France
Mark Valencia
There’s nowt so French as the mélodie and the chanson, but I’m not convinced they make ideal bedfellows. Nor, I suspect, is Anne Sofie von Otter, since she split the salon and cabaret halves of her Douce France recital with an interval (and the CD release of the same name with a change of disc). The art song and the popular tune may spring from the same national sensibility but they have little in common: the one is subtle and born of poetry, the other musically primitive and emotionally blatant. The francophile in me loves them both – an enthusiasm I probably share with the Swedish mezzo – Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
“The most potent special effect in movies is the human face changing its mind.” So stated film critic David Thomson, and the principle has never been more irrefutably proven than by Blue Is the Warmest Colour and its leading lady Adèle Exarchopoulos. The electric, emotionally raw story of 15-year-old schoolgirl Adèle’s sexual awakening unfolds in a series of languid close-ups and unbroken takes, and her face is centre-stage throughout, captivating both in its moments of beauty and ugliness, continually on the brink of change.Director Abdellatif Kechiche, whose treatment of his cast and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Clochemerle is the very odd one out in Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s scriptwriting career. It was their only adaptation, from Gabriel Chevallier’s 1934 comic novel set in the titular Beaujolais small town a decade before, and their only step away from the post-war, pre-Thatcher England they mined such socially rich, dark comedy from in Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son. The latter had two more years to run when this relatively lavish BBC-West German co-production was filmed, on location with a fine cast in Beaujolais in 1972. The tale of the catastrophic consequences when an ambitious Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Berlioz wanted to make the first arrival of his demon onstage unforgettable, with an extreme sound effect - violins and violas marked sul ponticello, strettissimo, starting fortissimo, with interjections from three trombones snarling in minor seconds. In last night's performance of La Damnation de Faust that moment was glossed over. It flashed past as if it had never happened.In many of the sections of the work which involved the vocal soloists and chorus, particularly in the first half, Valery Gergiev seldom looked up from his score. It produced a detached reading of the work. He took a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It is amazing how perceptions and attitudes change. Think of a nude and the chances are you will imagine a naked woman since, nowadays, the female body virtually monopolises the genre; naked men scarcely make an appearance in mainstream culture. This changed briefly in the 1970s, when American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe brought the male nude into focus with countless images celebrating masculine beauty. After his death in 1989, though, the naked male returned to the closet, relegated to porn movies and gay magazines.In 17th and 18th century France, the reverse was true. The male Read more ...
David Nice
If ever there were a week for London to celebrate Poulenc in the lamentably under-commemorated 50th anniversary year of his death, this is it. Two major choral works and two fun concertos at last join the party. But if Figure Humaine and the Concerto for Two Pianos look like being well positioned in the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Barbican programme on Saturday, Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s chosen two were the victims of his own success in Prokofiev interpretation. The Seventh Symphony, chronologically the last in this programme of works circa 1950 to tie in with The Rest is Noise festival’s agenda, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the creators of Scandinavia's drama boom could be forgiven if they started behaving like a collection of hysterical Justin Biebers. Not only are their home-grown series hits around the world, they're also being slavishly copied by other broadcasters. The American version of The Killing has been followed by a US take on Danish/Swedish joint effort The Bridge, starring Diane Kruger and set on the Tex/Mex border. Now here's an Anglo-French spin on it, replacing the titular bridge with our beloved Channel Tunnel.In some ways it's not a bad idea, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
In 2004 French director Catherine Breillat suffered a stroke. Three years later, she was cheated out of nearly a million euros by a known conman whom she was intending to cast in a film. She later suggested he took advantage of her still-reduced mental capacities.While it’s wonderful that Breillat overcame such multiple hardships to return to filmmaking, it’s unfortunate that she has chosen to convey these experiences onscreen. Sometimes autobiography adds piquancy to proceedings; as often, proximity to the material kills it. The result, here, truly flatters to deceive.Isabelle Huppert stars Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Go for the lesbian sex, leave knowing relationships are all the same: that's the nutshell of French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche's explicit, intimate and lengthy drama Blue Is the Warmest Color (aka Le Vie D’Adèle), the Palme d’Or winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Based on Julie Maroh’s 2010 graphic novel of the same name – itself akin to Pierre de Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne (famous in French schools for the vivid voice of its female narrator, the unfinished novel is mentioned early in the film), Kechiche’s sympathetic feature stars Léa Seydoux and Adèle Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Rebecca Zlotowski catches the blue-collar underbelly of France at dangerous work and uneasy play in her second feature Grand Central. Tahar Rahim from A Prophet leads as Gary, rejected by his family and looking for any job going: it turns out to be maintaining the huge nuclear plant that dominates the film’s Rhône landscape (and provides its title). Camaraderie grows convincingly between veterans and newcomers, as they live together and bond in a caravan park.The drama of the hazardous decontamination work has its own rules: preconditions for workers include the fact that if their personal Read more ...
David Nice
It has to be partial, because out of the 10 opera productions from the iconoclastic French actor-director, who died yesterday of lung cancer at the age of 68, I’ve seen but two, on screen only – but a big two at that – and only three of his 11 films. Yet they all had a tremendous impact, one way or another.Not in a good way - let's get this over with first - as far as Intimacy is concerned: on a blistering hot summer day in Paris, "film by Patrice Chéreau"’ on the poster outside a small cinema in the Beauborg – a poster, moreover, showing a gathering at a cocktail party, suggestive of Rohmer Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One of the joys of autumn is the seasonal return to films about - and intended for - grown-ups, and movies don't come much more crisply and buoyantly adult than Le Week-End, at once the latest and best from the director/writer team of Roger Michell and Hanif Kureishi. The abundant wisdom of the pair's third screen collaboration within 10 years surely reflects the growing awareness that comes with age of the derailments, large and small, that lie scattered along life's way.But whereas one might expect a gathering dourness from this excavation of marital fissures as they are laid bare Read more ...