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Marc Allégret: From André Gide lover to Simone Simon mentor (photo: Marc Allégret) (See previous post: "Simone Simon Remembered: Sex Kitten and Femme Fatale.") Simone Simon became a film star following the international critical and financial success of the 1934 romantic drama Lac aux Dames, directed by her self-appointed mentor – and alleged lover – Marc Allégret.[1] The son of an evangelical missionary, Marc Allégret (born on December 22, 1900, in Basel, Switzerland) was to have become a lawyer. At age 16, his life took a different path as a result of his romantic involvement – and elopement to London – with his mentor and later "adoptive uncle" André Gide (1947 Nobel Prize winner in Literature), more than 30 years his senior and married to Madeleine Rondeaux for more than two decades. In various forms – including a threesome with painter Théo Van Rysselberghe's daughter Elisabeth – the Allégret-Gide relationship remained steady until the late '20s and their trip to...

Alain Resnais’ You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet bears the director’s typical rumination on memory and loss, touching the themes on his cerebral earlier offerings like Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad, or his latest, Wild Grass. In his latest work, several famous French actors gather at the home of a deceased playwright who penned a play that they all starred in at one time or another. As they watch a recent filmed version of the play, they end up getting sucked back into the their former roles. Even though the film is brimming with French talent and with Resnais’ legacy of filmmaking, it never quite adds up to a satisfying whole. The film is perhaps too self-aware and never quite makes it past the surface. The film’s plot is rather simple. Esteemed French actors Mathieu Almaric, Pierre Arditi, Sabine Azéma, Jean-Noël Brouté, Anne Consigny, Anne Duperey, Hippolyte Girardot...