Customer Reviews

Bertrand Tavernier: The Film-maker of Lyon

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I'd recommend this book simply on the basis that there are only one or two other books on Tavernier.

The main part of this book is a film-by-film analysis of Tavernier's fictional movies through 1999's "It All Starts Today". In most books analyzing a director's different movies, it is relatively easy to draw connections between the stories and characters from film to film to come up with the themes that the director finds important.

However, Tavernier's films have such wildly differing stories and characters, that it seems a little tough to discover what drives his story-telling. Stephen Hay, the author, picks out loneliness, doubt, and the importance of home in times of trouble as some of the most important elements of Tavernier's movies.

One criticism I have of the book is that decent synopses of the movies aren't given before Hay delves into his analysis in each chapter. I doubt many readers will be familiar with all of Tavernier's films and the descriptions given in this book are pretty sparse.

Another nit-pick would be that the movies are always referred to in their official language, which is French for most of them. Got to be annoying having the titles like "La Vie et Rien d'Autre," "Un Dimanche a la Campagne," and "Ca Commence Aujourd'hui" pop up in italics all the time. First of all, I had to remember which movie it was, and also I couldn't remember what the plot for that movie was, since the description wasn't that good to begin with.

If you are into non-American movie directors, this might be a good book to pick up. But keep in mind that you'll want to be familiar with the plots of Tavernier's movie before reading it.