TSPDT

Key Production Countries: France, Switzerland
Key Genres: Drama, Romantic Drama, Marriage Drama, Psychological Drama, Comedy Drama, Romance
Key Collaborators: Maurice Garrel (Leading Character Actor), Louis Garrel (Leading Actor), Marc Cholodenko (Screenwriter), Arlette Langmann (Screenwriter), Yann Dedet (Editor), Caroline Deruas-Garrel (Screenwriter), Michel Fournier (Cinematographer), Brigitte Sy (Leading Character Actress), Nico (Leading Actress), Saïd Ben Saïd (Producer), Pascal Laperrousaz (Cinematographer), Sophie Coussein (Editor)

"Garrel began making movies as a teenager, and his early work that I’ve seen is both gorgeous and the epitome of stereotypical arthouse pretension of the period. There is 1968’s Le lit de la vierge, a very of-its-time film about a particularly mopey Jesus, and 1975’s Le berceau de cristal, in which his then-lover Nico smokes opium and stares blankly. It wasn’t until 1979’s L’enfant secret that Garrel began moving into the realm of reasonably conventional narrative, in a series of dramas that double as family therapy. Working early and often with his actor father Maurice, latterly with his son Louis, and even playing a version of himself in 1989’s Emergency Kisses, Garrel repeatedly probes personal and family history." - Vadim Rizov (Filmmaker, 2016)

"Garrel’s films are made up of moments, moments of day-to-day intimacy or alienation, often elliptically linked. Quiet conversations and silences between friends and lovers. And thought. Few other directors have made reflection so central to their filmmaking and almost none have captured it with such unforced grace. It is a cinema of contemplation rather than narrative. He shoots with the most basic means in an elegant, portrait like style. Sometimes he uses quite long takes, always with very little cutting around in a scene and often none at all. Scenes are filmed with a stillness and a patience that do the exact opposite of what most effective narrative cinema does, that is, to grab audiences and manipulate them into a state of false emotion." - Maximilian Le Cain (Senses of Cinema, 2001)

"Enamored by the giants of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, Garrel made his first film in 1964 at age 16. Part of the May '68 generation, he channeled a revolutionary spirit into his body of subtly cinematic work, focusing on life's seemingly banal, but essential happenings: family, art, and of course, love. Many of Garrel's favorite actors, especially in the '70s and '80s, surrounded him in real life, including German singer Nico, whom he dated from 1969 to 1979; his ex-wife Brigitte Sy; his son, Louis; and perhaps one of his most frequent collaborators, his father, the actor Maurice Garrel. Garrel's penchant for capturing autobiographical details has burrowed itself into his films, yielding stark portraits of intimacy, alienation, and the dynamic between men and women." - Colleen Kelsey (Interview Magazine, 2013)

"One of the last genuine romantics (and Romantics) of French cinema, Garrel has never made any bones about the transparency between his films and his life, his casting of Louis as his onscreen alter ego in all of his films since Les amants réguliers (2004) continuing that autobiographical connection. Yet while his latest films are as rife with uncensored angst as ever, melting in daydreams of death and suicide, there’s a sense that the world has stopped advancing for Garrel—that the further he gets from the traumatic events and tortured individuals that inspired him, the more his unrelieved woe begins to seem merely perpetually maudlin." - Blake Williams (Cinema-Scope, 2014)

"It’s only in the last decade, since the release of his most widely-seen film, Regular Lovers that Philippe Garrel has re-entered the collective cinephile consciousness. It’s not that he’s ever been away – he’s been churning out entries in his profoundly auteurist canon of casual masterpieces every year or two since 1964 – more that he remains a mainstay of the festival circuit, even as the presence of his son, Louis, in his last five films has brought a more recognisable public face to such a singular oeuvre of cinematic introspection." - Matt Thrift (Little White Lies, 2017)

"Unabashedly autobiographical, often shot in anachronistic black-and-white, and very-much imbued with the ethos of the nouvelle vague—whose artisans the director has made a habit of recruiting, Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and cinematographer Raoul Coutard among them—the latter-day films of Garrel are a constellation of ongoing, interconnected episodes that tackle the boundless dimensions (and contradictions) of love from a nakedly first-person point of view. They are, in the truest sense, ​“family” films, set in everyday domestic spaces and featuring a rotating troupe of intergenerational kinfolk—father Maurice, son Louis, daughter Esther, onetime wife Brigitte Sy, current wife Caroline Deruas—portraying either versions of themselves, as in 1989’s Emergency Kisses, or avatars of others, as in 2005’s Regular Lovers, the start of Louis’s tenure as his father’s onscreen alter-ego." - The Cinematheque.ca, 2018

"I think that you can fail or succeed any time in your life, and an artist never improves, he’s just faithful to himself and to his identity as an artist—and of course he goes through different stages in life. Since the very beginning I have made films, some I love, some I don’t love as much, and that has not changed in 50 years, you know—it was the same in the beginning as it is today. I don’t think that any change depends on an epoch, or the times that change." - Philippe Garrel (MUBI, 2018)