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In French with English subtitles

What do you get when French avant-garde novelist Georges Perec adapts a work of red-blooded American crime literature like Jim Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman? From one angle Alain Corneau’s SERIE NOIRE, named for an infamous series of French paperback pulps, is simply an exemplary neo-noir, but that’s almost too timid—with its archetypally spare characters cruising through a brutalist concrete landscape, this movie is proudly post-noir, post-punk, post-everything. Patrick Dewære (HOTEL DES AMERIQUES, PREPAREZ VOS MOUCHOIRS) stars as hapless door-to-door salesman Frank Poupart, just the type of schmuck to be drawn into a murder plot by an old widow’s mute niece (Marie Trintignant). “Without a second thought,” writes Pacific Film Archive curator emeritus Steve Seid, “you buy his worn-out, deranged lowlife toying with oblivion.”

IMPORTED 35MM PRINT FROM INSTITUT FRANÇAIS