Undoubtedly the coolest, sexiest, and most sophisticated film about a comic book artist ever made, Alain Jessua’s 1967 Jeu de massacre is a stylized French new wave comedy that’s incredibly ahead of its time. Burnt-out comic book writer Pierre Meyrand (Jean-Pierre Cassel), and his illustrator/wife Jacqueline (sixties babe Claudine Auger), are visited in their office one day by a wealthy playboy with an overactive imagination who invites the couple to stay at his luxurious mansion in Switzerland. He quickly inspires Pierre and Jacqueline to create a new comic strip character based on him nicknamed “The Neuchatel Killer,” a womanizing bank robber who turns into a psychotic serial murderer. The line between fantasy and reality quickly gets blurred when the playboy begins living out his alter-ego’s exploits, drawing his house guests into his zany, disturbing delusions with him.

Who better to call on to illustrate Jeu de massacre‘s comic strip sequences than Belgian artist Guy Peellaert? A decade before he became famous for his rock ‘n’ roll album covers and movie posters, Peellaert was known for his psychedelic pop art which included the now legendary comic strip, Les Aventures de Jodelle, published in the controversial French magazine Hara-Kiri in 1966. For Jeu de massacre, Guy Peellaert brought the same level of groovy sex appeal to the big screen. His suave, colorful illustrations are perfectly edited into the narrative, visually punctuating the characters as they lose their grip on reality and succumb to Peellaert’s romantic pop art dreamworld.
 

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
The bloodiest, most unsettling coming of age film since Ginger Snaps, Julia Ducournau’s Raw is lithe and feral body horror that turns budding teenage sexuality into a lawless apocalypse of teeth, claws, and gnawing, unholy hunger. Already a legend due to reports of moviegoers vomiting or fainting during viewings, this low-budget, high-impact French film repulses and titillates in equal measure, an authentically visceral cinematic experience. 
 

 
One of Raw’s many highlights is the soundtrack, a throbbing, neon-soaked collection of late-night club bangers, cutting-edge indie rockers and a grinding synth score by Jim Williams. The most audacious track is clearly Orties’  2013 hit “Plus Pute Que Toutes Les Putes” (“Bitchier than Any Bitches”), a snotty acid-rapper with alarming lyrics about murder (“I’m gonna drown you in my pool/I would eat your bones”), necrophilia (“I have sex with the dead/Pussy, I prefer you stiff and cold/Then you’re less of a chatterbox”), and good ol’ fashioned Satanism (“The king of darkness is in my heart/I’m sick of 69, I just want 666”).

Pretty goddamn edgy, especially when you consider it’s the work of two teenage sisters.
 

Kincy and Antha, the ghetto-goth rappers of your darkest nightmares
 
Orties was formed in a Paris suburb in 2010 by twins Kincy and Antha, who may or may not have been fifteen at the time. Misdirection is an important part of this whole operation. Anyway, they released their first album, Sextape, in 2013. They’re topless on the cover, and most of the songs are about cocaine, sodomy, and cannibalism, except for “Ghetto Goth,” which is about their pre-rap death-rock days. It’s obviously one of the greatest albums ever made.

Their most recent single, 2016’s “SEXEDROGUEHORREUR,” is less menacing than usual, but I’m sure they’ll be back in black any minute now. A new album is in the works. It will doubtless be a monster.  If anything’s gonna kill rock n’ roll once and for all, it’s gonna be French twin sister Satanic sex rappers.
 

“Plus Pute Que Toutes Les Putes” (“Bitchier than Any Bitches”)
 
More after the jump…

 
François Truffaut was casting for his first feature film The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups), the semi-autobiographical tale of Antoine, a rebellious adolescent growing up in Paris. The young director had already cast Claire Maurier as Antoine’s mother, Guy Decombe and comedian Pierre Repp as his teachers, and Henri Virlojeux as the night watchman who arrests the troubled youngster for the theft of a typewriter. But still Truffaut had no one for Antoine.

He placed an advert in the Paris Soir in the Fall of 1958. Hundreds of young hopefuls were auditioned but none were quite right for the role. Then a friend suggested the son of assistant scriptwriter Pierre Léaud and actress Jacqueline Pierreux.
 

Actor and Director in Cannes, 1959
 
When Truffaut met Jean-Pierre Léaud he knew he had found his Antoine. The director later wrote that he saw in the 14-year-old:

...a certain suffering with regard to the family…With, however, this fundamental difference: though we were both rebels, we hadn’t expressed our rebellion in the same way. I preferred to cover up and lie. Jean-Pierre, on the contrary, seeks to hurt, shock and wants it to be known…Why? Because he’s unruly, while I was sly. Because his excitability requires that things happen to him, and when they don’t occur quickly enough, he provokes them.

 

 
Jean-Pierre Léaud was a pupil at a private school in Potigny, where he was a described by the school’s headmaster as “unmanageable” with a level of:

Indifference, arrogance, permanent defiance, lack of discipline in all its forms.

Jean-Pierre had been caught with pornography in his dorm, and had often escaped with the older boys on their nights out. But the teenager was bright with an aptitude for writing.
 

 
An audition was held that confirmed that Jean-Pierre Léaud was Antoine, so much so, that Truffaut made changes in his script, as he later explained:

I think in the beginning there was a lot of myself in the character of Antoine. But as soon as Jean-Pierre Léaud arrived, his personality, which was so strong, often led me to make changes in the screenplay. So I consider that Antoine is an imaginary character who derives a bit from both of us.

The 400 Blows is described as “one of the defining films of the French New Wave.” It won François Truffaut numerous awards, and was his most successful film in France. It also began a fruitful collaboration between director and actor over the following decades, with Jean-Pierre Léaud going on to become one of France’s greatest actors.

As for the title, well The 400 Blows is a literal translation of the French, which doesn’t capture the nuance or double-meaning of the term Les quatre cents coups, which comes from “faire les quatre cents coups” meaning “to be up to no good.”
 

 
Below, an extraordinary interview with Jean-Pierre Léaud at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival:

Lizzy Mercier Descloux
 
French Leatherette Mix.

French post punk, new wave, metal, funk and punk.

01. “Extase” - Mecanique Rythmique
02. “Torso Corso” - Lizzy Mercier Descloux
03. “Il Ne Dira Pas” - Etienne Daho
04. “Aere Perennius” - Docdail
05. “Victoires Prochaines” - Seconde Chambre
06. “Electrique Sylvie: - Modern Guy
07. “Pepper Drums” - P.A Dahan & Mat Camison
08. “Sandie Trash” - Les Olivensteins
09. “Burger City” - Casino Music
10. “Detective” - Medikao
11. “Chercher Le Garcon” - DJ Shell
12. “Man Of Time” - Kas Product
13. “Jungle Soho” - End Of Data
14. “Wanda’s Loving Boy” - Poni Hoax
15. “Des Poi Sur Moi” - Masoch
 

 
Our knowledge of French New Wave cinema of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s is generally limited to the names of innovators and auteurs like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Goddard.

But although less well-known outside of France, director Claude Chabrol—who died earlier today at age 80—started the movement with Goddard and Truffaut, and became one of the most prolific filmmakers of his time, averaging a film per year until his death.

A Hitchcock acolyte like his compatriot Truffaut, Chabrol played a key part in mainstreaming La Nouvelle Vague. Although he smoothed out some of the genre’s signature styles—improvisation, quick cuts and scene changes, characters stepping out of roles or addressing the camera—Chabrol retained the sense of alienation that imbued Paris as the Algerian War was coming to its pathetic end.

Dealing in class, desire, and compulsion, Chabrol brought a new view of film to the masses. Check out this scene from his fourth feature, Les Bonnes Femmes (The Good Time Girls, 1960), which follows the travails of four angst-ridden shop girls, each dealing with their drab existences in order to follow their obsessions, whether it’s the city’s nightlife or that mysterious motorcycle man.
 

 
Get: Les Bonnes Femmes by Claude Chabrol (1960) [DVD]