The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Decrepit merry-go-rounds, smeared lipstick, a flickering neon windmill outside the Moulin Rouge, tea gone cold … It’s tempting to posit Neige as a hidden bridge between the nouvelle vague and the subsequent generation’s cinéma du look: drunken street poetry shot through with pop realism.”

Steve Macfarlane, Cinema Scope

Juliet Berto, the star of films by Rivette and Godard, applied her talents to directing in the 1980s, making three features before her untimely death from breast cancer at 42. Neige, a coolly committed piece of street poetry, was Berto’s debut, a tale of two guardian angels and the heavily policed community—dealers, users, dancers, lovers, and friends—they watch over. Anita (Berto) and Joko (Robert Liensol, West Indies) daily make their way through Paris’s Pigalle district, a home that goes on high alert when a crucial drug supply connection disappears, leaving their friends to suffer. Master cinematographer William Lubtchansky ensures that Neige ably inhabits a noir register (Alphaville​’s Eddie Constantine even makes a cameo), but it also takes the open-air doctrine of Jean Vigo and the French New Wave even further, merging the qualities and dangers of a thriller with a portrait of solidarity among marginalized communities. This restoration was selected as part of Cannes Classics 2020.

In French with English subtitles

Restored DCP courtesy Fun City Editions

“The plot of this film noir [provides] an excuse to get swept away by a group of eclectic personalities who all call Pigalle home … A picturesque work filmed sans pretentiousness, using a documentary approach that will both move and surprise viewers … Has rightly become a cult film.”

Jean-Pierre Rehm, Viennale 2018