Pierre Etaix

Le grand amour

Le grand amour

Despite having a loving and patient wife at home, a good-natured suit-and-tie man, played by writer-director Pierre Etaix, finds himself hopelessly attracted to his gorgeous new secretary in this gently satirical tale of temptation. From this simple, standard premise, Etaix weaves a constantly surprising web of complexly conceived jokes. Le grand amour is a cutting, nearly Buñuelian takedown of the bourgeoisie that somehow doesn’t have a mean bone in its body.

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Film Info

  • France
  • 1969
  • 87 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.66:1
  • French

Available In

Collector's Set

Pierre Etaix

Pierre Etaix

Blu-ray Box Set

2 Discs

$41.96

Collector's Set

Pierre Etaix

Pierre Etaix

DVD Box Set

3 Discs

$34.96

Le grand amour
Cast
Pierre Etaix
Pierre
Annie Fratellini
Florence
Nicole Calfan
Agnès
Louis Maïs
M. Girard
Ketty France
Mme. Girard
Alain Janey
Jacques
Micha Bayard
Secretary
Credits
Director
Pierre Etaix
Producer
Paul Claudon
Screenplay
Pierre Etaix
Screenplay
Jean-Claude Carrière
Cinematography
Jean Boffety
Editor
Henri Lanoë
Editor
Michel Lewin
Set design
Daniel Louradour
Music
Claude Stieremans

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Explore

Jean-Claude Carrière

Writer

Jean-Claude Carrière
Jean-Claude Carrière

A quietly influential force in art cinema throughout the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière (also an author, actor, opera librettist, and occasional director) has collaborated with such important screen artists as Luis Buñuel, Milos Forman, Jean-Luc Godard, Philip Kaufman, Louis Malle, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, and Andrzej Wajda. He got his start working with the comic filmmaker Pierre Etaix on the Oscar-winning slapstick short Happy Anniversary (1962), which the two codirected; Carrière would go on to cowrite all of Etaix’s 1960s features. Meanwhile, Buñuel enlisted Carrière to cowrite 1964’s Diary of a Chambermaid, the beginning of a grand partnership that would also result in increasingly surreal visions like Belle de jour (1967), The Milky Way (1969), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). (In 2012, Carrière said of working with Buñuel, “How we mixed together is impossible to say. One started an idea, the other finished it.”) As is clear from those productions, he has a way with the absurd, but the versatile and erudite Carrière is also a keen literary adapter, translating such daunting novels as The Tin Drum and The Unbearable Lightness of Being into formidable films. Carrière’s career continues to take surprising turns: he has a small but crucial role in Abbas Kiarostami’s 2010 Certified Copy, for example.

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