In the Courtyard (2014)

the leading man is my tpye

Awesome Movie

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

There are definitely some references, like crack in the wall, but the crack thing goes in a completely different direction. In Repulsion, Deneuve is over the top, simulacra of madness, here, she's a regular patient, no wild insanity thing, it's pretty ordinary, by the book. But everyone in the movie is a bit crazy, in some dark comedy kind of way. Little neighbourhood is very well depicted. Ending is, however, not very good, lost points for me. Something is missing there. But still, a nice movie. Good acting, interesting characters, some weird scenes, there's a lot of cute stuff, but that ending is haunting me. Too weak, to dry, too short, no real closure. Why?

... but it was written in French.Pierre Salvadori is usually a good bet to send you home cocooned in a warm glow. Like Francis Veber he likes to throw two disparate people together and watch what happens but whereas Veber does this almost exclusively with males Salvadori, as often as not, will mix the genders. Here he locks onto two people who stumble upon a mid-life crisis at roughly the same time but miles apart. Antoine is a rock musician who walks away from his band in mid-tour and immediately pre-gig. Not really equipped for any other line of work he tries his hand as a janitor and as luck would have it his immediate superior, Mathilde, is having a crisis of her own, albeit she has support in the shape of a husband. No one is surprised when the two bond and grow close although stopping well short of romance. A lot of the fun are the fruitcakes who people the building and/or neighbourhood. It's very easy to take and well acted by all hands. Recommended.

I don't regret this film I just saw this morning. A powerful and very sensitive feature that looks like a comedy at first sight, but only at first sight. It is eventually not. The unusual story of two fates crossing, two desperate souls who meet each other. Gustave De Kervern is absolutely outstanding in this offbeat - and also downbeat - character, who tries to help Deneuve's one, also is total distress. They happen to help each other in a surprising and poignant way. This story reminds me TYRANNOSAUR, seen last year, with nearly the same scheme between the two leads.Don't expect here the usual scheme of the love story between a man and a woman. it's more complex than this.I highly recommend it.

I saw this film at the Berlinale film festival 2014. It was the international premiere in a venue with more than 1,500 booked seats, in presence of film makers and main actors. There was no Q&A afterwards.I'm not sure why I liked this one much more than "A Long Way Down" (Chaumeil, 2014) that I saw earlier in the same week, in spite of many traits they have in common. Both films are mere entertainment, casting well known actors which will attract many viewers regardless of its contents, neither has an express intention to carry a message or a morale, both will trigger several laughs, and have more than sufficient unexpected turns of events. I assume that the courtyard film had a definite advantage in its diversity and strangeness of the main characters living in the large house, in fact in a micro cosmos, yet not too far fetched and not too artificial, all that working to keep us interested throughout its running time. It has no useful purpose to summarize the plot here. The story line is very easy to follow, the characters are properly introduced and one gets ample chance to get to know them better.