Less and Less

A French man recalls his moviegoing adventures at a now defunct titular theater as a journalist for the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma during the mid-1950s.

The 1984 short Barres celebrates the ingenious ways one can get onto the Paris Metro without paying.

Bananas, eggs, and tuna: three basic foodstuffs with three wildly different points of origin. Moullet begins with these on his plate but constructs his film by working backwards and finding the sources for these items and how they reach our plates. As Moullet’s investigation deepens, however, the film moves beyond the confines of a simple exploration of food origins into more political and social realms, not only relating to food but also to the medium of film.

Bernardette is feeling bored in a country house. She decides to send weekend invitations to a lot of people.

It’s summer, on the beach of this little town in Brittany, a man is building a sand castle. A few people watch him. We will be told the story of three of them: a boy, Jumbo, aged 9; François and his sister Zaza. All of them had to deal with the death of somebody they cherished.

In a cul-de-sac in the Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, Leon shares two rooms with his sister Marie. In one, he receives his clients: he is a tailor. In the other, Marie receives her own: she is a clairvoyant. Leon was happy until he learned what Marie was hiding from him. She is actually a prostitute, and Maxime, her supposed fiancé, is her pimp. On the same day, Leon also discovers love in the form of Arlette, a provincial young woman picked up by Marie.

With little or no embellishment, filmmaker Marguerite Duras offers a simple, often wordless chronicle of a woman's day. She and her friend are seen doing yard work, talking about their families and receiving the occasional visitor. The brightest spot in the day is when a washing machine salesman comes to call.

Sylvain Berg, a "professional" unemployed who spends his time hiking and mountain climbing, and "model" bank employee Benoît Constant, who has just been fired and does not want his wife to find out, both find themselves in Françoise Duru's office at an employment agency. Françoise is secretly in love with Sylvain, so in order to keep him close she convinces her employer to give Sylvain a job he doesn't want, instead of Benoit who not only wants it but also has the right qualifications.

In the French countryside it's the day for peasants to kill a big fat pig. The slaughter goes on for a great part of the day as they work to store 140kg worth of meat.

Independent Parisian doctor Annie finds herself in an emotional tangle when she tries to help single-minded HIV-positive patient Laurent and embarks on a brief affair with conceited actor Richard.

Two young girls find out, in the hard way, that climb mountains isn't all that fun that people often say it is.

A travelogue of abandoned strip mining sites in France extolling their potential for recreational use.

The intense and twisted relationship between a man and a woman in a bizarre wilderness, as a seductress accompanies a gunslinger fleeing from a posse.

A man with nothing to do all day decides to take guitar lessons. He falls for his music teacher’s flatmate who flirts with him slightly and even has the same name as the Serge Gainsbourg chanson he’s struggling to learn “Laetitia”. Not so much a passionate love story as a finely woven, laconic film about what it’s like to be just that little bit in love.

Whilst seeking out locations in the South of France for his next film, director Luc Moullet comes across a male corpse. He immediately decides to use this to his advantage. By swapping his passport with that of the dead man, Moullet hopes that the world will believe he is dead, thereby ensuring a renewed interest in his work. Unfortunately, the scheme backfires, since the dead man was someone rather important...

A bicycle race is held every year in a pass of the Alps called Parpaillon. With the energy of a skillful cyclist perhaps as a great tribute to François, the mailman played by Tati in The Big Day, Moullet makes a comedy by pedaling at a pace that allows him to reinvent the possibilities of film gags.