Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Josephina Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

TxMike I saw this movie for young actress Ludivine Sagnier who plays the title character, Lili, a young girl who happens upon a group vacationing at a summer inn.The story is mostly about Jean-Pierre Marielle as Simon Marceaux, a passionate and sometimes angry young man who aspires to be a film-maker. His mother Mado has a boyfriend Brice who happens to be a well-known film-maker, but Simon doesn't respect either one of them, because in his eyes they have sold out to commercial interests, making films only to make money.The movie has one scene of nudity, of Sagnier, during the first 2 minutes. I only mention this because it seems like it was put in just to have a nude scene, although the love making did contribute to the story.The stay at the inn was tumultuous, and it did lead to Simon writing his script, based on his family, Lili, and others in the interactions that transpired.

moimoichan6 The most annoying thing about french movies about cinema is certainly their need for self-criticism. By doing so, they think they can hide themselves from any other criticism. It's exactly like when someone tells you - with an ironic intonation - all his major flaws, only in order to be contradict. But showing your flaws is not suppressing them.And so it goes with Claude Miller's "La Petite Lili". This movie is a naturalist drama, where you can only watch "actors playing their parts", and who speak by "mots d'auteurs", trying to reach by them a certain "psychological truth". Furthermore, there're indeed an impression of constant semi-failure in all the scene of the movie, even in the one where a character says so. And, once again, it is not because all this is underlines by the movie itself that it's not true.But the movie seems better than that and manage to get over all the clichés of a certain french "cinema d'auteur" -with the DV in bonus. Maybe because Proust's shadow, more than Tcheckov, seems to be everywhere in the movie. The writer is directly quote twice in the movie. The firth evocation - more of an invocation by the way - is made by Brice, the conventional director, who, in order to seduce the "jeune fille en fleur" Lili, quotes "Les plaisirs et les jours", where he found "something beautiful about the desire's angst". This sentence, of course, perfectly fits with the preoccupation of Lili, tortured double of Anne Baxter in Mankiewiictz's "All about Eve". Later on, Simon - the great Jean-Pierre Marielle - looking for something to argue with his doctor he can't stand, says to him that his illness comes from intelligence, and therefore, he needs an intelligent doctor to cure him. This sentence is a reminiscence of what's Marcel told to the Doctor Cottar in "In search of lost time". Of course, for it's hard to establish one and only direction for the movie, you can reproach to Miller to use as many cultural references as possible - Tchekhov, Proust, Mankiewicz - in order to satisfied his intellectual spectators. However, the Proust's way goes beyond Lili's "Desire's angst", and of all the characters, and gives birth to strange scenes in the second part of the movie, where the events of the first one, like in Proust's, are lived a second time by memory and artistic creation. It even reminds me of Eustache and the shooting of "La Maman et la putain".Everyone tries to transcend his own flaws, his pitiful routine, his ridiculous past and present to transform them in artistic energy - and especially Lili. Meanwhile, Simon meets Michel Piccoli, his fictional double - another proustian theme - and strangely walks in a foreign and familiarly stage, the artistic copy of his holiday's house. You can then interprets the movie as an old man's dream, the search of lost time of a man who never lives anything, but who sees himself as an artist through his son. Because it's also in their memories that the characters walks in this second part. They live their life once again, but changed by art, which makes them unrecognizable, and certainly more true than the little family drama they lived four years ago. The movie becomes really good in this repetition, which almost belong to the fantastic, because, as in Proust's, art gives birth to a memory which is more real than art, and life becomes then its own ghost.

winter-49 The film starts off a little awkwardly. I wasn't quite sure where it was going or if I wanted to go with it, but like all great films it slowly got under my skin. By the second half I was totally engaged and rate it right up there with my favourites. Like Antonioni's, The Dreamers, this film captures the awkwardness and passion of being young but also offers a reflection on growing older. This film is not for people looking for typical Hollywood fare. It a classic European film that draws you slowly into these characters lives. The film takes it's time to get where it's going, but when you get there you're glad you went along for the ride.

noralee "La Petite Lili" is a delightful, visually enticing reinterpretation of Chekhov's "The Seagull" through a very Gallic sensibility, similar to how "Clueless" updated and Americanized Austen's "Emma."While retaining most of the original dialogue and plot as a droll commentary on the more things change the more they stay the same, co-writer/director Claude Miller cleverly updates the artistic medium of debate from literature to film and uses his visual powers to very sensually illustrate the sub-text that in most productions is stifled under 19th century Russian costumes. Because for all the high falultin' talk of aesthetics and generational conflict, and intellectual art vs. commercial pandering, lust is the primary motivator. Essentially, all the men are led around by their genitals and the women are empowered by controlling them (and it was suspenseful as to which of the competing women would succeed at it for the long run as to whether any of the men could remain faithful to them). For all their intellectual pretensions, all the characters are ruled by their emotions. Miller wonderfully sets us up for the hot indolence of a country home weekend with a nude nubile Ludivine Sagnier, triggering a much more more effective mise en scene than Bernardo Bertolucci did in "Stealing Beauty." The effect Sagnier has on all the gathered extended family members is palpable and her brazen manipulations are consistent through to the ironic conclusion. I thought through most of the movie that the director was possibly unaware of just how equally visually mesmerizing her counterpart Robinson Stévenin is on screen, as only one character responds to him, until I saw that James Dean is thanked in the acknowledgments and realized that Miller was using this brooding hunk as an archetype as well (his one final smile is almost a shock). The last act is a culminating commentary on Chekhov's jarring denouement, claiming that "this is how it should have turned out." Miller softens some of the punishing sexism of the original while putting together a film-within-a-film like Hamlet's play-within-a-play that revenges on the ex-girlfriend, the mother, the mother's lover, etc. full of both comedy and tension. The sub-titles are many times white on white for difficult reading.