France
Graham Fuller
Jeanne d’Arc was 19, she believed, when she was tried for heresy by her English enemies in Rouen in 1431. Of the actors who have played her onscreen – Falconetti, Ingrid Bergman, Jean Seberg, Leelee Sobieski, Milla Jovovich among them – none has evinced more wolf-cub-like fierceness or childlike purity of purpose than does Lise Leplat Prudhomme. That’s because Prudhomme was 10 when she portrayed Jeanne from age 17 onwards in Joan of Arc, Bruno Dumont’s sequel to his 2017 Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc.Prudhomme appeared in the first half of Jeannette as the little girl shepherdess Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Rustles of renewal are stirring in the Surrey woods where Grange Park Opera has built the splendid theatre that remains, for this summer, sadly out of bounds. Faced with the cancellation of its 2020 programme, Wasfi Kani’s company has not simply relied, like many others, on a back catalogue of archive videos to keep its audiences onside. For the “Found” season, it has commissioned a series of 15 original performances – some given by artists in their own homes, but some staged in the empty “Theatre in the Woods", with social-distancing measures duly in place. The events, which run until 9 July Read more ...
Charlie Stone
A century on, the années folles of Paris between the wars do not cease to excite readers and writers of all varieties. Alex George’s latest novel, The Paris Hours, draws on the myriad charms the interwar period has to offer, condensing them into a single day in 1927. We follow his four protagonists on their separate ways through the crisscrossing city streets until they come together in the most dramatic of dénouements. If these four leads are fictional, though, the author reminds us that this is still the Paris of Hemingway, Proust, Ravel, Stein and so many others by littering his narrative Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There are quite a few good things to be said for Julien Leclerc’s Earth and Blood. It’s a terse and uncluttered thriller which makes full use of its main location, a battered old sawmill in the midst of a dank expanse of forest, and Leclerc has rustled up a thoroughly unpleasant bunch of gangsters led by the intimidating Adama (Ériq Ebouaney). Best of all is his leading man Saïd, played as the acme of strong and silent by Sami Bouajila, a Leclerc regular who also appeared in the director’s recent pieces The Crew and The Bouncer.In fact Leclerc’s opening scene might be a little too good, since Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
With influences as diverse as Hitchcock’s Vertigo to 2010’s Catfish, Safy Nebbou’s genre-splicing French-language feature, starring Juliette Binoche, comes loaded with a heady mix of cheap thrills and surprising psychological depth. And it’s a hoot from start to finish. Nebbou’s sixth and most accomplished feature is an adaptation of Camille Lauren’s 2016 novel, ‘Celle que vous croyez’. Binoche is Claire, a fifty-something literature professor, with two children from a failed marriage. We meet her being interviewed by a psychiatrist, Doctor Bormans (Nicole Garcia), the Read more ...
David Nice
One way to look at Stravinsky's celebrated collaboration with W H Auden and Chester Kallman is as a numbers opera in nine pictures, four of them indebted to Hogarth's series of paintings/prints. So it's not surprising that visual flair has marked out three significant productions: John Cox’s for Glyndebourne, “starring” David Hockney’s cross-hatched homage to Hogarth in 1975 and still going strong; Robert Lepage’s 1940s Hollywood tale in 2007; and, a decade later, this, Simon McBurney’s contemporary version first seen in Aix-en-Provence (but not so far in the UK, hence our gratitude to Read more ...
Charlie Stone
Nathalie Léger’s The White Dress brings personal and public tragedy together in a narrative as absorbingly melancholic as its subject is shocking. The story described by Léger’s narrator – a scarcely fictional version of herself – is of the performance artist Pippa Bacca who, in 2008, set out on a symbolic journey from Milan to Jerusalem clad in a white wedding dress, hitchhiking her way through cities and countryside. Bacca was never to reach her destination. The narrator’s research of this woman’s failed journey runs alongside and increasingly intertwines with her own story, that of her Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-born French filmmaker, has a reputation that precedes her. Her upbringing was the subject of the acclaimed films Persepolis (2007) and Chicken With Plums (2011). Persepolis won the Cannes Jury Prize, two César awards and was nominated for an Oscar. Satrapi adapted and co-directed both films. She also wrote and illustrated the comic books on which they were based. Over the past ten years, Satrapi has parlayed her success as a cartoonist into a formidable career as a filmmaker. Her latest film is her biggest. Radioactive is a wide-ranging biopic about the life of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Presenter Waldemar Januszczak suffers from something very like Robert Peston Syndrome, which makes him bellow at the camera and distort words as if they’re chewing gum he’s peeling off the sole of his shoe. Nonetheless he has a knack for finding fresh and revealing angles on art history, as he aims to do in this new series.Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear is frequently taken to be the pitiable proof of the artist’s hopeless derangement, another step along the road to his eventual suicide by gunshot, but Januszczak gradually revealed a more nuanced and much more Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It may offer veteran French star Catherine Deneuve as substantial and engaging a role as she has enjoyed in years, but the real surprise of The Truth is that it’s the work of Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda. The director, whose Shoplifters took the Palme d’Or at Cannes two years ago, has made a distinctive move away from his native environment – and, no less importantly, language: apart from a few scenes played in English, this is a French-language piece – in a film that catches the tone and nuances of French cinema with a finesse that’s as delightful as it is convincing.Occasionally it feels Read more ...
David Nice
Emblazoned on a drop-curtain in front of a mirror-image of the auditorium, the three great tenets of the French revolution seem to be mocking us right at the start, above all the second of them: equality, really, given the make-up of the Royal Opera stalls? But the last, more bitter laugh is on both the audience and the director, Tobias Kratzer, who cheats Beethoven's admittedly lopsided liberation opera of its significant events and, ultimately, some fine singers, above all the eagerly-awaited Lise Davidsen and Jonas Kaufmann, along with their conductor, Antonio Pappano, of what has to be Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is windblown, spare, taut, and sensual – a haunted seaside romantic drama, set in the 18th century, that makes most recent films and series dressed in period costumes seem like party-line effusions of empty style and social conservatism (Gentleman Jack excepted).Writer-director Céline Sciamma’s fiercely adult follow-up to her coming-of-age trilogy – Water Lilies (2007), Tomboy (2011), Girlhood (2014) – can be enjoyed simply as the story of two women falling torturously in love just before one of them enters an arranged marriage in pre-Revolutionary France. In terms Read more ...