Snow Day!

Me and Raphaël Personnaz are huddling together for warmth today amid the frozen tundra so no new posting! Apologies. Y'all stay warm and safe your ways. (You can however see more from this scene at this old post right here.)

Gone Sundancin'

Alright kiddos that's it -- I'm off to the mountains of Utah for the next week to watch some movies and get a backrub from Robert Redford or whatever. My first Sundance in person, baby! Keep your eyes peeled to my social media for updates -- reviews will be popping on Pajiba but I'll doubtlessly be rambling verbally on Twitter and visually on Instagram as well. I'm theoretically back from the fest on Tuesday but I'm taking the rest of next week off to dive into the online portion of the fest so... not sure if I'll be posting here on MNPP any sooner than January 29th. Wish me luck! (And before anyone asks the gif above is of French actor Raphaël Personnaz in a 2016 movie called In the Forests of Siberia and you can see a lot more from this scene right here, you are welcome.)

7 Off My Head: France In My Pants

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First and foremost everybody say hello to the actor Thimotée Robart -- another Thimotée, who knew? Anyway while I don't particularly consider myself a Francophile -- I don't speak French, and I don't really have much desire to visit France, except maybe their portion of the Alps -- I always question that stance when this time of year comes around. This time of year is when FLC here in New York announces their annual "Rendez-vous with French Cinema" series  -- which will run from March 5th to March 15th this year -- and I inevitably find myself wanting to see a dozen at least of the titles they're premiering. You can see 2020's entire line-up at this link, including New Thimotée's movie which looks interesting and is called Burning Ghost. Below I'm going to share several I'm personally jonesing for.

On a Magical Night 

(dir. Christophe Honoré)

I literally just posted about my love for Honoré's previous film, the gay love story Sorry Angel with Vincent Lacoste, so it shouldn't be surprising that I'm fairly psyched to see Honoré's new film, which also stars Lacoste. I've even posted about this one before! 

Proxima

(dir. Alice Winocour)

Winocour's last film was the marvelous Disorder with Matthias Schoenaerts (my review) -- already I'm sold on the strength of that. But this movie stars my beloved Eva Green! Eva Green, so brutally under-appreciated, playing an astronaut! Eva in Space! Bring it on! 

Who Do You Think I Am // The Truth

(dir. Safy Nebbou / Hirokazu Kore-eda)

A Juliette Binoche double-feature! The Truth is the opening night movie and is from Shoplifters director Kore-eda -- I didn't love that movie quite as much as most people did (I love me some melodrama, but that movie was a little soppy for me) but with a cast that also includes Catherine Deneuve and Ethan Hawke and Ludivine Sagnier I'm curious. 

I'm admittedly a little more curious about Binoche's other movie at the fest (and PS she'll be there for both of these movies!) though, which has the greatest actress in the world creating a cat-fishing profile on Facebook. The movie co-stars François Civil -- we are definitely fans, as this gratuitous post attests -- and Nebbou's last movie In the Forests of Siberia with Raphaël Personnaz had this scene in it (cue Tex Avery bulging eyeball effect) so yes please, we want to see this. 

Deerskin

(dir. Quentin Dupieux)

Quentin Dupieux once made a movie about a murderous car tire, and I've followed him ever since. (Read my review of his last film Keep An Eye Out here, which I saw thanks to this series last year.) Anyway I thought that Dupieux working with his new leading man The Artist Jean Dujardin would be plenty to get me excited, and it was, but then I saw that their leading lady is Portrait of a Lady on Fire marvel Adèle Haenel, and I really rocketed right over the moon on this one. Per usual with a Dupieux movie I really have no idea what to expect from this thing's plot summary, which has Dujardin becoming obsessed with a new deer-skin jacket.

Perfect Nanny

(dir. Lucie Borleteau)

This sounds basically like an upscale re-do of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and I am a sucker for that shit. Will it probably be a little classier? Maybe. Who cares? Bring on the crazy nanny! It also co-stars Antoine Reinartz from BPM as the bedeviled daddy.
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Joan of Arc

(dir. Bruno Dumont)

John Waters had this movie on his best of 2019 list.

I mean so did Cahiers du Cinéma but really... John said.

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Tickets for this year's "Rendez-vous With French Cinema" series go on sale on February 20th -- again you can see the entire line-up at FLC's website and I recommend you do, there are even more titles I didn't even get to that look exciting. I mean I didn't even talk about the Vincent Cassel movie, or director Claude Lelouche doing a sequel to his 1966 classic A Man and a Woman with original stars Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée. Imagine the nerve.

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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Good Morning, Raphaël

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We first became acquainted with the French actor Raphaël Personnaz (somehow we didn't take note of him in Joe Wright's gorgeous version of Anna Karenina in 2012 - I really need to go back and rewatch that movie!) about a year and a half ago thanks to the serial killer thriller SK1 and posted about his resemblance to Alain Delon - a couple of months after that he could be seen soaping it up (sexually speaking) with Romain Duris in Ozon's film The New Girlfriend, and it was official - we were smitten. (We made that official by posting a gargantuan gratuitous post on him, by the way.) Now comes a new movie called In the Forests of Siberia, and well...

... if one has to go to Siberia, this is the way to do it. This movie came out in June in France and my guess is it's hitting DVD over there now since we're seeing this stuff online; no word on a US release and I wouldn't hold my breath for it. Any of our foreign readers seen the film? Well for the rest of us we'll just have to stare at a whole bunch of gifs of a naked Raphaël Personnaz and pretend we have. Poor us. Hit the jump for the NSFW rest...

Good Morning, Gratuitous Raphaël Personnaz

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The problem with "ask and ye shall receive" (and yes, I do indeed use "receive" purposefully in the context of the above photo) is that sometimes you just don't know the right question to ask in order to get the answer (or whatever) you want to receive. Like earlier this week I asked y'all if any of you had seen Francois Ozon's new movie The New Girlfriend starring Romain Duris, but if I'd known there was a scene where Duris and Raphaël Personnaz went at it in the shower, well, that would've been my question!

As pointed out in the comments of my Monday post the scene does constitute a sort-of spoiler though, so we'll refrain from diving into that too much in depth (except down below, after the jump, where you'll find some more gifs from the scene, because come on). Instead we'll just focus on the receiving end of Romain's attenion, Raphaël Personnaz, who's well overdue our own attentions...

We've only posted about him one time previously -- back in March at FSLC's yearly "Rendezvous With French Cinema" fest I saw SK1, a pretty good serial killer procedural, and Raphaël was its star and I found him an uncanny doppleganger for Alain Delon. I still do, although it really depends on how he's styled, but people seem to purposefully style him that way because why the hell wouldn't you want to look like Alain Delon???

Anyway I have a feeling we're going to be seeing Raphaël around for a very long time -- the French are good to their movie stars. For now, we'll make do with the approximately one hundred more pictures (some pretty NSFW) that I've collected, which you can see after the jump...

So When Is Raphaël Personnaz...

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... going to play Alain Delon in a bio-pic? That's all I could think while watching the movie SK1 the other night - in certain shots the resemblance is crazy uncanny. I think it was actually being played up on purpose - I noticed a sign in his character's office with Delon's name on it at one point. But still. It's true! I'm not really familiar with Raphaël Personnaz (I was surprised to see he was in Joe Wright's Anna Karenina; I really need to re-watch that movie) - has he got any fans here? What should I watch of his?