 feature about queer life has been described as Germany’s ‘Stonewall moment’, married his long-term partner on Friday Rosa von Praunheim, a key figure of the New German Cinema movement who made taboo-breaking films about queer life and scandalised the country when he outed German celebrities on live TV, has died aged 83. German media reported that Praunheim died in Berlin in the early hours of Wednesday morning, just days after marrying his long-term partner at a ceremony in the German capital on Friday. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/kqLpouT via IFTTT

The Second Act review – Quentin Dupieux’s likable meta comedy of actors’ private lives

Cannes film festival
With help from an A-list cast, Dupieux brings his customary mischief to an amiable tale of imposture and role play

Cannes can always do worse than choose a comedy for its opening gala, and the festival is off to an amiable, entertaining start. Quentin Dupieux brings the wackiness onstream with this cheerfully mischievous, unrepentantly facetious fourth-wall-badgering sketch. It’s a sprightly meta gag, a movie about a movie, or perhaps a movie about a movie about a movie – or perhaps just a movie, full stop, whose point is to claim that reality as we experience it inside and outside the cinema is unitary despite the levels of imposture and role-play we bring to it. It is all just one unbroken skein of experience like the endless dolly-track (the temporary rail that lets the camera move smoothly) that Dupieux finally shows us.

There are plenty of laugh lines, though The Second Act would be a bit thin were it not for the rich, creamy thickness of the alpha-grade French acting talent involved. We see a nervy, unhappy guy called Stéphane (Manuel Guillot) open up his restaurant in the middle of nowhere, quibblingly called The Second Act. Two young men are seen walking towards the restaurant: David (Louis Garrel) and his pal Willy (Raphaël Quenard, from Dupieux’s previous film Yannick). David has a date there with a beautiful woman, whose clinginess and neediness he nonetheless finds a turnoff, so he’s brought Willy along to seduce her and take her off his hands. This woman, Florence (Léa Seydoux) is preparing to meet David, unaware of his plans to palm her off on someone else, and so confident is she that David is the One that she has actually brought her dad with her, Guillaume, played by Vincent Lindon.

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