France
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 ...
Graham Fuller
It’s no accident that the eponymous young antihero of Coincoin and the Extra-Humans loses his virginity to the daughter of a French white nationalist in a field close to a sewage farm. The stench of racism pervades the hilarity of Bruce Dumont’s follow-up to his 2014 miniseries Le P’tit Quinquin, which happily features the same principal cast members. Available in four 52-minute episodes but more hypnotic when watched in one sitting, Coincoin is a deceptively gentle polemical comedy so rich in ideas it deserves its own sequel. Hopefully, the story of the Pas-de-Calais farmer’s son Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Imagine, if you will, that the Internet doesn’t allow you to see other people. Because that is the premise upon which Safy Nebbou's Who Do You Think I Am rests. It smacks of an idea that hails from the days of Friends Reunited (one for the younger readers). This is, ultimately, a Juliet Binoche vehicle – and there’s nothing wrong with that. She is a fine actress and she is utterly mesmerising in this very French psycho-emotional thriller.Binoche plays 50-something lecturer, Claire – a mother of two boys whose husband has left her for (we discover later) a much younger woman. Her attempts Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
It’s hard to take The Old Guard seriously — it’s an action film about thousand-year-old immortal warriors. Pulpy flashbacks and fake blood abounds. But The Old Guard doesn’t need to be serious or even memorable: it’s a fun, feel-good film, a rare commodity these days.Andy (Charlize Theron) leads a band of renegades who use their immortality to thwart crime. Their secret power makes them outcasts, so their existence is increasingly threatened by surveillance and modern technology. A new immortal, Nile (KiKi Layne), joins their ranks at the exact moment that their freedom is most threatened. Read more ...
Charlie Stone
Edgar Degas is famous for his depictions of ballet dancers. His drawings, paintings and sculptures of young girls clad in the uniform of the dance are signs of an artistic obsession that spanned a remarkable artistic career. One work in particular – a sculpture of a young ballet dancer in a rest position – cemented his reputation as a pioneering spirit, unafraid of provoking controversy in the pursuit of perfection. It is this sculpture and the story behind it that Camille Laurens explores in Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, whose immersive translation by Willard Wood conveys a deeply Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a story of impossible love between two young women, takes place in the 18th century, on a wind-swept, wave-battered island off the coast of Brittany. The writer and director Céline Sciamma, who established herself as a unique voice and very capable filmmaker with films like Waterlilies (2008) and Tomboy (2011), explores once again the world of female passion.Marianne (Noémie Merlant) has been commissioned to paint the portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who has just been released from convent life and is destined to be married. She is impetuous, introverted and Read more ...