Interview of Francoise Romand by Adam HART, critic at Senses of Cinema.
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In England in 1936, two female babies are exchanged by mistake.
The truth erupts 20 years later thanks to the tenacity of one
of the mothers who suspected this from the first day. |
DVD Mix-Up on sale at Lowave
Extras Bonus on line / Trailer Mix-Up / ITW Rosenbaum
Vincent CANBY - New-York Times and Online and Archives
"A deliciously oddball movie... sounds like the synopsis for a hilarious if cruel comedy...
Mix-up has some of the style of Peter Greenaway's Falls and The Draughtsman's Contract... It's the work of a filmmaker of original vision..."
David EDELSTEIN - Village Voice
"Romand doesn't comment directly on much of this. But her intelligence and point of view - along with her youth and foolhardiness - is manifest in every frame. To an extent she treats her people as if they're puppets, but what happened in Nottingham in 1946 was the cruelest puppet show of all; what Romand underlines is their humanity. And she evokes, in us, extremely deep and private feelings. We can't help but think back on our own childhood terrors, our fears of not belonging - on how they were soothed, if they were soothed, and how the process coloured our present worldview. "
Michael WILMINGTON - Los Angeles Times
"As interesting as the story of Mix Up is the way Romand tells it : a queer, distanced, high-tech style, with carefully composed and balanced frames, symbolic settings and many obviously scripted and staged scenes. There's a pristine, farcical quality about the style, but its very overcomposed rigor ironically suggests the absurdity of a world where havoc can be wreaked by mere chance, where things simply can't be controlled. Mix Up is as unique and interesting a documentary as you're likely to see for quite a while."
Jonathan ROSENBAUM - "My favorite film in my choice of Ten Best Movies of 1988"
Chicago Reader 1988 Online
"Her highly stylized presentation of what it all meant is at once a collective psychoanalysis, a danse and humorous 19 th-century novel with Dickensian characters, an essay on representation, a poetic integration of portraiture with domestic architecture, and a tragicomic existential melodrama. Having seen this film about half a dozen times, I've found that it grows in power and resonance with every viewing. Romand's attack on her material seems intuitive rather than theorical or intellectual, but the seriousness and thoroughness with which she pursues it -not only charting the process of two families reassessing their behavior and experiences, but also contriving to bring this process about- create a formal beauty and a witty precision in framing, pacing, editing, use of music, and mise en scene that is inseparable from the film's ethical and philosophical project."
Chicago Reader 1995 Online (capsule)
"One of the most remarkable and innovative documentaries ever made, this hour-long film made by Francoise Romand for French TV (1986) follows the famous true story of two English women who as babies got switched in the hospital and 20 years later discovered that they'd been raised by the wrong sets of parents. Romand enlists all the surviving family members in her haunting and bizarre investigation, which involves not only a recounting but a reenactment of all the significant events in the two daughters' emotional histories. Composed in an elaborate visual form that involves parallel shots, diptych compositions employing windows and mirrors, home-movie footage, stylized group portraits, and striking use of the families' homes and possessions, and featuring inventive work with sound and music, the movie burrows so deeply into the subject and its ramifications that one emerges with enough material for a 500-page novel. The mix-up of the title refers not only to the putative subject but to many stylistic and formal collisions: fiction versus fact, French versus English, memory versus imagination. An astonishing film debut."
Jonathan ROSENBAUM's 1000 Essential Films - Notes on the Top 100 (2004)
Mix-Up ou Meli-Melo following here "The 15 best of the 1980s" :
Out of the Blue (1980, Dennis Hopper)
Sans soleil (1981, Chris Marker)
Blade Runner (1981, Ridley Scott)
Passion (1982, Jean-Luc Godard)
The King of Comedy (1983, Martin Scorsese)
Love Streams (1984, John Cassavetes)
Manuel on the Island of Wonders (1984, Raul Ruiz)
Shoah (1985, Claude Lanzmann)
The Horse Thief (1985, Tian Zhuangzhuang)
Mix-Up (1985, Francoise Romand)
Melo (1986, Alain Resnais)
Brightness (1987, Souleymane Cisse)
Housekeeping (1987, Bill Forsyth)
A Story of the Wind (1988, Joris Ivens/Marceline Loridan)
Distant Voices/Still Lives (1988, Terence Davies) |
ITW Rosenbaum |
Bérénice REYNAUD - AFTERIMAGE 1 - 2 (Mix-Up) - 3
Michael SRAGOW - San Francisco Examiner
"... But the film is consistently funny and poignant; at times raucous and roughhewn and at times affectingly delicate..."
Wayne CAFFERY - Surreal and cult films
Noel BURCH - Revolution
Adam HART - Senses of Cinema
Bruce HODSDON - Senses of Cinema
Jean-Philippe TESSE - Cahiers du Cinéma
Frédéric ARON - Fiches du Cinéma
ACQUARELLO - Film Ref / Strictly Film School
"Five years before Abbas Kiarostami would blur the delineation between documentary and fiction in Close-Up by casting underemployed laborer and accused Mohsen Makhmalbaf impersonator, Sabzian to participate in a re-enactment of his fateful encounter with Mrs. Mahrokh Ahankhah and his subsequent deception of the Ahankhah family by ingratiating himself into their company, Françoise Romand would channel the spirit of dramatist Luigi Pirandello's recurring preoccupation with the interpenetration between art and reality in the thoughtful and poignant, yet fascinating, idiosyncratically offbeat, and whimsical first feature, Mix-Up to explore similar Pirandellian themes of identity, destiny, and absurdity......"
Gary W. TOOZE - DVD Beaver
"The DVD inferiorities don't take away from the magnificence of this documentary at all - in fact it may ingratiate it with a kind of 'realism charm'. This is one of our most recommend DVD accessible documentaries folks. Price is not cheap but the content is worth double - easily. Strongly recommended! "
Appelez-moi Madame / Call Me Madame
Documentary-Fiction 52 mn
In a small village in France, a 55-year-old married man and communist activist becomes
a transsexual with the help of his/her wife. His/her teenage son, however, has some qualms.
Anne Gallois |
Huguette et Ovida |
Jean-Pierre Laforce |
Vincent CANBY - New-York Times on the web
"Miss Romand makes documentaries that looks like those of nobody else. Though she sticks to facts, they're often facts that few writers of supposedly serious fiction would dare to touch except under pseudonym... It's enough, as in fiction, that the film maker is able to persuade us to share her curiosity, surprise or point of view..."
Susan LINFIELD - American Film
Two twins, 55 years old, still leaving with their parents, 90 years old,
old traditional catholic family...
 Yves et Alain
Catherine HUMBLOT - Le Monde
"...Françoise Romand a ce regard qui mélange, de manière indéfinissable, ironie, indiscrétion et vraie passion pour les gens. La réalisatice s'est toujours intéressée aux destinées peu ordinaires... La caméra capte les creux et les déliés d'une vie ritualisée par les déjeuners, les thés, la messe, mais que viennent emporter la fougue et les mouvements de pensée de ce stationnaire passionné de musique et de peinture. Etonnant."
Past Imperfect / Passe-Compose
Fiction 95 mn
A war photographer trying to forget his past pulls a mysterious woman out of the sea in Tunisia.
She is suffering from amnesia and doesn't want to deal with her past.
 Laurence Masliah Féodor Atkine |
Patty Hannock Thérèse Crémieux |
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Francoise MAUPIN - Vancouver
"... This film could have been an obscure dead-end, a work without a way out. But director Francoise Romand doesn't let herself get fooled by the story. She intersperses her images with amusing little bits and suffuses it with style. The result is an extremely original film, poetic and out-of-the-ordinary, that has just been selected for the prestigious Critics Week in Venice."
Jonathan ROSENBAUM - Chicago Reader
"... It's a provocative, troubling and haunting spellbinder just the same, beautifully shot and originally conceived. The sound track is especially striking."
Vice Vertu and Vice Versa
Fiction 90m
A high price whore moves in next door to a divorced well educated upright woman
desperately looking for work. A quid pro quo will change both of their lives.
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Florence Thomassin |
Marc Lavoine |
Anne Jacquemin |
Gilles VERDIANI - Premiere
"The moral tale attracted Francoise Romand... she turned to Truffaut Vivement dimanche! with its mischievous darkness, and to Demy bittersweet Lola and the Demoiselles de Rochefort (without the songs)..."
The Camera I / Thème Je
Narrative essay 75 mn
Françoise Romand feeds bleeding chunks of herself into your mirror.
Watch this forty something Parisian lady lose her way in other hearts and other cities,
by turns mischievous and gnashing her teeth, making up games of chance
and a family secret along the way.
An experiment in DV that flirts with the Webcam to raise issues of cinema.
Jonathan ROSENBAUM - Village Voice
"Best Undistributed Film in the US - 2004"
Robert KOEHLER - Variety
"Francoise Romand pushes her voice in a extremely private direction in The Camera I.
Kay ARMATAGE - Toronto
"Established documentary and fiction filmmaker Françoise Romand started noodling around – as did so many people – with her digital camera in a diary format. She began filming her mother and then turned the camera on herself in a moment of hesitation just before leaving her Paris apartment for a one-year teaching gig at Harvard University. Three months later in Boston, she passed the camera to a friend who finished the tape without knowing what Romand had shot, but his images rhymed uncannily with hers. From there, the film evolved into an essay-diary, charting the vicissitudes of one talented, troubled and loving soul’s attempts to understand herself and the elusive, enigmatic delicacies of relationships.
The title, Theme Je, is a play on words; although the meaning is that of literary self-reflection (“I” as the theme of the piece), it is a twist on je t’aime or “I love you.” Unpredictable, abstract, fragmented and ultimately unresolved, the film charges full tilt at the frontiers of personal cinema."
Hugo ANCAROLA - Creteil
ACQUARELLO - Film Ref / Strictly Film School
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