Actualités

Lenny Borger, who served as Variety‘s Paris correspondent and film reviewer throughout the 1980s and who championed French cinema for decades as a researcher and subtitle expert for numerous films including Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” died Dec. 23 in Paris. He was 73.

Producer Serge Bromberg reported that he died after a long illness.

Borger was raised in Brooklyn, and moved to Paris in 1977 to work on his doctoral thesis. Abandoning his academic work, he began covering the French film scene for Variety and served as a correspondent and film reviewer from 1978 to 1990.

During that time he also began working on providing the English subtitles for French films, and Bertrand Tavernier gave him his first subtitling job for the 1980 “A Week’s Vacation.”

Film critic and Amazon executive Scott Foundas called Borger “a kind of medium, channeling the linguistic spirit of a given film and making it live anew for English-speaking audiences the world over.

1929 was the end of silent cinema in France, the process of conversion beginning in earnest for the following year's releases. So what height of expressiveness had the French movies reached?

Quite a bit, if Henri Fescourt's epic three-and-a-half-hour-and-change adaptation of Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo is anything to go by. The novel is a cracking yarn, a bit of a warhorse perhaps but always reliable and dramatic, full of crimes, revenges, outrageous coincidences and spectacular reversals in the best nineteenth-century tradition. One would expect a movie to be, at best, bold and operatic, at worst, staid and stagey. But Fescourt, who had already made a vast version of Les misérables (1925), manages to combine the best of commercial cinema's dramatics with the innovations of the impressionist filmmakers, to create something strikingly modern.

Stop me if you've heard this before: hero Edmond Dantès is maligned by a fellow sailor, snitched on by a romantic rival,...