Love at Sea

Guy Gilles's first feature was shot across nearly three years, from 1962 to 1965, because he could not find any funding. He was twenty two when he started, and the lack of money shaped the film's form, which is part black and white and part color. It follows a sailor finishing his service in Brest after returning from the Algerian War and a young woman living in Paris, and the love between them that distance and letters slowly hollow out. This unfunded amateur debut nonetheless features brief appearances by some of the biggest French stars of the moment: Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliette Gréco and Jean-Claude Brialy. Romy Schneider also shot a scene, which was cut. It premiered at the Pesaro Film Festival in Italy in 1965 and was not shown in France until 1966. Born in Algiers, Gilles worked alongside the New Wave rather than within it and is remembered as an unjustly overlooked auteur, his films built from songs, voiceover, photographs and ellipses, avoiding conventional dramaturgy entirely. He contracted AIDS in the late 1980s and died in 1996 at fifty seven. The Cinémathèque française has since rediscovered his filmography and his films have been digitally restored. Who it's for: Admirers of the forgotten filmmakers working at the edges of the New Wave and of formally free, poetic French cinema. Who it's not for: Not for viewers wanting a tight narrative, since the film is a deliberately loose, elliptical drift.