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This is Argentinean director Edgardo Cozarinsky's first film made in France, where he has been living since 1974.
Zouzou is a former French teacher in Santiago. She is now married to a film maker, and she longs to see her old friends from the past, especially, a rightist called Phil, who has been named after Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe. She is involved with left-wing politics, and gains possession of a briefcase containing passports of dead Argentinian and Chilean radicals. She hides the briefcase after one courier is murdered in the projection room of a cinema, but she is betrayed when her old lover, Phil, returns.
The Apprentice Sorcerers reflects Cozarinsky's admiration for the films of Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch, and the film's serious spy material is mixed with comic situations. A chic leftist holds a party which is attended by agents of both the CIA and the KGB, who swap polaroid photos between drinks. Dennis Hopper falls about as the stoned Yank at the party, and Marie-France Pisier plays the rich lady gushing over avant-garde artists and political refugees.
Paris is reflected through the film's elegant satire on the complicated relations between the Latin Americans who have become involved in this complex spy affair.
Edgardo Cozarinsky
Born in Buenos Aires. Film. His first feature film ‘...' (Dot,Dot,Dot) (1971) has never been shown in Argentina. In 1974, Cozarinsky settled in Paris. The Apprentice Sorcerers is his second feature.