France
Adam Sweeting
The Billie Eilish story is a paradigm of pop music and marketing, 2020s-style. Eilish’s instinctive talent became evident when she was barely into her teens, and she flourished with the support of a close-knit and musical family. But the club-gigs-and-radio-play model is long gone, and Eilish’s high-speed ride was boosted by a deal with Apple Music, releases of individual tracks on SoundCloud and YouTube and hefty promotional support from Spotify. The pitch had been rolled for the arrival of her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in 2019, which became a monster seller and Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Joseph Andras wastes no time. “Not a proud and forthright rain, no. A stingy rain. Mean. Playing dirty.” This is how his debut novel kicks off, and it’s a fitting start for his retelling of the arrest, torture, one-day trial and subsequent execution of Fernand Iveton, the only Algerian-born European (or “pied-noir”) to have been subject to the death penalty during the conflict. It remains one of the most ignominious episodes of the Algerian War of Independence. Ignominious but largely forgotten. Iveton’s case received attention from the likes of Simone Beauvoir, Sartre and Camus, a “pied Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Frànçois Marry’s sixth album as Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains evokes warm days spent lounging in fields of clover reflecting on friendship, places visited and journeys which could be undertaken. Banane Bleue’s 10 tracks are unhurried and delivered as if Marry had just woken up. Relatively, the chugging “Holly Go Lightly” is uptempo – but it’s still reserved.Musically, Banane Bleue is more Eighties sounding than previous Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains albums and comes across as a family friend of Belgium’s Antena, the early Elli Medeiros and él Records mainstay Louis Philippe. Marry’s Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is an odd film, made even odder by a caption near the beginning, which claims it is "inspired by true events" but doesn’t elaborate. Produced in Belarus, it’s a Holocaust drama based on a novella by the veteran East German screenwriter/director Wolfgang Kohlhaase but made by the Ukrainian director Vadim Perelman. Perelman had quite a success in 2003 with House of Sand and Fog, but since then seems to have mainly worked in television.Persian Lessons tells the far-fetched story of a young Jewish man from Belgium, who when captured in France in 1942, manages to survive by Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Catalan director Albert Serra’s interest in late 18th century France is well established – his previous film was The Death of Louis XIV – but the title of his new one has precious little to do with the triadic revolutionary slogan that swept away the French monarchy at the end of it. If Liberté celebrates freedom in any sense, it’s that of libertinage, libertinism, the rejection of moral and especially sexual restraints that was being celebrated at the time by the Marquis de Sade, whose philosophical presence is a commanding one here (alongside, cinematically, Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose final Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
As much as we would like it to, writing can never fully recapture someone who is gone. This we learn all too effectively in A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux, arguably one of France’s most important living authors. The text, released in an updated translation by Tanya Leslie, is a concise piece of autofiction: a portrait of Ernaux’s father’s life and death which stumbles, self-reflexively, at realising a complete conception of the man.Ernaux’s writing marks a return to the real after the deconstructive emphasis of mid-20th century French fiction. But rather than picking up traditional realism in Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The BFI has done an excellent job of giving La Haine the 4k restoration treatment under the vigilant eye of the film’s cinematographer, Pierre Aïm. From the opening image of planet earth being torched by a slo-mo Molotov cocktail to the shocking final moments, this is a stunningly handsome film. It’s hard to believe Matthieu Kassovitz’s blistering tale of three young men fired up by police brutality is now 25 years old as the film has lost none of its incendiary energy and style.Kassovitz sets the scene with an archive montage of the 1993 riots that broke out in Paris after the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Feuds make good theatre. I mean, look at the furious 1970s spat between playwright Lillian Hellman and critic Mary McCarthy. Yikes. So far, I’ve counted three recent stage versions: in 2002 there was Nora Ephron’s Imaginary Friends, followed in 2014 by both Brian Richard Mori’s Hellman v McCarthy and Steven Carl McCasland’s Little Wars, which addresses this feud obliquely and got an Off-Broadway workshop production by Beautiful Soup Theater. It’s now streaming in a new rehearsed reading with a starry all-woman cast led by Juliet Stevenson and Linda Bassett.A bit of background always helps, so Read more ...
David Nice
Nobody would wish it this way, but orchestras playing on a stage specially built-up for distancing to a handful of invitees have never sounded better in the Royal Festival Hall. The Philharmonia’s outgoing principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is a master of exquisite textures, and Ravel, arguably the greatest orchestrator ever, has come under his sympathetic microscope on many occasions. It says much for Britten that his writing for strings and human voice stood the comparison with the French master last night in an enchanted hour of music.Britten’s haunting response to Rimbaud’s Les Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Intriguingly, Summer of 85 could have been François Ozon’s very first film. Back in the mid-Eighties the French director was much taken by Dance on My Grave, the YA novel by Aidan Chambers on which it’s based, its youth-romance, coming-of-age story – one centered on a teenage gay relationship that, unusually for its time, came with no extra complexes for that sexual orientation – obviously attractive. Ozon even wrote a treatment at the time, though he actually hoped he would end up watching an adaptation made by someone else, probably coming from America (Gus van Sant was one of his hopefuls Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This fifth feature from Claire Denis must surely be the director’s most sheerly concentrated film. Scaling back narrative and dialogue alike – story elucidation relies mainly on intermittent retrospective voice-over narration – Beau Travail engages the viewer instead with its sensual elements (“A Cinema of Sensation” is the title of the essay by critic Girish Shambu that comes with this new Criterion edition). It’s absorbing in every sense – from the choreographically stylised gestures of its military protagonists to the parched desert surroundings of Djibouti, a striking presence in itself, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Mademoiselle is Jeanne Moreau, in smouldering femme fatale mode: a school-teacher and town hall secretary in a small French village, she wreaks havoc by setting fire to barns, poisoning cattle and unleashing flood waters in a farm yard full of animals. As a seemingly uptight spinster of a certain age, she is above suspicion, and the villagers cast their eye instead on a stud of an Italian woodcutter (a suitably beefy Ettore Manni), who has sent the menfolk into jealous fury by seducing their frustrated wives. The savage finale, as the men of the village beat the outsider to death – a Read more ...