France
Matt Wolf
It's not often with Private Lives that you feel Amanda and Elyot are one step away from a visit to A&E. But such is the startling force of Michael Longhurst's Donmar Warehouse revival of arguably Noël Coward's most durable play that you are aware throughout of violence and pain as the flipside of passion at its most intense. Some will complain (and have) that the result negates the comedy coursing through this time-honored text; I would argue that the laughs are still there, tempered in this instance by an awareness of the lacerations oftentimes inflicted by love. After all Read more ...
joe.muggs
Popular musicians “going classical” can work well. Look at Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, at Richard Reed Parry and Colin Stetson from Arcade Fire, or at the late Jóhann Jóhannsson who had a successful career as indie and electronic musician in Iceland before becoming a globally beloved orchestral composer. Of course the boundaries are flimsy anyway these days, with the likes of Max Richter, Nils Frahm and Anna Meredith existing comfortably with one foot in the concert hall and one in the gig venue. Crucially, each of these artists has been able to negotiate their own position among all this, Read more ...
Tom Carr
It’s easy to forget in the age of TikTok and trending that “virality” doesn’t always cement a lasting mainstream awareness. This can be said of M83, the cinematic music project started in 2001 by French musician Anthony Gonzales.A symphonic blending of pop and electronica with smatterings of dance and indie rock, Gonzales brought M83 into the popular music conscience with its third album in 2011, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. It was heralded with the irresistibly dancey lead single “Midnight City” that was unavoidable for a time, being used in countless trailers and tv shows.But in the years Read more ...
mark.kidel
I have wanted to visit the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar for many years: the home of Matthias Grünewald’s masterpiece, the Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-1516), one of the great works of North European religious art. The opportunity finally arose in an oblique way, as the museum has been hosting a major exhibition by the French painter Fabienne Verdier.The show was commissioned as an invitation for the artist to respond to the Grünewald and other works in a treasure trove that lies hidden away in the east of France, only just over two hours train from Paris, and yet somewhat off the beaten track. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Saint Omer is a psychological and sociological mystery, unpicking the enigma of Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), a French Senegalese woman who drowned her 15-month-old daughter in the ocean.Director Alice Diop recognised her own Senegalese heritage and circumstance in the case of Fabienne Kabou, the murderer of a mixed-race child much like her own, who was racially pathologised in the French media. A prize-winning documentarian, Diop’s first feature adapts Kabou’s trial transcripts, and was filmed next-door to her courtroom in the depressed northern town of Saint-Omer.We glimpse the Paris life of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A sprawling French-made drama set in the early days of the First World War in 1914, Women at War tells the stories of a quartet of female protagonists as they struggle to make sense of the mayhem which suddenly engulfs them. The series – its French title is Les Combattantes – was filmed in the photogenic Vosges region of eastern France and is set around the town of Saint-Paulin (also the name of a semi-soft French cheese, as it happens), which finds itself perilously close to the front line as the Germans invade.Fans of top French cop show Spiral will be delighted to see the flame-haired Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I am proud – if surprised – to continue to be pretty much a lone voice in the wilderness singing the praises of the composer Guillaume Connesson (b.1970), whose substantial new string quartet “Les instants retrouvés” was heard at the Wigmore Hall on Saturday.Probably the most widely programmed French composer of his generation across mainland Europe and the USA, he continues to be almost completely ignored in the UK. And this is where the surprise comes in. Connesson’s music is at once more accessible than a lot of contemporary music – he is unafraid of heart-on-sleeve melodic outpourings – Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Audrey Diwan’s French abortion drama Happening was the year’s hardest but most luminescent watch, as a fiercely intelligent young woman fights for her future survival as an artist in 1963, when illegal abortion requires wartime subterfuge and bloody violence to female bodies.Similarly humane social concern motivated the poetic realism of Li Ruijun’s Chinese peasant saga Return to Dust, and migrant children’s struggles in the Dardennes’ gripping Tori and Lokita. Nina Hoss’s portrait of a disintegrating piano teacher in The Audition also brought icy thriller techniques to the arthouse, while a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s Friday night and I’ve finally arrived at 43-year-old French music festival institution Trans Musicales. Due to some dreadful nonsense, it’s taken a 12-hour train journey, two baguettes, one short Stephen King novel, six large beers, a tumbler of Bourbon, and one shuttlebus to place me at the Parc Expo, a series of giant airport hangars that house the majority of musical activity (although there’s a smattering of earlier events in Rennes itself).The music runs from 9.00 pm-ish through to shortly before dawn and Trans Musicales is renowned for ensuring that the nearly 60,000 attendees are Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Only by doing something mad can I hope to stay sane,” says Charlotte Salomon (voiced by Keira Knightley) to her lover, Alexander Nagler (Sam Claflin). “I feel it inside me, the same demon that’s haunted so many in my family.”Both are Jewish refugees in Villefranche, near Nice in the south of France, in 1943. Her mad, courageous plan is to paint the story of her life (it’s considered by some to be the first graphic novel). The demons are not just the Nazis, but the suicidal impulses that claimed her mother, her great-uncle, her aunt Charlotte and now her Grossmama (grandmother, voiced by Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Mathieu Amalric's Hold me Tight (Serre moi fort) keeps springing surprises. Perhaps the first is the title. It sounds like an invitation to settle down with the popcorn to enjoy a light French film dealing with intimacy. Not even close. It's a quote from a song by Étienne Daho. Apparently, Amalric could just as well have called it the opposite: “Serre moins fort” (hug less tight). He has also said the ideal title (“if it hadn’t already been taken” by Douglas Sirk) would have been Imitation of Life.That is telling. The film is a melodrama, a constant Read more ...
David Nice
How do they do it? Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective ticks all the boxes of diversity and reaching out to all ages without needing to draw attention to it all. The answer is quite simple: the repertoire – in Saturday’s morning and afternoon concerts, French chamber music both known and unfamiliar – is beautifully chosen and programmed, the performers all born communicators as well as musicians at the highest level.Among the first and last artists to appear were recent BBC Young Musician finalists, horn-player Annemarie Federle (2020) and percussionist Jordan Ashman (2022; another, Laura van der Read more ...