Browsing DVD Beaver has again helped me uncover works by great directors hidden in packaged box sets. This time it's the Catherine Deneuve Collection, from Lionsgate, which quietly hides a film by the excellent French director André Téchiné.Hôtel des Amériques (aka Hotel America) (1981)
This time the Amazon page doesn't even list the individual film titles. (They have them run together in one long run-on sentence with no spaces in some tiny section of the page.)
For me Téchiné is worth a look because of Les Voleurs (aka Thieves) (1996), Ma Saison préferée (My Favorite Season) (1993), both with Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil (Les Voleurs also features the excellent Laurence Côte),
and Rendez-vous (1985) with Juliette Binoche. (All are on DVD except for Les Voleurs, which is on VHS, although Ma Saison préferée is apparently out of print.) Alice et Martin (1998) is also on DVD, although I was disappointed when I saw it in the theater. Perhaps I need to see it again. (Although it appears that, too, is out of print. Where's the love for Téchiné?) Téchiné has a very evasive style and perhaps can be too elusive at times. Maybe that caught up with me on Alice et Martin, but in any case, I will be excited to check out Hôtel des Amériques on Netflix. Téchiné is usually most well-known for Wild Reeds, which I still haven't seen.
Another Lionsgate set, The Sophia Loren Collection, hides I Girasoli (aka Sunflower) (1970, Italy), by Vittorio de Sica, that costars Marcello Mastroianni! Wow, I wish I had time to watch all these. As further evidence of how these films can slip by you, IMDB's handy DVD link is grayed-out for this film, so if you were researching De Sica via IMDB you might not realize this one was available.
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