From TIFF, with love: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina in Pierrot le fou, playing at the Lightbox on August 10.

TIFF Cinematheque presents: Summer in France
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
July 13–September 2
Tickets $12 each

Going one better than Woody Allen’s late-night jaunts to the Paris of the Lost Generation, TIFF’s latest retrospective is a summer-long excursion, spanning 50 years of landmark French filmmaking. Participation in TIFF’s screening series is also markedly more convenient than doing things Midnight in Paris style, given that time-travelling vintage town cars are a rarity around these parts. To partake, you’ll simply need to visit the Lightbox, where, between July 13 and September 2, Summer in France will showcase a bountiful selection of bona fide classics from some of cinema’s most celebrated names.

Encompassing everything from the epochal, poetic realist masterpieces of Jean Renoir (Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game), to the iconoclastic pillars of the Nouvelle Vague (Breathless, The 400 Blows), to rarely screened late-career works from the likes of Maurice Pialat and Eric Rohmer (Van Gogh, Le Rayon vert), TIFF’s programmers have assembled an eclectic assortment of treasures, with plenty on offer for neophytes and cinephiles alike.

Class struggle, cannibalism, and cataclysmic car wrecks. All in a Weekend's work for Jean-Luc Godard.

Where recommendations are concerned, we’re spoiled for choice, and, in truth, it would be hard to go too far wrong given the pedigree of the available picks. That said, we’re particularly keen on Weekend (August 16, 6:30 p.m.), which will screen with an introduction from TIFF head honcho Piers Handling. Featuring Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc as a mordantly amoral bourgeois couple who set out on cinema’s most calamitous country drive, Jean-Luc Godard’s caustic consumerist satire has lost none of its edge—nor any of its relevance—since its 1967 debut.

For those of a gentler sensibility, Anges Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (August 20, 6:30 p.m.) is as graceful an effort as any entry in the New Wave canon, as well as a uniquely female take on the capricious Parisian beauty, one of the movement’s favourite character types. In near real-time, Varda follows her eponymous protagonist (Corinne Marchand) as she anxiously awaits the results of a medical exam. The director’s freewheeling vérité style is a remarkable counterpoint to Cléo’s weightier, ultimately transformative reflections.

Edith Scob and a canine co-star in George Franju's Hitchcockian horror triumph, Eyes Without a Face.

Reflections bring only torment, meanwhile, to the disfigured daughter of a mad cosmetic surgeon in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (August 29, 6:30 p.m.). Hugely influential—notably on Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In—Franju’s sixteenth feature is a haunting tale of paternal obsession with a devilish Hitchcockian bent. In fact, screenwriting duo Boileau-Narcejac were also behind Hitchcock’s Vertigo, as well as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s peerless Diabolique. The latter film makes a welcome return to the Lightbox on July 20 (8:45 p.m.), and our endorsement from last fall certainly stands.

Last, but certainly not least, we recommend the newly restored version of Marcel Carné’s 1938 Port of Shadows (July 20, 6:30 p.m.). Along with Renoir, Carné is cited as a master of poetic realist filmmaking. His foggy underworld melodrama is among the genre’s most iconic entries. And if that all sounds a bit academic, we reckon Port of Shadows remains worthy of classic status simply for its scenes of quintessential tough guy Jean Gabin tormenting the hapless Pierre Brasseur with a series of hilarious slaps to the chops.

Images courtesy of TIFF. For tickets and a complete programme schedule, visit Tiff.net.