French cinema
anne.billson
BD, pronounced bédé, is short for "bande déssinée", the French equivalent of the comic-strip or graphic novel, which has long been accorded a popular affection and cultural standing well beyond that of its anglophone equivalent. Luc Besson says he was weaned on BD, which comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with his films. The only surprise is that it has taken him so long to direct an adaptation of one. But here it is - his eleventh full-length live-action directing credit - Les aventures d'Adèle Blanc-Sec, a mash-up of two volumes from a series of BDs by Tardi, one of the most respected Read more ...
Graham Fuller
After a trio of harsh modern pictures dealing with the pitfalls of globalisation - Demonlover, Clean, and Boarding Gate - the director Olivier Assayas felt the need to write a more personal, reflective screenplay around the time Paris’s Musée d’Orsay invited him to make a film using artefacts from its collection to commemorate the 20th anniversary of its opening.But the dispersal of familial and national life are still felt in the resulting film, Summer Hours, which examines a family’s response to parting with the informal collection of objets d’art treasured by the matriarch following her Read more ...
sheila.johnston
A sensational performance by Sylvie Testud is the singular reason to catch this rambling biopic of Françoise Sagan - bestselling novelist, high-rolling playgirl, multiple addict, flamboyant bisexual, monstre sacré - which plays in repertory throughout April at the French Institute's Ciné Lumière. Testud, one of France's best young actresses (also currently to be seen illuminating Lourdes as a desperate young pilgrim), takes no prisoners in her electrifying account of the writer's train wreck of a life over half a century, from the precocious literary star who stormed the world in 1954 Read more ...
sheila.johnston
High summer in Paris. Jazz plays on the soundtrack, the boulevards are bright, leafy and humming and Grégoire, a good-looking man in his mid-forties, scuttles along the street, mobile phone glued to ear. He's troubleshooting on a truly international scale: the Koreans are arriving mob-handed, the Georgians are so demanding and that nutty Swedish director's budget is spiralling out of control. Grégoire is a movie producer, and Father of My Children starts out as a light-hearted, slightly madcap addition to the capacious genre of films about film-making. Slowly, though, it shades into something Read more ...
sheila.johnston
"I like directors whose style you recognise right away: Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Emir Kusturica, David Lynch," asserts Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a statement which should surprise none of his followers. Fabled for its attention to minutiae, his work is honed down to the last millimetre, from the immaculately choreographed sight gags to the hyperstylised sets. Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children (both co-directed with Marc Caro), Amelie, A Very Long Engagement, even Jeunet's Stygian contribution to the Alien franchise, are instantly, unmistakably recognisable as his. "If a certain detail isn Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Jacques Audiard's A Prophet arrives in Britain laden with plaudits (Best Film at the London Film Festival, Grand Jury Prize in Cannes and a fistful of superlative reviews). Here, in the first of a series of illustrated masterclasses, in which leading directors introduce clips from their work, Audiard reveals the secrets of how he shot two of A Prophet's memorable scenes.Audiard has directed just five features in a 15-year career, but they are all provocative, unusual films that it's well worth catching up with (the others are See How They Fall, A Self-Made Hero, Read My Lips and The Beat That Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Eric Rohmer, who died yesterday in Paris aged 89, was famed for elegant, literate, yet profoundly romantic and erotic dramas such as La Collectionneuse, My Night With Maud and Claire's Knee; and for a style that helped define the French Nouvelle Vague and that he pursued with distinction in some 50 films over the next half century (his last, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon was made two years ago). In this interview, first published in the Daily Telegraph in 1999, the director revealed himself as remarkably clear-eyed and incisive about his films. I offer it here, in a slightly edited form, Read more ...