We have now a new layout, made by Sharon from Petrichor Graphics .

Hold on to your stilettos, darlings: VMAN (one of StyleCaster’s favorite mag rags for the fashionably fearless male) just spilled to us that former Vogue Paris Editor-in-Chief Carine Roitfeld is taking on the reigns as guest editor for their Spring Issue.

With Carine in charge this time around, looks like she called upon her good friend Karl Lagerfeld (a.k.a our Uncle Karl) to contribute a small feature — and by contribute we mean getting behind the camera and the pen for a short spread on French actor-slash-major-eye-candy Louis Garrel.

Shot in black and white and styled by Carine (in Brooks Brothers pajamas no less), our fave designer has managed to capture some hauntingly dreamy photos of our future husband, er, this stone cold fox….yeah, you know where we’re going with this.

Check out the exclusive first look of this spread in the slideshow above, but be careful; gazing at Louis’ hunky face for too long may induce some seriously naughty daydreaming.

To see more content on the upcoming Spring Issue, be sure to head on over to VMAN.com.

Source: StyleCaster

Scans > 2012 > V Man #25 (Spring 2012)

Louis Garrel and Elio Germano during the Giorgio Armani Men fashion show as part of Milan Fashion Week Menswear Autumn/Winter 2012.

Public Appearances > 2012 > Milan Fashion Week Menswear Autumn/Winter 2012 (January 17, 2012)

Photoshoots > Bruce Weber

Scans > 2011 > Io Donna (June 18, 2011)

Photoshoots > Matt Carr

There are certain cliches associated with European cinema—they’re not necessarily always accurate but they do exist. Ask a layman—a well educated, smart, nice person who might not be quite as subtitle-happy as you or I—what they imagine they might see in, say, an average French film, and a number of things might come up. Characters who are constantly having extra-marital affairs, for instance. A vaguely homoerotic relationship between two friends. Unbroken four-to-five minute takes. Dialogue talking about ‘the revolution.’ An actress, perhaps Monica Bellucci,taking her clothes off within the first 45 seconds.

If you were to take this layman’s thoughts and turn them into a screenplay, you’d end up with “Un Été Brûlant” (or “A Scorching Summer”) the latest from Venice Film Festival favorite Philippe Garrel. Ostensibly, it’s a film about male friendship: Paul (Jérôme Robart) meets Frédéric (Louis Garrel, the helmer’s son), a painter married to Angèle (Monica Bellucci), an Italian film actress, and the two men become fast friends. The couple invites Paul and his girlfriend Elisabeth (Céline Sallette) to stay with them in Rome, but it soon becomes apparent that their marriage is in trouble.

Let’s put it this way. “A Scorching Summer” is the kind of film where the line, “Fidelity is an outdated, petit-bourgeois concept” is said with a straight face. There were times when we genuinely thought that the film might be a very sophisticated parody. But it’s not. It’s instead an interminable, excruciatingly written drama, full of characters that you wouldn’t care about if you were related to them. Garrel Sr. says that the film is one about friendship, but there’s very little evidence of it here. Paul and Frédéric are introduced. They sit in the same room. And from that point on, we’re led to believe that it’s some kind of defining bromance, although there’s nothing to suggest that they’re anything more than acquaintances. It doesn’t help that Paul is a bland, characteristic-free cipher, and that Louis Garrel is one of the least charismatic leading men we’ve seen on screen in some time; going for “brooding artist” he lands closer to “that-guy-in-high-school-who-smoked-licorice-roll-ups-and-read-Sartre-to-show-how-tormented-he-was.” We can only imagine that Garrel begins the film with Frédéric driving his car into a tree to keep the audience hoping that the scene will be replayed later on, in super slow-motion. We know a 1000fps shot of Garrel Jr headbutting a windshield would have gone a long way to redeeming the film for us.

The women don’t fare much better, thanks to a thick strain of misogyny that runs through the film. Bellucci, a good decade too old for the part, somehow manages to be unconvincing as an Italian film actress, which is, you know, what she is. It can’t be the French, because she’s delivered good performances in the language before, but somehow, she was less wooden in “The Matrix Reloaded.” Sallette comes off the best—she’s rather luminous on screen, and a bizarre sleepwalking scene suggests that another, more interesting film could have been made that focused on Elisabeth, if only Garrel had any interest in having her do anything but complain that her boyfriend isn’t paying attention to her. What little drama there is, is often revealed in advance by a forehead-slappingly redundant voiceover, new characters are introduced seemingly at random and the pacing is such that the film feels twice as long as it really is, with no sense of how much time has passed on screen. And Iike yesterday’s other Venice turkey “W.E,” there are a number of scenes that simply beggar belief: a ghostly appearance by Frédéric’s grandfather, for instance, or an interminable one-shot, five minute sequence of Bellucci dancing at a party to some substandard British indie rock (Carl Barat‘s Libertines offshoot Dirty Pretty Things, if you’re interested).

There are maybe, if we’re being generous, one or two neatly composed shots (the film is competently made at least, and well shot by veteran Willy Kurant, it just has this great stinking albatross of a screenplay around its neck), and one or two nicely observed moments. More importantly, it has a lovely, although spare, score by ex-”Velvet Underground” man John Cale, one just good enough to lift the film off the bottom grade. We’ve no idea why he agreed to do it, however—presumably he owes Garrel money from back when the director was seeing Nico. Hopefully, it’ll become independently available, to save interested parties from actually having to sit through “A Scorching Summer.” [D-]

Source: IndieWire

I added even more pictures from Venice Film Festival!

Public Appearances > 2011 > Venice Film Festival “Un Ete Brulant” Premiere (September 02, 2011)

I added various HQs pictures of Venice Film Festival of Louis with the lovely Monica Bellucci. Enjoy it!

Public Appearances > 2011 > Venice Film Festival “Un Ete Brulant” Photocall (September 02, 2011)

Like an old rock song that used to be a favorite and now sounds past its prime, or an apartment that used to be swinging and now badly needs a paint job and new furniture, watching Philippe Garrel’s That Summer has a sweet retro taste of the Nouvelle Vague that soon turns insipid. Set in present-day Paris and Rome and, gasp, shot in color, this drama of two couples (one separates, the other doesn’t) is dramatically lifeless and uninvolving. Fans of Garrel, a two-time Silver Lion winner in Venice for directing I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar and Regular Lovers, may enjoy the self-reference of topliners Louis Garrel and Monica Bellucci, who play off their iconic images, but there isn’t much more to pin down even specialized audiences.

The whole story is told as a flashback by an off-camera narrator, after Frederic (Garrel) commits suicide in his car in the opening scene.

Working with his regular co-writer Marc Cholodenko, Garrel weaves strands of his other films through this tenuous chronicle of love and friendship. Two bit players (played by two real-life bit players in Regular Lovers, Jerome Robart and Celine Sallette) meet on the film set of what looks like a terrible French Resistance movie. They flirt, coucher, and start living together in Paul’s (Robart) cold water flat.  Paul is a shaggy-haired revolutionary and has no money; Elisabeth (Sallette) has made suicide attempts and has an immense need for love.

One day Paul is introduced to the rich, ultra-cool artist Frederic and improbably becomes his “best friend.” Frederic invites Paul and his girlfriend to stay with him and his Italian actress wife Angele (Bellucci) in Rome. The two couples seem to have nothing in common, with the penniless wannabe actors Paul and Elisabeth living like parasites on their glam friends.  The hungry, bored Angele and Frederic, each two-timing the other, use them as witnesses and confidantes to their quarrels.

Perhaps shallowness is the point about these characters; otherwise, there isn’t much rhyme or reason to the goings-on, and certainly no emotional reality in the tears that flow too easily from the eyes of Garrel’s posturing, self-centered Frederic, or in Angele’s ridiculous urge, while she’s in bed with her lover, to go to church and pray. Bellucci captures the character’s vapidity, along with her self-indulgent sensuality, in a long, hypnotic dance sequence in which she lets herself go.

As the awkward, insecure Paul and Elisabeth, Robart and Sallette act (perhaps deliberately?) like extras uncomfortably thrust into a leading role, and neither leaves a particularly deep impression.

Finally abandoning the black and white cinematography of his recent work, Garrel entrusts D.P. Willy Kurant and production designer Manu de Chauvigny with heavily saturated Sixties-looking colors for the interiors, reserving a little breathing space on the Roman summer streets and an airy Fellini-like film set (the film’s second behind-the-scenes movie reference.)

Source: The Hollywood Reporter