France
David Nice
Ditch the divers, the video-projected sea and the Relevance with a capital R of ENO's production last season - which managed all three very well indeed - and what remains of Bizet's Pearl Fishers in concert (and in French)? Three ravishing arias, three passionate duets, orchestration and harmony of a subtlety way beyond the plot's cod-oriental hokum: that's enough to begin with. Put Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano, master of exquisite colour and winged phrasing in French music, in charge of orchestra, chorus and two-and-a-half top singers, and you're in for a treat.Sweet delight Read more ...
judith.flanders
Gauguin has always been the poor relation in the art-legend sweepstakes. Unlike Van Gogh, there is no heartwarming story of overcoming lack of technical facility; no ghoulishly enjoyable story of genius crushed by madness. Instead, there is a story that veers from irritating to deeply unattractive: a businessman and Sunday painter, Gauguin acquired his technical skills across a range of art forms with almost insolent ease, before abandoning his wife and children in poverty to flee to ever-more exotic locales, where he lived with a succession of (in today’s terms) underage girls, some Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The constant strobing lights us white like we’re watching an Atom bomb test. From its garish credit sequence to the somehow inevitable vagina’s view of a penetrating penis, Enter the Void attempts assaultive cinema. You’d expect no less from Gaspar Noé, whose previous film Irreversible (2002) menaced audiences with the prospect of Monica Bellucci’s character’s real-time rape half-way through. The director is an idealist as much as a provocateur, as this long trip through the post-death visions of a murdered young American in Tokyo proves.We only see casual drug dealer Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) Read more ...
rachel.wagstaff
I remember walking into the Hawthorn Ridge cemetery, seeing a grave of a 20-year-old boy who died on 1 July, 1916, and knowing for the first time why Sebastian Faulks needed to write Birdsong, and why I desperately wanted it to live and breathe and be brought back to the public consciousness again.I first approached Sebastian four-and-a-half years ago. I got his email and asked him if he’d be interested in discussing it as a possibility. Sebastian sent a very gracious email back saying pretty much "Thanks, but no thanks" because he thought Working Title owned the theatrical rights. But he Read more ...
james.woodall
Cambridge is in pre-term cocktail mood, almost. Its Film Festival slips in after Locarno and Venice, and as Toronto ends, and before Rome (increasingly important) and London (internationally a struggler) start. It tilts in the same direction as the aforementioned, with fully fledged art movies, provocative documentaries and work from a dozen language groups or so, though it's very small and many people might not know it exists.This year, it nearly didn't exist at all. No corks popped as it opened, arriving at its 30th birthday - yes, 30 years of festival films in a city far more famous for Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The French have got serious form when it comes to twisting the determinedly uncool into something hip, a fact Phoenix illustrated so winningly last year with Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, a beautifully crafted album of mid-tempo soft rock which lounged dreamily in some critic-proof holding area between the mid-Seventies and early Eighties.The Versailles four-piece have been kicking around for the best part of 15 years, but they only really hit their stride with their fourth studio album, a veritable party bag of lush, dreamy, fluid, euphoric pop. It won them a Grammy for Best Alternative Album ( Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
From Russian “avant-garde constructivism” to Estonian minimalism via a jazz-inspired French concerto and the defiant originality of Scriabin – last night’s Prom from Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra had a lot of ground to cover. I can imagine few pieces more antithetical – in spirit as much as style – as the self-reflexive indulgence of Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy and Arvo Pärt’s Symphony No 4 with its meditative asceticism; it says much of Salonen’s persuasive energy that it was a dialogue rather than a squabble that ensued amongst this rag-bag of the 20th and 21st Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Amid the cinematic dog days of late summer, François Ozon's Le Refuge comes aptly named: a character-led, intimate tale in the style of the late Eric Rohmer that will infuriate those who like their films more purely driven by plot even as it offers a refuge to moviegoers for whom the curves of a pregnant belly or a handsome young man's spine contain within them their own narrative.A meditation on the subtleties of tenderness and the legacy of pain, the film possesses something of the qualities of an exceedingly smart novella. Well, at least up until a final sequence that threatens to undo Read more ...
theartsdesk
Marcel Lucont, “France’s greatest misanthropic lover”, comes on stage looking like the love child of Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge Gainsbourg - in head-to-toe black, sporting manly stubble and clutching a bottle of vin rouge. Is he an ethnic stereotype, or is he the alter ego of Alexis Dubus from Buckinghamshire, who happens to speak perfect French?Marcel Lucont, Underbelly ****
Whichever and whomever, it’s a beautifully observed and executed piece of character comedy, as Lucont eyes up the women in the front row and tells us that if we don’t like his show, it’s our problem, not his. He’s an Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Every year there are a couple of Proms that have a haphazard look about them, as if a fire had suddenly broken out in the BBC archives, and the programming committee grabbed whatever came to hand – a piano quartet, a couple of choral odes and a concerto for mandolin – and made for freedom. Though there had evidently once been a clear architecture to Sunday’s concert by the BBC Symphony Chorus and friends, in practice things were somewhat confused; endless personnel shiftings and a stuffed-to-bursting programme blunted the impact of music which demanded altogether simpler treatment.Bookending Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
My surname came to Britain with the Normans, and I must say that my forebears have had a bad press in their adopted homeland. From Hereward the Wake to Robin Hood, Anglo-Saxon legends have depicted us as despotic and cruel, whereas we were great builders of castles and cathedrals, brilliant horsemen and tip-top administrators, as well as being despotic and cruel. Anyway, it was good to have the refreshingly un-youthful and un-strident Professor Robert Bartlett (more Norman names) giving us his authoritative account of the antecedents and legacy of 1066 and all that. It’s about time we Viking- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The arrival of Gainsbourg: Vie Héroique in British cinemas this week – under its Anglo-Saxon title Gainsbourg – assumes that distributors think there’s an audience. Even so, Gainsbourg hardly has the appeal of a Johnny Cash biopic. Or even an Ike Turner biopic. The release continues a process that began in the early 1990s, when a slow, posthumous rise to recognition of Serge Gainsbourg began outside the Francophone world, au delà de l’Hexagon. France might be a non-stop train ride from London, but this particular Gallic cultural icon has taken a while to make a mark over here.Which means that Read more ...