Jean-Claude Guiguet had taken on various roles in productions by Paul Vecchiali and Jean-Claude Biette — actor, assistant director, production designer — before he made his first feature. Having discovered Emmanuel Lemoine, he built Les Belles Manières around him, casting the young actor as Camille, a proletarian who arrives in Paris from the provinces to work in the home of the upper middle-class Hélène and her reclusive son, Pierre.
 
Amid the stifling, claustrophobic world inside the walls of the apartment and the harsh one outside, Camille finds himself caught between the fantasies of a sclerotic bourgeoisie and the brutality of a nocturnal Paris, until he reaches his breaking point.
 
Photographed by Diagonale mainstay Georges Strouvé and closely attuned to the smallest details of its central performances, Les Belles Manières is, in Guiguet’s own words, “an image of the bourgeoisie confronted with the face, the body, the reality of someone who doesn’t belong to their world”.

This screening will be introduced by Benjamin Crais, a Government of Ireland post-doctoral fellow at University College Dublin and one of the editors of the quarterly film magazine Narrow Margin.