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Boespflug co-founded Pyramide and was managing director of Warner France.

French producer Francis Boespflug, best known as the co-founder of historic Paris-based production and distribution company Pyramide and the former managing director of Warner France, has died aged of 70.

Boespflug first became involved in cinema in his native city of Strasbourg in north-eastern France, working as a student volunteer at a cinema-club aimed at under-privileged, difficult teenagers.

It was through this volunteer work he met his future wife and life-long collaborator, the late producer Fabienne Vonier, who at the time was the manager of Le Club, the arthouse theatre founded...

The Paris-based Pyramide co-founder, producer and distributor worked closely with Aki Kaurismaki, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Catherine Corsini, among others.

Veteran distributor and producer Fabienne Vonier, who co-founded Paris-based distribution and production company Pyramide, has died after a long illness. She was 66.

“Fabienne was passionate about film,” said long-term collaborator Eric Lagesse, who took over Pyramide’s distribution and international sales activities in 2008. “She was someone who was constantly on the look-out for interesting productions, directors.”

Lagesse continued: “She had done it all: exhibition, distribution and lastly production. She did everything to the full and was as demanding of herself as she was of everyone else. She was a true professional, working right up until the end.”

In a career spanning more than 40 years, Vonier supported the work of scores of directors from across the world including Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki, Canadian Denys Arcand, Mexico’s Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Palestinian Elia Suleiman, Egyptian [link=nm...

The Paris-based Pyramide co-founder, producer and distributor worked closely with AKi Kaurismaki, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Catherine Corsini, among others.

Veteran distributor and producer Fabienne Vonier, who co-founded Paris-based distribution and production company Pyramide, has died after a long illness. She was 66.

“Fabienne was passionate about film,” said long-term collaborator Eric Lagesse, who took over Pyramide’s distribution and international sales activities in 2008. “She was someone who was constantly on the look-out for interesting productions, directors.”

Lagesse continued: “She had done it all: exhibition, distribution and lastly production. She did everything to the full and was as demanding of herself as she was of everyone else. She was a true professional, working right up until the end.”

In a career spanning more than 40 years, Vonier supported the work of scores of directors from across the world including Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki, Canadian Denys Arcand, Mexico’s Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Palestinian Elia Suleiman, Egyptian [link=nm...

Passion may be inexplicable, but it can also be a bit silly when viewed from the outside. At least that's the way it is in ''Damage, '' the story of a destructive affair between a conservative English politician and the hot-blooded young woman engaged to his son.

The film has received a controversial NC-17 rating, a rating which, based on the print offered for review, is entirely too restrictive. It's the lack of heat, if not nudity, that handicaps the film.

Jeremy Irons plays Stephen Fleming, a self-satisfied and rising member of Parliament happily married to Ingrid Miranda Richardson). At a party alone, he runs into his son's fiancee, Anna Barton (Juliette Binoche), also alone. The two exchange only lingering looks, but seemingly that's enough to tip them off, for after ''officially'' meeting Stephen in the company of his son Martyn (Rupert Graves), Anne invites the older man over to her home and before long they are ripping each other's clothes off.

From then on their relationship becomes a series of frenzied entwined limbs alternating with respectable public fronts. Stephen edges toward divorce but Anna, psychologically burdened by the memory of her brother's suicide, is happy to keep up their deceptive intrigue. However, as must happen, they fail at one point and the film climaxes when son Martyn catches Stephen and Anna reaching their climax in bed.

Irons and Binoche play their characters as stock types -- Irons is the stiff-lipped, proper Englishman, Binoche the continental vamp -- and it's hard to discern any more complex psychology at work. As a result, their couplings, no matter how athletic -- and some are extremely so -- seem mechanical, and their increasingly demonstrative sex play sometimes takes on a comic aspect. Similarly, their relationship doesn't react to any internal dynamic so much as it waits to get caught. Director Louis Malle adopts a similarly standoffish approach so that the viewer is put in the position of observing the passion from an uninvolved distance rather than experiencing it up close.

In a small part as Anna's mother, Leslie Caron brings the film a welcome infusion of energy. Richardson and Graves also breathe more life into their parts than the panting Irons and Binoche.

DAMAGE

New Line Cinema

A co-production of Skreba, Nef and Le Studio Canal Plus

Producer-director Louis Malle

Co-producers Vincent Malle, Simon Relph

Screenplay David Hare

Based on the novel Josephine Hart

Music Zbigniew Preisner

Director of photography Peter Biziou

Production designer Brian Morris

Editor John Bloom

Color/Dolby

Stephen Fleming Jeremy Irons

Anna Barton Juliette Binoche

Ingrid Miranda Richardson

Martyn Rupert Graves

Edward Lloyd Ian Bannen

Elizabeth Prideaux Leslie Caron

MPAA rating: NC-17

(c) The Hollywood Reporter...