France
Tom Birchenough
The sheer joy of making theatre provides the central attraction of Cycling with Moliere (Alceste à bicyclette), but Philippe Le Guay’s film is also rich in the comedy of fractious interaction between old friends whose worlds have moved apart. It’s the story of two actors: Gauthier (Lambert Wilson) has become famous for his television roles (the different circumstances in which he’s recognised become memorable vignettes in the film); Serge (Fabrice Luchini) has left the profession after a breakdown, retreating to a run-down house on the windblown Ile de Ré and a life of virtual solitude. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We call it the First World War, but in Western Europe at least, most of the scrutiny is confined to what happened to Britain, France and Germany (with a side order of Russia) from 1914-18. The writer and presenter of this two-part series, David Olusoga, seized the opportunity to emphasise the full global scope of the conflict by throwing fascinating light on the contributions made by troops from the French and British colonies, uncomprehendingly transported from India and Africa to the mud, blood and horror of the Western Front.Beginning with the revelation that the first shot fired by the Read more ...
David Nice
The sprightly tread of Handel’s Queen of Sheba, attended by two wonderful Turkish oboists, wove the most fragile of gold threads between full orchestral exotica and Rameau motets of infinite variety last night. Not that any more links need be found: it’s the addition of the late night events which turns the Proms into a real festival, not the mere concatenation of concerts you might find in the main orchestral season. And no-one could have asked for a higher level of engagement last night from either Austrian live wire Sascha Goetzel and his amazingly high level Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Finding a new angle for a forbidden romance film must be tough. Telling the story of a couple where one is married, in a relationship or in some other situation impeding the path of true love or lust is not enough. New settings are needed. In the French drama Grand Central, the problem is solved when love blossoms inside a nuclear power station and the surrounding encampment.Grand Central tells of Gary (Tahar Rahim) and Karole (Léa Seydoux). From near Lyon, he has pitched up in the Rhone Valley and finds a job as a decontamination worker at a nuclear power plant. Karole works there and is Read more ...
Sarah Connolly
I felt so shocked by the events that took place during the premiere of Handel’s Ariodante on 3 July in the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence last week, and so disappointed that our painstaking work with director Richard Jones over the last six weeks had been so comprehensively ruined, that I felt I should document what happened.I am avoiding making any political comments. For a full explanation of the situation concerning the confederated unions of arts workers in France known as Les intermittents, read this article from 2012. Black sheets daubed in white painted slogans (banner pictured Read more ...
Matthew Wright
French band Pulcinella is little known over here, but the release of their third album Bestiole (meaning nothing more ribald than “tiny creatures”, apparently), coincides with a brief UK tour, and is looking like the beginnings of a breakthrough. A quartet of sax, accordion, percussion and bass, with an exotic array of guest instruments, they’re self-consciously experimental, but melodic and humorous with it. Their swirling sound-world of whimsical, gothic circus noir draws on jazz, tango and alt rock, but balances the mixture with feisty originality in independent territory in between.The Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Grange Park Opera has a strong penchant for French repertoire, and has been valiant, consistent and highly imaginative in presenting it ever since 1998, when Wasfi Kani and Michael Moody first started inviting opera-goers to the unique setting of a Greek revival house in the Hampshire countryside. This year's production of Massenet's 1909 Don Quichotte is the eighth French work which the company has produced. Samson et Dalila next year will be the ninth.Stagings of Don Quichotte in the UK are rare indeed, the last one of significance probably having been English National Opera's in 1994 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With the 70th anniversary of D-Day following hard on the heels of the extensive World War One commemorations, battle fatigue is becoming a very real concern for TV-watchers. Breaking the mould of retrospective war documentaries becomes increasingly difficult, as Messrs Enfield and Whitehouse demonstrated with deadly satirical accuracy in Harry and Paul's Story of the 2s, so all kinds of credit are due to National Geographic's frequently devastating record of the D-Day landings and their immediate aftermath.Although this was a multinational collaborative effort, the premise was straightforward Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Miss this “gay” film at your peril - a thriller with a stronger story than most. Directed and written by Alain Guiraudie (King of Escape), Stranger at the Lake’s a stealthy ineluctable drama that draws the audience in as few other films can, with explicit nudity and sex integral to its unfolding.A gay cruising lake is the solo setting where Franck (Pierre Dalndonchamps) goes to socialise and have casual sex. Out of shape, older bloke Henri (Patrick D'Assumçao) becomes his friend and a kind of Greek chorus, outlining the film’s subtext. It is Michel (Christophe Paou) who attracts attention as Read more ...
David Nice
“Assez vu” (“seen enough”) is the first line of Benjamin Britten’s last Rimbaud setting in his electric song cycle Les Illuminations. Victor Hugo and Paul Verlaine had been the objects of his 14-year old attention in the Quatre Chansons françaises; later he made typically quirky arrangements of French folksongs. Les Illuminations has certainly been seen and heard enough in concert halls around Europe, even if you can never have too much of music as fresh as this. Britten loved the continent and the idea of the European Union. But have the French returned the compliment with stagings of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
French cinema is full of long-term marriages hit by a meteor in the form of an attractive younger female. So there is a heavy sense of déjà vu to Before the Winter Chill. It also features another increasingly common trope of modern French film, which is Kristin Scott Thomas playing a perfect French speaker with an English heritage, and accent. So is there a twist? Sort of.Scott Thomas is Lucie (pictured below), the wife of a successful neurosurgeon Paul (Daniel Auteuil) who prefers to operate on brains rather than suffer the fate of his shrink friend Gérard (Richard Berry), who has to listen Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Paths of Glory (1957) stars Kirk Douglas as a First World War colonel who's as fearless leading his poilus on a suicide mission as he is arguing for mercy for three of the survivors. A lawyer in peacetime, he defends them when they are tried as cowards before a panel of French officers who have no intention of exonerating them.Stanley Kubrick's fourth feature was adapted from Humphrey Cobb's 1935 novel, which was inspired by the French execution of soldiers chosen arbitrarily to pay for the disciplinary failure of their unit during an attack in the Marne. In February 1915, at Souain-Perthes- Read more ...