20:08 (Ludivine in Motion)

Thoughts and screenshots from the 20th minute and 8th second of films released in 2008. I was missing my 20:07 series so I'm bringing it back albeit in an altered form. Looking only @ this year's titles.


Ludivine Sagnier (in motion) doesn't like to wash dishes. Particularly not while the men lounge about in the next room. And especially not after awkward conversations with her mother (smoking) about her new threesome!

This random screenshot pulled from Christophe Honoré's young musical Love Songs, which flitted briefly across stateside screens in March, proved serendipitous. Because when I think of Ludivine Sagnier, which is more often than you'd guess, she strikes me as a Girl of Perpetual Motion. With some actresses I think of close-ups. Not so with Sagnier. Whether it's the languidly sexual movements in Swimming Pool, the youthful bounce in 8 Women or even her exaggerated bratty gesturing as Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, in my mind's eye she's always on the go.

<--- I haven't finished watching Love Songs yet but I grinned impulsively the second I saw her hair swinging in closeup in the opening credits. She's walking to a movie theater as this film begins. So meta ...or so French whichever the case may be.

Come to think of it, Ludivine's current film A Girl Cut in Two has a fine uninterrupted shot of the intoxicating starlet hurrying down the street, too. I loved the movie when I saw it @ the NYFF last year, but it's kind of a blur now. My memory might be faulty but that particular long cut felt like a bullet shot, a dividing line for the film as the victim/heroine raced from its first half into its second, hormones and emotions in disarray. Another image from A Girl Cut in Two that also loops in the brain is a kinkier suggestive one of Ludivine on all fours crawling towards her svengali lover. I was so pleased to discover that the new poster uses it.


Ludivine je t'aime.
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