Director Alain Resnais's STAVISKY... is a stylized recounting of the life of Alexandre Stavisky, a masterful swindler who sold thousands of worthless bonds, working his way into a massive financial hole and drowning in a riotous political scandal. The film focuses on his heyday, which came in the years just before his arrest and subsequent death in 1934. Surrounded by an aristocratic class of financiers who, like Stavisky, delighted in transferring enormous sums among a multitude of accounts around Europe, he was an expert at moving money. Stavisky inhabited the lavish wooden parlors and grandiose theaters of Paris, the ocean overpasses and casinos of Biarritz, with sexy cars, planes, and women to get him from place to place. The delectably glossy filming of STAVISKY..., like its dialogue, is sharp, pointed, tightly framed, and complex. Every scene contains a lingering spatial depth and a feeling of weighted drama, colored by flashbacks and dream sequences that are rendered with fragile grace. All the while, a narrator who watches through binocular lenses follows the subtle subplots of Stavisky's love affairs, sporting affairs, and legal affairs. When Stavisky is arrested in the middle of a dinner party (reminiscent of Resnais's LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD with red wine spilled dramatically across the white tablecloth and a bejeweled woman in a cocktail dress careening through the air like a wounded bird), the ugly end is near. A thumping musical score from Stephen Sondheim completes this masterwork, sprinkling it with noirish spice.

STAVISKY... is an exquisite recounting of the climactic days in 1933 in the career of Stavisky, the con man turned international financier whose ruin resulted in political scandal and his own mysterious death.

STAVISKY... had its world premiere at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, in competition. It marked director Alain Resnais's first film in five years.

A note in the beginning of the film indicates that while most of the events in the film are true, it was not the author's intention to present them as historically accurate.

The son of a Jewish dentist, Stavisky moved quickly from the world of chicken-feed embezzlers to that of France's most infamous con artists. He ultimately broadened his power base by bribing both the pressmen and the politicians who stood in his way.

Excerpt: "Personne ne sais qui je suis ou de quoi je suis capable." ("Nobody knows who I am or of what I'm capable.")--Sasha (Alexandre Stavisky), rhetorically, at a party on the seven-year anniversary of his father's suicide

DVD Features:

Region 1
Keep Case
Anamorphic Widescreen - 1.66
Audio:
PCM Mono - French

Jean-Paul Belmondo: French Actor, BREATHLESS (1959)
Anny Duperey: French Actress
Charles Boyer: Known as "The Great Lover"
Francois Perier: French Character Actor
Gérard Depardieu: French Actor/Director

Alain Resnais: Director/Writer/Editor

"...A superb film....There are so many beautiful and extraordinary things in it....STAVISKY is unusual, highly intelligent, exquisitely beautiful...and much underrated..."