La Grande Vadrouille

a film by Gérard Oury

As Большая прогулка, this WWII comedy starring Bourvil and Louis de Funès was both widely screened and wildly popular in the Soviet Union. Yet somehow I’ve never watched it before. And now I did, thanks to Filmoteca de Cantabria, with collaboration of the Alliance Française de Santander and Institut Français de Bilbao.

Drylongso

a film by Cauleen Smith

Another happy discovery: this lost and found (and restored) gem of a movie starring Toby Smith, April Barnett and Will Power. As far as I know, Drylongso is (so far) the only feature film by Cauleen Smith.

Scener ur ett äktenskap

a film by Ingmar Bergman

I had a dilemma: either to rush after work to watch almost three hours of Scenes from a Marriage, with a distinct possibility to fall asleep, or to give it a pass and just have a proper nap. As you may have guessed, my craving for cinema won.

This 1974 film is a theatrical release of a 1973 miniseries of the same name. If the first chapter/episode has a rather extended cast, by Bergman standards anyway, in the last four chapters “only” the protagonists, portrayed by Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, remain. It’s long but never boring, and even has a kind of wabey-sabey happy ending: Marianne and Johan evolve from meh spouses to pretty good lovers.