WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM
With filmmaker Brian Chu in conversation with Wesley “El Bongocero” Ferrer and Council Member Antonio Reynoso.

For ONE NIGHT ONLY, Spectacle is thrilled to host local filmmaker Brian Chu for a screening of his short documentary THE B-SIDE FIGHTER, alongside other works made within (and about) the neighborhood our theater calls home, the South Side of Williamsburg. Following the shorts program, Chu and his collaborator/subject Wesley “El Bongocero” Ferrer will hold a discussion with Antonio Reynoso, Council Member the 34th District.

THE B-SIDE FIGHTER
dir. Brian Chu, 2019
15 mins. United States.
In English, and Spanish with English subtitles.

The south side of Williamsburg (Brooklyn, NY) a neighborhood built on industry and hustle. From these streets emerges a young boxer named Wesley Ferrer, AKA “El Bongocero” because of his rhythmic punching style. Wesley was originally born in the Dominican Republic and moved to Brooklyn when he was a teenager. When his father Mateo took him to the boxing gym one day, he immediately saw his potential for greatness.

Wesley quickly worked his way through the amateurs and won the prestigious Golden Gloves tournament which started his professional boxing career. Alongside his father Mateo, who became his trainer, they held an undefeated record of 12-0 and continued to chase their dream of becoming a champion.

It’s been over a year since their last fight and this inactivity is tough on a boxer. Stuck in the politics of boxing, all they can do is continue to train and patiently wait for their next fight. Balancing the life of a professional athlete and being a kid living in Brooklyn pushes Wesley and Mateo to the edge of giving it all up. All they want is a chance to prove themselves in the ring.

This event is a collaboration with UnionDocs, WEREHAUS and the office of City Council Member Antonio Reynoso.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
(This event is $10.)

Spectacle is thrilled to host author and curator Raymond Foye as he presents a program of film rarities honoring the late poet and painter Bob Kaufman. Our feature is Will Combs’s recently restored HEARTBEAT (c 1978 b/w, digital transfer, 24 minutes) a film long out of circulation. About this work, the filmmaker has written:

“As a young film student immersed with the works of Godard and cinema verite’, Will Combs barged into the backyard of the remaining Beats in San Francisco’s North Beach in the mid 1970’s. Using surplus film stock and a spring-wind Bolex, he began to capture the temperament of the Era, kabuki style. HEARTBEAT features rare and personal footage of Bob Kaufman, Jack Micheline and Hube the Cube in their environment, infusing poetry with a concise inquiry into the Beat Era.”

Also on the program are recently discovered and remastered film and video footage of Kaufman, including excerpts from his famed reading at Malvina’s Cafe in San Francisco on December 6, 1974, his first major reading since he broke a ten-year silence, and his 1979 reading with Philip Lamantia at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Poet and publisher Kaye McDonough will be present to discuss her friendship with Kaufman and read from her North Beach diaries from the 1970s and 80s.

This program celebrates the recent publication of the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman by City Lights Books.

WILL COMBS, a renowned visual artist, maintains an active studio on Sonoma Mountain.

RAYMOND FOYE is a publisher, editor, writer and curator who has lived in New York’s Chelsea Hotel since 1979. He studied film with Stan Brakhage at the Art Institute of Chicago, and attended the San Francisco Art Institute. He worked as an editor at City Lights Books (The Unknown Poe, 1980) and New Directions (Bob Kaufman: The Ancient Rain, 1981). From 1990-1995 he was Director of Exhibitions and Publications at Gagosian Gallery, New York. Since 1995 he has independently organized dozens of art exhibitions worldwide, including the first gallery exhibitions of Allen Ginsberg’s photographs, and the art works of Harry Smith. He serves as literary executor for John Wieners, James Schuyler, and Rene Ricard.

KAYE MCDONOUGH was born in Pittsburgh and studied literature at Vassar College, and UC Berkeley where she earned her degree in Art History. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence Colelge. She is a poet and printer, who lived in the North Beach community for 20 years (1965- 85). She founded the Greenlight Press, devoted to fine letterpress editions including the classic Jack Micheline book Purple Submarine. She is the author of Pagan: Selected Poems (New Native Press, 2014) and Zelda: Frontier life in America (City Lights, 1978), she is currently working on a memoir: The Spell of Bohemia: Twenty Years in San Francisco’s North Beach 1965 – 1985.

BOB KAUFMAN was born in New Orleans, and had a career as a merchant seaman and labor organizer before turning up in San Francisco in 1957. He founded Beatitude magazine, while his books and broadsides were published by City Lights and New Directions. His defiant stance against police authority led to repeated beatings and incarcerations. In 1963 he took a ten-year vow of silence following the Kennedy assassination. He resumed writing and making public appearances in 1973 and continued to produce important work until his death in 1986.

On Tuesday December 3rd, we are pleased to welcome filmmaker Daniel Schmidt (DIAMANTINO) back to Spectacle for a special presentation of Kamal Amrohi’s MAHAL (1949) alongside James Kienitz Wilkins’ short film SPECIAL FEATURES (2014). The screening is part of a multi-venue series organized by Schmidt, with companion double features at Light Industry and Metrograph. Schmidt’s last visit to Spectacle was nearly four years ago, when he and filmmaker Alexander Carver presented João Pedro Rogrigues’ O FANTASMA alongside Pier Paolo Pasolini’s LE MURA DI SANA. Schmidt describes his latest series, ALIENATING RESURRECTIONS, as follows:

“There are few dreams I am able to recall years later. Dreams that persist, despite their inherent evanescence, outliving the very memories of waking life which scientists hypothesize they’ve been conjured to reinforce. Dreamy dreams – whose ornamentations are surely boring to anyone besides me. But I wonder if others share a similar grouping of remnants. They are united by their common inhabitants – intimate relations from my life who have departed from theirs. Here they are alive. The circumstances of their resuscitation are never clear, nor is it clear they ever died – but there is something deathly about them. While in life our relationships were often strong – my memories of them loving – in dreams it is the vitality of these relationships which are now paradoxically faded. Aunts who were like mothers, a mother who was like a best friend, a best friend who was like a lover – reappear defamiliarized, of uncertain allegiance – often aloof, sometimes possessed. They gravitate towards some second death, wounded in some obscure, unknowable way. Physically intact, yet spiritually wraithlike, their motives and sense of self are opaque to me and perhaps to them. Often, they seem like imposters who have forgotten the reason for their disguise. They are both alienated and alienating. I awaken similarly disoriented. Always mesmerized by the opportunity to be in their presence, but estranged by who they’ve become.

I do not experience lucid dreaming. I remain without awareness, and without capacity to make decisions. I only just learned you can train yourself to develop this talent – would be cool to try. For now, it is only in waking life that I can stray into such liminal realms. Namely while making and watching movies. Through these collaborative actions I find I am able to at least consciously participate and orient myself to the phenomena of dreams – and engage the elusive revenants within.

Here I’ve gathered eight films that have allowed just that. Films that explicitly and implicitly concern alienating resurrections. Most have at their centers – the emotional narratives of people who experience a sort of demise and a sort of revival. While some elaborate on their initial deaths – the central concern is of the problems and possibilities wrought by their rebirths – both for themselves and the living whom they encounter.

In contrast to predictable desires held by the undead populations of so many commodified fictions – the ghost seeking vengeance, the vampire seeking blood, the zombie seeking brains – these films are instead populated with phantoms who often lack direct motivations and are mired in existential confusion – perhaps seeking identity or freedom from it. They are lost amidst relatively earthly environments, usually in one or two simple locations, unburdened of the archetypal phantasmagoria. For some – like in my dreams – it is their personalities which are illusory. In the pop-sci lingo of oneirology their personalities are the “interobjects” – dreamed condensations of two unlike objects that could not occur in real life. The films’ shapes resonate around these characters with a generative ambiguity. Most, if not all, derive from this a vital sense of humor – ranging from mordant to whimsical, satirical to absurd.

Of course, this eight-starred constellation is merely a survey of a much larger, inexhaustible galaxy of art concerning such specters. Here, some personal favorites – four longer films by inspiring strangers, paired with four shorter films by inspiring friends. I feel each on their own and when grouped together exemplify what critic and programmer Dan Sullivan described as “cinema’s freedom to be a liquid medium—always something slightly other than what we think it is.” A freedom and flexibility that might stimulate similar openness to life and death, loosened from strict interpretations and the desire to define, while both awake and asleep.”

MAHAL
(THE MANSION)
dir. Kamal Amrohi, 1949
165 mins. India.
In Hindi and Urdu with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3 – 7 PM w/introduction from Daniel Schmidt
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
(This event is $10.)

A musical. An all-night metaphysical requiem. Hari Shankar, the son of a famous judge, arrives at a desolate mansion he purchased in a government auction and learns of its tragic past from a remaining servant. Thirty years prior, the estate’s original owner, an anonymous man of means, drowned in a flooded river while travelling back to home to his lover. With his final words he vowed to return to her in the next life. However, the lover, Kamini, soon after succumbed to the same fate – while searching the waters for him. Thereafter, Shankar discovers a portrait, presumably of the former proprietor, which bears a striking resemblance to his own. He readily conceives that he is the reincarnation of the drowned man – reborn to reunite with his lost love.

Profoundly disoriented – Shankar’s stunning interpretation evaporates moments later when he hears a woman’s voice wavering through his new home. Through a series of elusory encounters with the singer – he arrives a new belief: that she is the ghost of Kamini – and he, Shankar, is falling in love with her. She confides this is true, as is her undying love for him. To be united in the flesh – she proposes Shankar commit suicide and be reborn again with her. Then, fearing such a plan could fail, she suggests Shankar instead murder the servant’s daughter – so that she may inhabit the body for herself.

Who is reincarnated? Who is a ghost? And what might they carry from the past life to this one or into the next? To say more would give away the revelations best shared with these haunted protagonists. It might also overly emphasize the causality and chronology of a saga whose harmonic digressions are just as touching and touched by uncertainty and a longing to know and control.

In one such passage, the perspective shifts to that of Shankar’s unloved wife, Ranjana, via her written correspondence to her family. Within the letters she asks for counsel as she mournfully seeks to understand her husband’s despondence over the course of two unhappy years. Eventually, having learned of Kamini, Ranjana spies on her and Shankar. In a simple yet strikingly staged image – Ranjana eavesdrops by standing very close and very nearby their conversation, surely within view of their peripheral vision. Yet she remains unseen. Is this theatrical blocking or is Ranjana herself a ghost?

Vagueness permeates the world of MAHAL. There’s a lack of distinction between the infinite space of the mansion and a seeming eternity of twilight that surrounds it. The anonymous servants, who, as is customary, are reciprocally unaware of the wealthy identities of whom they serve; remain, often shrouded, to perform their roles in the mansion indefinitely. Obsession is the protagonist, ensnaring all in sinuous orbits. They spin, flickering between lonely oblivion and luminous passion, intersecting and then rushing apart again. A building and bodies, alternately possessed and forsaken.

MAHAL entranced its viewers as well – and was tremendously popular upon its initial release in India. An ouroboros film – it is also a provenance. Bollywood’s first gothic, and in a sense, first horror film. It was also strikingly the first Hindi film to feature ornate sets. As Amrohi’s directorial debut feature – he imagined someone beyond the famous performers of the day and cast Madhubala as Kamini in her first significant role, becoming an icon of sensitivity and tragedy at age 16.

Kamini, like the film, is mesmerically and ironically layered – at times authentic while veiled, at others chimeric while exposed. But amid these visions there was a second discovery – one of sound. Much as Shankar was first drawn to her ethereal singing, Mahal’s audiences, and the larger public who heard its songs on the radio – were drawn to this, unfamiliar voice – and insisted to know her identity. Bollywood relented and for the first time revealed the identity of a playback singer – it was Lata Mangeshkar. Thus began her 10,000+ career of recorded songs. Using nascent sonic techniques, Mangeshkar recorded a consonant, almost corporeal presence, within Madhubala’s Kamini. Standing in the corner of the studio, with the microphone in the center of the room – she moved towards it singing:

Time stands still,
The stars are silent,
The world is at rest.
Yet my heart is uneasy.
Suddenly, I hear footsteps nearing,
As though someone were
walking through my heart…

Most significantly, perhaps, MAHAL was the first Indian film to feature a reincarnation narrative. Fittingly, the film itself has been reincarnated many times over. One can see its dark reflection in remakes, homages and rip offs from Mumbai to the cinemas beyond. Woefully unrestored and underseen – it is at times lost, but now returns seeking old and new lovers with its melody of sound and image.

screening with

SPECIAL FEATURES
dir. James Kienitz Wilkins, 2014
12 mins. United States.

CALLING ALL LEFTISTS! The past few years have been a whirlwind: exhausting, invigorating, and ripe with potential. It’s tremendously difficult, when in the thick of it, to pause, reflect, or even find a moment to catch a breath. Especially when “it” refers to the rise of fascism on a global scale, with any number of future cataclysms hovering just over the horizon. But we digress.

Join us, then, for a series that asks: if not now, when? Come for great works of radical political filmmaking, stay for the generative discussions, or even just to gossip and gripe. The hope isthat this forum for authentic representations of successes, defeats, and the messy work of political action, will be thrilling, edifying, and maybe even inspire your next organizing project. To butcher the title of a great film for the sake of a moderately applicable pun: “Throw away your dogma, rally in the cinema.”

UNCIVIL REST: CINEMATIC REFLECTIONS ON THE 8-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF OCCUPY WALL STREET
dir. Various, 2011-????
Approx. 90 mins.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21 – 7:30 PM – ONE NIGHT ONLY!
ONLINE TICKETS       FACEBOOK EVENT

The razing of Zuccotti Park – enacted by the state to quite literally squash Occupy Wall Street – succeeded in so far as the movement, whose nom de guerre was also its central organizing tactic, was constituted within and thus constrained by physical space. From its outset, however, Occupy had become something grander and more abstract than an assemblage of squatters in a park. It actualized as a vital experiment in new forms of organizing and orienting oneself in collective struggle. The state may have bulldozed the people’s bookstore, but the wisdom gained, and strategies tested, have informed the approach of activists throughout the decade – Occupy Sandy, Standing Rock, and Occupy ICE being but a few notable examples.

Crucial to its global impact were the people who recorded every step of the occupation: live streamers, documentarians, fine artists, and ordinary smartphone-owners. Burning Frame proudly presents a supercut of vivid imagery captured during Occupy Wall Street and its aftermath. After the screening, we will be joined by a panel of former Occupy organizers for a candid discussion on the successes, failures, and legacy of Occupy – with the expressed aim of answering the perennial question: “Where do we go from here?”

Michèle Rosier (1930-2017) was a pioneering fashion designer (she created the vinyl-intensive V de V sportswear label), a journalist who worked as editor of the women’s lifestyle magazine Le Noveau Femina, and an avowed leftist. She also had a 40+ year career behind the camera, directing several documentaries for French television as well as a handful of theatrical features, most famously the George Sand biopic GEORGE QUI?, starring Anne Wiazemsky. Rosier’s cumulative body of work is staggering, and the movies bely an utterly idiosyncratic filmmaking sensibility: wryly funny, curious about people, jazz-suffused (with scores by Mal Waldron, Keith Jarrett and Aldo Romano) and forever interrogating the limits of liberation in post-1968 France. While she’s a known quantity in France, Rosier has never before been given a proper retrospective in the United States; we’re honored to show these works in a two-part series spread over November and December, with her signature work MON CŒUR EST ROUGE (MY HEART IS RED) screening in a brand new digitization with fresh subtitles translated and timed by Spectacle volunteers.

Hervé Boulliane, rightsholder to a number of Michèle’s films, has made them available for free online (without English subtitles.) You can learn more about the filmmaker here, and access the official Vimeo page here.

This series is part of Brooklyn Falls for France, a cultural season organized by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and FACE Foundation in partnership with Brooklyn venues. Special thanks to Go Films, Hervé Boulliane, Bernard Payen (Cinematheque Francaise), Nathanaël Arnould (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel) and Amélie Garin-Davet.

GEORGE QUI?
(GEORGE WHO?)
dir. Michèle Rosier, 1973
106 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1 – 10 PM
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13 – 7:30 PM with introduction from Hervé Boulliane, longtime friend of Michèle Rosier
MONDAY, DECEMBER 23 – 10 PM

Rosier’s extraordinary feature debut is a buried gem of post-New Wave French filmmaking, starring the inimitable Anne Wiazemsky as the scandalizing writer George Sand (1804-1874). Born into nobility as Aurore Dupin, Sand was the most prolific female author of the 19th century, notorious for smoking cigars and flouting laws banning women from dressing as men. While her life is storied (she was close friends with Balzac, Delacroix and Flaubert, as well as one of Frederic Chopin’s lovers; he described her gaze as “like a fiery flood” in his journal), Rosier’s approach mischievously and anachronistically engages the limitations of the staid and stale drawing-room biopic. GEORGE QUI? juxtaposes current-day discussions about Sand’s proto-feminism (as well as her militant opposition to the Paris Communards) with the very real movement for gender equality raging outside the cinemas. Beyond Wiazemsky’s coy leading turn, the film features delectable discussions about sex, love and literature, with a supporting turn from Bulle Ogier as stage actress Marie Dorval, and Gilles Deleuze in a bizarre cameo as pioneering Catholic philosopher Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais – Rosier’s idea.

( poster by Stephanie Monohan )

MON CŒUR EST ROUGE
(MY HEART IS RED)
dir. Michèle Rosier, 1976
110 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 5PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24 – 5PM
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5 – 7:30 PM with introduction from Hervé Boulliane, longtime friend of Michèle Rosier
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18 – 10 PM

ONLINE TICKETS       FACEBOOK EVENT

MON CŒUR EST ROUGE stars Françoise Lebrun as Clara, a market research analyst hired by a big cosmetics company to interview women from different walks of life about their makeup-purchasing habits. (Rosier’s original treatment for the film put it like this: “What began as research for better ways to lie to women becomes a quest for truths only women can reveal.”) The process sees her probing questions of femininity in a Paris that’s modernizing at a rapid rate; while Clara strikes up a spur-of-the-moment romance along the way, much of the film concerns people’s embrace of (and resistance to) the new freedoms of the Sixties and Seventies. MON CŒUR EST ROUGE is a bruisingly funny cross-examination of second wave feminism and its discontents – ending in an extraordinary finale at a “Women’s Fair”, with a murderer’s row of Rosier’s collaborators playing luminaries such as Freud, Sartre, Aristotle, Marx and Shakespeare in drag – provoking dreams of an alternative history away from masculine supremacy. Screening with brand-new English subtitles translated by Claudia Eve Beauchesne.

UN CAFE, UN!
(ONE COFFEE, ONE)
dirs. Michele Rosier & Jacques Kebadian, 1982
40 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

screening with

LA FEMME, L’HOMME
(THE WOMAN, THE MAN)
dir, Michele Rosier, 1975.
54 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 19 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21 – 5 PM

ONLINE TICKETS         FACEBOOK EVENT

These two short documentaries (both made for French television) demonstrate Rosier’s abiding interest in the lives and careers of ordinary people, her keen eye for human foibles and her undergirding focus on gender inequality. Part of the series grands jours et jours ordinaires (big days and ordinary days), UN CAFE UN details a small coffee shop and bistro in Paris over the course of one long working day, carefully registering small moments (like one businessman’s very long gulp of his first beer, or a bored child soliciting the attention of the various old ladies who flock to the espresso counter on the regular.) With a sly nose-thumbing attitude for the tired rigors of documentary sociology, LA FEMME, L’HOMME sees the filmmaker asking women from a variety of personal backgrounds for their opinions on the future of femininity – anticipating the interviews with working-class women that formed the backbone of her second theatrical feature MON CŒUR EST ROUGE. Screening with brand new English subtitles translated by Natalia Espinoza. 

SMILE, YOU’RE HAPPY TODAY
(SOURIS, T’ES HEUREUX CE JOUR-LA)
dir. Michele Rosier, 1978
76 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21 – 3PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22 – 5 PM

screening with

SORAYA OF AUBERVILLIERS
(SORAYA A AUBERVILLIERS)
dir. Michele Rosier, 2004
50 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

ONLINE TICKETS         FACEBOOK EVENT

In 1978, Michèle Rosier filmed the marriage of Soraya and Pascal Alvarez in the working-class suburb of Aubervilliers – resulting in a humanist, warmly funny documentary surveying the the entire community and pageantry of the wedding. Thirty-six years later in SORAYA OF AUBERVILLIERS, she wanted to see how their marriage – and the city – had evolved. Screening with brand-new English subtitles translated by Djata Doumbouya.

AH! LA LIBIDO
dir. Michele Rosier, 2009
83 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14 – 3 PM

ONLINE TICKETS         FACEBOOK EVENT

Whether by intent or coincidence, Rosier’s final feature seems a French riff on Sex and the City, about a quartet of women, working for the newspaper Liberation, as they endure the ecstasies and tribulations of singledom (or not). The film culminates in a bizarre twist ending – after each of the group has hired a sex worker to spice up their dull dating life – and whereby one of them realizes she may be happier in a bad relationship with a middle-aged slimeball. Screening with brand-new English subtitles translated by Claudia Eve Beauchesne.

EMBRASSE-MOI
(HUG ME)
dir. Michèle Rosier, 1987
93 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 14 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 10 PM

ONLINE TICKETS       FACEBOOK EVENT

The first film shot by legendary cinematographer Darius Khondji (CITY OF LOST CHILDREN, SE7EN) and anchored by a heartbreaking performance by Sophie Rochut, EMBRASSE-MOI is a slice-of-life drama about Louise, an 12-year-old girl left to her own devices over the summer following her parents’ divorce. Her mother (Dominique Valadie) is a renowned concert pianist, anxious to begin a second life free of entanglements. Her father (Patrick Chesnais) is a workaholic industrialist, distracted to the point of denial about the collapse of his marriage. Rosier’s command of her cast is impossible to deny, as is the brave unsentimentality of EMBRASSE-MOI’s approach: Louise clocks her mother’s newer, younger lover in one brazen panning shot across his naked body. While Rosier denied any autobiographical interpretations of EMBRASSE-MOI, it’s hard not to read at least a kinship between Louie’s solitude and the filmmaker’s own relationship with her famous mother Hélène Gordon-Lazareff (founder of Elle) and stepfather Pierre Lazareff, who adopted Michèle as his own.

PULLMAN PARADIS
dir. Michèle Rosier, 1995
99 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – 10PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 7:30 PM

ONLINE TICKETS       FACEBOOK EVENT

A cross-section of tourists, Parisians and daytrippers board a Pullman bus on a 48-hour journey to Normandy; along the way they all become friends (or enemies) and fall prey to a mass burglary. A multi-character dramedy in the vein of Robert Altman, PULLMAN PARADIS again affords Rosier an opportunity to expose the contradictions (and the comedy) of postwar French society, without casting her participants into facile molds of good and evil. The result is a warmly compassionate, drolly hilarious depiction of multiple anxieties (class, race, etc) crisscrossing at once – and a revealing ensemble portrait.

“Traveling is not just going places, but meeting people, remarks a character in Michèle Rosier’s refreshing human comedy. The actors (who hail from the stage) make up a troupe that revels in repartee — it may not be Musset, but Rosier, who made a movie on George Sand, has a sense for sharp dialogue and the subtle pacts that spring up between strangers. So a kind of spell is cast on these mere mortals, shaken from their moorings, who quit their banality and take off from the big bus into another space, outward bound.” – Janet Dupont, The New York Times