France
Joe Muggs
It's a nervous beginning. This is the first ever presentation of the first proper album by one of the lynchpins of British underground music, and the soundsystem isn't right. Record label personnel and friends are flung across Paris to requisition new loudspeakers, while the invited audience drinks mojitos. After all this, it would be deeply embarrassing if the record turned out to be bad.Spoiler warning: once the right speakers turn up, the record proves not to be bad. In fact it is stupendous. It was never guaranteed, but the project did have promise. The idea of one of the founding fathers Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The repertoire of the OAE is creeping away from the 18th century and into the 20th with such unashamed eagerness, it wouldn't be at all surprising to see them throwing up an urtext edition of "Hit Me Baby One More Time" in a few seasons. Last night, we got 20th-century French impressionism, including a work that was premiered in 1933. Some might call this expansion into the last century bold. Others greedy. But in the hands of their guest conductor, Sir Simon Rattle, it's also never anything less than fascinating.Though it doesn't immediately tally on paper, the match-up made Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Productions at the life-changing Globe to Globe sequence of international takes on the Bard have had numerous points of origin, from shows conceived directly for the event to reprises of stagings that in the case of the Brazilian Romeo and Juliet was decades old. So why shouldn't France of all countries deliver a Much Ado About Nothing straight from the charcuterie? Here was arguably Shakespeare's most affecting and nuanced comedy served up with funny voices, exaggerated gestures and an extra helping of jambon. In the end, the play still delivered the goods: it's Much Ado, after all Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The 65th edition of the Festival de Cannes opens today, with Wes Anderson’s latest slice of leftfield whimsy, Moonrise Kingdom, and continues for almost two weeks of frantic film-going, star-spotting, wheeler-dealing and beach partying. For these days in May a usually somnolent seaside town becomes the cinema city that never sleeps.Cannes is still the world’s leading film festival, for good reason: the best directors in the world want their films to premiere here; everyone else has to wait in line. Of course, the festival doesn’t always deliver – one can never know. But this year’s selection Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The release of Jean Vigo’s wonderful L’Atalante on DVD is cause enough to celebrate, but the arrival of everything he committed to film in one place is more than that – it commemorates this special filmmaker’s genius and humanity. Zero de Conduite and L’Atalante are thrilling films, whatever their context and influence on the French New Wave. They need to be seen.This double DVD set, L'Atalante and the Films of Jean Vigo, includes A Propos de Nice (1930), Taris (1931), Zero de Conduite (1933) and L’Atalante (1934). The films are supplemented by the incredible Nouvelle Vague-flavoured Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“Atmosphère…atmosphère,” the tart played by Arletty barks at her boyfriend-pimp on a canal bridge in Marcel Carné’s 1938 Hôtel du Nord. She was furious with him for wanting to go fishing for a change of ambience, but the famous line – which later prompted the star to launch a perfume called Atmosphère for charity – might have been screenwriter Henri Jeanson’s insider dig at Carné’s Le Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows), which had been released to rapturous acclaim and huge business earlier in the year. Unfolding on the dank, fogbound streets and jetties of charcoal-smudged Le Havre – and Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I have no idea why the original title of this fine first feature from Frenchwoman Alix Delaporte has been changed, from Angèle and Tony to the current one. Apart from the pointlessness, it also suggests the wrong tone entirely, since Angèle is certainly no angel.The film’s first scene sees Angèle (Clotilde Hesme) having sex against a wall, in a public space in broad daylight, with a young man we will never see again. The brashness is accompanied by a business-like ennui; her payment, rather fantastically, is an action man: yes, the toy.This twisted transaction sums the woman up. The toy is a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Earlier this year Clotilde Hesme won the César, France’s equivalent to the Oscars, for “most promising actress” in the excellent, atypical love story Angel & Tony. One wonders if the voters have some kind of collective myopia, or simply don’t see enough good movies, because Hesme stopped being "promising" a long time ago.That’s not to take away from a much-deserved award, for one of France’s unsung actresses. Ever since she came seemingly out of nowhere in 2005 to match (and even out-pout) the smouldering Louis Garrel, in his dad Philippe’s epic love story Regular Lovers, Hesme has been a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A new publicly funded UK web channel for performing arts opens tomorrow morning, preparing for a major launch this weekend streaming top international streetdancers to the web audience and publishing John Peel's notes on his record collection. The channel, called The Space, is funded by the Arts Council England in partnership with the BBC, and will run for six months over and through the Olympics period as an on-demand channel to put performance out via smartphones, tablets and computers.Described as an experimental digital arts channel and "communal playground", The Space clearly hopes to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The first series of the French cops gone-to-pot drama ended with Lieutenant Eddy Caplan about to blow the head off his nemesis Serge Lemoine. Offing him was supposed to solve all Caplan and his team’s problems. Unfortunately, Lemoine was fitted with a wire and things didn’t go to plan. Series two began in the immediate aftermath with Caplan, his in do-do colleagues and Lemoine caged in the back of police van. As it rattled along, their on-the-run compadre Théo Vachewski was being hunted down.After a brief recap of the previous series, the episode was off and running. Braquo's Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Incest, rape, torture and matricide, as well as an obligatory spot of cross-dressing, all played their part in making Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novel The Monk the scandalous success of its day. But with such stuff the bread and butter of Hollywood’s unblinking horror departments, why would a contemporary director choose to revisit this period classic? It was apparently a lifelong ambition of Surrealism’s greatest filmmaker Luis Buñuel to adapt The Monk for the screen. It’s a tantalising prospect of what might have been, and one that speaks not only to the bloody and allusive thrills of the Read more ...