A Woman’s Life first premiered at the 2016 Venice International Film Festival, alongside the likes of La La Land, Arrival and Jackie. Though it’s taken longer to get to our shores than its contemporaries, the film feels fresh and relevant. This immensely personal character study is at times dense, but subtly effective.

A new box-set to relish, six French cinema classics by a cult director, along with a wealth of fascinating extras on a seventh DVD.

Bertrand Tavernier’s trip through French cinema is shot through with the love of someone who has grown up with cinema and knows how to communicate his passion in a way that is totally engaging. The three hours-plus that he delivers make you want to plunge back into the classics, as well as start discovering many underrated or forgotten directors, actors, DoP’s or film score composers.

What makes the documentary so good is his 100% personal approach – although he is touchingly modest and includes contributions from many of his professional colleagues. It is not a completist’s bible or an attempt at cinema-historical balance. Rather like David Thomson’s unreservedly subjective and opinionated Biographical Dictionary of Film, this is a treasure trove of enthusiasms, presented with a keen knowledge of what underpins the language of great cinema. Tavernier celebrates well-known directors such as Jacques Becker, Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, Jean-Pierre Melville and Claude Sautet, but he focuses as well on lesser-known directorial talents such as Edmond T Gréville who split his remarkable career between England and France, and many of whose masterpieces, such as Menaces or Brief Ecstasy aren’t available on DVD.

The recurrent figure in Tavernier’s pantheon is Jean Gabin, the French acting icon from the 1930s through to the early 1960s, much more subtle than Depardieu in his depiction of the ordinary Frenchman. As Tavernier demonstrates with many carefully chosen clips, enhanced by an always eye-opening and thought-provoking commentary, Gabin was as fine an actor as any, not just the personification of a nation’s better self.

There are delightful quirks, such as his celebration of the tough-guy actor Eddie Constantine, best-known to British audience for his ironic self-referential role in Godard’s Alphaville, but a regular fixture in a series of often very violent gangster films of the 1950s, which Tavernier greatly enjoyed. He rhapsodises as well about Maurice Jaubert, the film composer, not least the score he wrote for Jean Vigo’s classic L’Atalante. In describing the way in which Jaubert managed to add a dramatic dimension to key scenes of the films he worked on, rather than just fill gaps, Tavernier gives us a lesson in film technique, just as he does in describing the outstanding work of other craftsmen working in the medium.

The film is never didactic, although always surprisingly informative. Tavernier’s exploration of French cinema is made entertaining by a wealth of revealing anecdotes – not least, during the making of Le jour se lève, designer Alexandre Trauner’s insistence that Carné and his producers build an extra floor onto the house (pictured above) which plays such a crucial part in the drama. What stands out perhaps most of all is an extraordinary generosity of spirit – this is a man who can speak about others in his profession with great respect, rare in a milieu where ego rules a great deal of the time. That generosity is contagious: this is a film where the man’s love of the medium is fully shared with his audience. Highly recommended to anyone interested in le cinéma français.

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@Rivers47

Overleaf: watch the trailer for A Journey Through French Cinema

The myth of Modigliani, the archetypal tortured artist, was set in train while he was still alive and remains potent almost a century after his death. Every so often a few game academics try to put things straight, and now Tate Modern’s exhibition reappraises his considerable output not through the broken lens of his addiction, but in the sober daylight of his influences and milieu.

Albert Serra has earned himself the directorial moniker “the Catalan king of stasis”, and nothing in The Death of Louis XIV is going to dispel such a reputation – if anything, he has honed that characteristic approach further, concentrating this story of the declining days of the Sun King into a single royal bedchamber. However, there is one new element: it’s the first time the director has worked with professional actors, which at least ensures that his film's studiedly visual longeurs are handled with first-class Gallic thespian assurance.

Never more so than from French New Wave legend Jean-Pierre Léaud in the title role: he plays the 76-year-old fading monarch with an assurance no less absolute than the rule that the longest-serving king of France had exerted in life. Much has been made of the difference between Leaud’s very first screen role – in particular, that closing freeze frame of Truffaut's The 400 Blows – and the practically immobile intensity that he conveys here, and the contrast could hardly be more acute. It’s a bravura performance, which somehow compels attention over 115 occasionally agonising minutes, catching a sense of character in minute movements of the face or variations in exhalations of breath.Louis has a pain in his leg; as it worsens, he is confined to bed; eventualy gangrene sets in. The process of dying is slow and laboured, and the principle action – hardly the right way of putting it – comes from the deliberations of the doctors who discuss and administer a variety of treatments (pictured above). However, Serra does achieve one scene in which the awareness of approaching death becomes transfixingly clear, as Léaud stares into the camera, unforgettably locking the audience’s gaze. It's a stark moment of contrast in mood, the breach of the fourth wall emphasised by the accompaniment of Mozart’s Great C minor Mass (there is no other incidental music in the film).

The silence and stasis is broken, to varying degrees, by Serra’s depiction of the court, or at least that element of it that appears in the anteroom of the monarch’s bedchamber. Comedy is probably not the right word (and satire not much more appropriate) but the stylised sycophantic attentions are memorable. His Royal Highness is applauded – Bravo, sire! – for every small gesture he manages, a flourish of the hat, or managing to eat a single biscotto. There are early innuendos that hint at past sexual liaisons, but by this stage his affection for his dogs seems more powerful than anything else. Part of the time his secret wife Madame de Maintenon sits inscrutably to one side, while another episode (main picture) brings a visit from his five-year-old successor, the future Louis XV. Don’t imitate me in architecture, or war, is the gist of his advice.

No wonder Molière gets a mention, with quacks like these around

Louis has a right royal caprice, calling urgently for water in the night, then refusing to drink it except from a crystal goblet. “Let me know when you’ve decided to cure me,” he harrumphs to his physicians. The doctoring is grimly comic, led by Fagon (Patrick D’Assumcao) who variously prescribes remedies like donkey’s milk, and tries to resist bringing in outsiders to consult – first from the Sorbonne, then finally a strangely accented charlatan from Marseilles whose elixir includes bull sperm and frog fat. No wonder Molière gets a mention, with quacks like these around. “We haven’t tried the jelly yet” is just one line that Serra and his co-writer Thierry Lounas might have borrowed from Carry On. Though the film’s title appears to preclude any need for spoiler alerts, there’s a touch of unexpected grotesque to its conclusion. (Hint, sausages.)

Such details are apparently based on medical testament, while the story itself draws on court remembrances, principally the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. After a brief opening scene with Louis in his Versailles gardens, it’s all interiors, which are a triumph for cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg, working exclusively with candlelight to produce a deeply painterly effect – sumptuously rich reds recall the Old Masters – and Sebastian Vogler’s production design. No praise is high enough (literally) for the film's perruquiers.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Death of Louis XIV