France
Kieron Tyler
In 1966, the combo fronted by French sax player Barney Wilen issued an album of musical interpretations of each sign of the zodiac. In the US in 1969, Mort Garson released 12 albums, each dedicated to a single sign. Two years earlier Garson was behind the one-sign-per-track Cosmic Sounds album, credited to The Zodiac. Back in 1945, bop pianist Mary Lou Williams made an album – over six 10-inch discs – titled Signs Of The Zodiac.Taking inspiration from the signs of the zodiac wasn’t unusual. But Wilen’s album approached what could have been cheesy from a perspective acknowledging that this was Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
For die-hard Juliette Binoche fans – don’t cross us, we get angry – Between Two Worlds is heaven. The French star hardly ever leaves the screen during the film’s 106 minutes. It was her unwavering detemination that ensured the film came to be made in the first place. Binoche’s early attempts to bring to the screen Florence Aubenas’s best-selling 2010 book Le Quai de Ouistreham (published in English as The Night Cleaner) met with major resistance from the journalist. But Binoche persisted, as she does, and Aubenas eventually agreed it could be made on the condition that the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Nouvelle Vague directors have grown to seem more diverse than bonded, a golden generation linked by extreme cinephilia and the mutually supportive main chance. Godard endures at one extreme, pushing the movement’s implications to their terminus, collaging gnomic capitalist critiques holed up in Swiss self-exile, still fiercely repulsing acceptance.Claude Chabrol lasted almost as long making chilly thrillers beloved by the French public but distrusted by the academy, steeped in Lang and Hitchcock, but most of all Georges Simenon. He was similarly prolific and accepting of human Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Life, opined Thomas Hobbes, is “nasty, brutish, and short”. In Gaspar Noé’s Vortex it’s not short enough for a dementia-afflicted octogenarian psychiatrist (Françoise Lebrun) and her addled film critic husband (giallo auteur Dario Argento), whose joint decline is a protracted saga of alienation, confusion, and fear.When worrying is your default mode and oblivion your near future, dignity is an out-of-reach luxury and survival a harrowing moment-to-moment ordeal. As blunt as ever about human flaws and vulnerabilities, the Argentina-born French filmmaker Nóe typically offers no bromides or balm Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A dozen years have passed since Downton Abbey first landed on our TV screens, since when it has passed into folklore. Whether you thought it was escapist historical froth, a ludicrous anachronism full of class-system clichés or a documentary probing the British aristocracy, Downton has lodged itself in the national consciousness, probably forever.However, perhaps even some of its most fervent fans thought that a belated second Downton movie was a bit of a stretch. The first one, from 2019, involved the arrival of King George V and Queen Mary at Downton, prompting panic attacks among family Read more ...
mark.kidel
François Truffaut’s Nouvelle Vague masterpiece revolves around an endlessly mutating love triangle, set in a world that encompasses the hedonism of the Belle Époque, the horror of the First World War, and the book burning that ushered in the Nazi period in Germany. The film is a triumph of humanity as well as a deep and touching reflection on friendship, love and marriage.Jules et Jim marked an era, not least because the two male protagonists, the Austrian actor Oskar Werner as Jules and Henry Serre as Jim, are more sentimental than Catherine, the near-psychopathic and yet overwhelmingly Read more ...
Nick Hasted
France is a female dystopia in Audrey Diwan’s immersive illegal abortion drama, set in 1963 and based on Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel.Anamaria Vartolomei is Anne, the first girl from her rural family to go to college, where she is a modest but eager star student. Looming exams are a crucial staging-post towards full escape velocity from provincial, working-class restrictions into the writer’s life she desires. Between classes, she lounges on summer grass with her friends, verbally bold Brigitte (Louise Orrey Diquerro) and cautious, quiet Hélène (Luàna Bajrami-Rahmani, pictured below Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If Florian Zeller isn’t a Wordle fan, I’d be very surprised. As with the hit online game, the French playwright likes to offer up a puzzle for the audience to solve, clue by clue, before the curtain falls. His latest play, The Forest, which had its world premiere at the Hampstead Theatre in an unusual move for this writer, is his most purely puzzle-like yet, and also his least rewarding. Whereas Zeller’s standout play, 2012’s The Father (a double Oscar-winner in its screen adaptation last year), wrung poignancy from its theatrical tricks at every turn, his shtick here is all trick: Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Louise Bourgeois didn’t throw anything away and, during the last 20 years of her life, she used her own and her mother’s old clothes to create theatrical tableaux which revisit painful childhood memories. “These garments have a history,” she explained. “They have touched my body and they hold memories of people and places. They are chapters from the story of my life.”Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife), 2001 (pictured below, right) is like a scene from an Ibsen play with dresses standing in for people. Three female characters are trapped inside a wire cage, caught in the Read more ...
mark.kidel
Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Alain Resnais’s first feature-length film, followed a number of remarkable short documentaries, the most famous of which was Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1956), a haunting evocation of Nazi terror, and still a reference for the way in which the unspeakable can be powerfully expressed.Another was Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), a beautiful work about the Bibliothèque Nationale, France’s national library – a film about memory, compressed into thousands of book stacks through which Resnais’ camera tracked relentlessly. The same tracking shots re-appear in Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“It mustn’t be a surface thing. You have to put in the work,” Janet Baker once said. Sandrine Piau’s Wigmore recital of German song followed by French song was the perfect demonstration of that credo in action.Whereas Piau described the repertoire, almost nonchalantly before performing their encore – Debussy’s “Beau Soir” – as a “new programme from David Kadouch”, there was no disguising the level of careful preparation and forethought which both singer and pianist had put into every nuance. The poetry and the music could be savoured and enjoyed completely; the results were overwhelmingly Read more ...
graham.rickson
Why Les Triplettes de Belleville was rechristened Belleville Rendevous in the UK is one of several questions left unanswered by this reissue. Along with what happened to French director Sylvain Chomet’s animation career, which seems to have fizzled out after his 2010 Jacques Tati adaptation The Illusionist.The latter, while beautiful to look at, lacks bite, but 2003’s Belleville Rendevous is a masterpiece, one of the 21st century's greatest animated features. Tati’s influence is discernible throughout this near-silent film, and Chomet’s idiosyncratic use of sound will amuse anyone who’s Read more ...