The best Catherine Jourdan’s movies
We present our ranking of the best Catherine Jourdan’s movies. Do you love cinema? Or are you looking for a movie of your favorite actor to watch tonight? Surely you have some to see or that you did not know yet about Catherine Jourdan.
Le Samouraï
8/10
In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts. After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him. An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director Jean‑Pierre Melville, Le samouraï is a razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology.
Eden and After
6.4/10
A group of French students are drawn into the psychological and sexual games of a mysterious Dutchman. Once they sample his "fear powder" the students experience a series of hallucinations.
The Girl on a Motorcycle
5.3/10
Newly-married Rebecca leaves her husband's Alsatian bed on her prized motorbike - symbol of freedom and escape - to visit her lover in Heidelberg. En route she indulges in psychedelic reveries as she relives her changing relationship with the two men.
Vortex
5.1/10
Rod Taylor plays a United Nations bio-warfare disarmament expert whose lonely wife (Andersson) has a steamy affair while she's away in France. But soon she finds out the hard way that her lover is not quite the charming and stable guy she thought he was, and starts to fear him and wonder about his true motives.
The Four Charlots Musketeers
5.4/10
This French slapstick comedy stars the musician/comedian foursome Les Charlots, as valets to the Four Musketeers. One of the film's highlights is a mutual kicking session between Cardinal Richelieu, the King, and a monk. This comedy foursome was enormously popular in 1970s France, and they made a huge number of films during that period.
The Four Charlots Musketeers 2
5.2/10
This French slapstick comedy stars the musician/comedian foursome Les Charlots, as valets to the Four Musketeers. One of the film's highlights is a mutual kicking session between Cardinal Richelieu, the King, and a monk. This comedy foursome was enormously popular in 1970s France, and they made a huge number of films during that period.
Zoo zéro
5.4/10
Eva is a singer in a Noah's Ark themed nightclub, where the guests wear animal masks. She sings about a doomed love affair between a lion tamer and a lion. She is approached by a stranger who claims to know her and to remember her singing Mozart which she denies. Driven around in her midget manager´s limousine she encounters bizarre characters who turn out to belong to her incestuous family of ogres. All culminates in a bizarre finale in a zoo featuring Klaus Kinski and arias from "The Magic Flute". Stylish, surrealistic and weird, but you will scratch your head and ask yourself what it´s all about (and why you should bother).
Love and Anger
5.8/10
Five short stories with contemporary settings. In New York, people are indifferent to derelicts sleeping on sidewalks, to a woman's assault in front of an apartment building, and to a couple injured in a car crash. A man, stripped of his identity, dies in bed with actors expressing his agony. A cheerful, innocent young man walking a city street in a time of war pays a price for this innocence. A couple talks about cinema while it watches another couple talk of love and truth on the eve of one character's return to Cuba. Striking students take over a university classroom; an argument follows about revolution or incremental change.
Aphrodite
4.3/10
Harry is a young millionaire on holiday; he takes his yacht to a Greek island, and stays in the mansion of his friend...
Un merveilleux parfum d'oseille
4.2/10
Marriage a la Mode
5.1/10
The main character is a woman trapped in the long stifling marriage in a boring province. She has an affair with a traveling photographer, follows him to Paris, and then has a series of unsatisfactory but interesting relationships, one of which is with a woman.
Love in the Night
5.9/10
French youth drama.
N. Took the Dice
6/10
N Took the Dice is essentially a reworking of Eden and After made possible by the roll of a dice (scenes from the 1970 film were combined with outtakes and additional footage in an aleatory way). Robbe-Grillet was always interested in music and since he perceived Eden and After to be serial in nature, it only made sense that its sister film would stand in opposition to that.
Dehors-dedans
6.6/10
Inside an apartment, a young woman suffers from widespread distress. She lives alone in an attic with a skylight in the ceiling that is her only contact with the outside of Paris.
Pourvoir
5.5/10
Patrice Enard’s ‘Pourvoir’ is a film mainly comprised of images of women in nature, his style is stark and repetitive, shots are angular, which both hide and reveal. There is though a visual poetry to his work - once the smoke dissipates, a sexual liberation emerges, with subtle flourishes in the staging and editing threaded together by Marxist and Freudian discourses.
The Satin Spider
5.1/10
The setting is Les Fauvettes School for Girls just after WWI, where sternly Teutonic headmistress Ingrid Caven vies with Catherine Jourdan, a morphine addicted, fabric fetishist gym teacher, for the sexual favours of liquid eyed nymphet Scyluna. Meanwhile the chaplain conducts a nude exorcism.
