French cinema
Tom Birchenough
Robert Guediguian has spoken of the influence of Chekhov on The House by the Sea (Le Villa), and the shadow of the Russian dramatist, particularly The Cherry Orchard, can certainly be felt in the French director’s latest film, his 20th in a career that stretches back now some four decades. It’s there in ways that are thematic and structural equally, from its sense that a particular environment, a precious place that has defined the lives of the film’s protagonists in the past, is changing, to an unstudied story development defined by the loosely theatrical, almost “fly-on-the-wall” way in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I met Agnès Varda, who died today aged 90, just once, for the interview that’s reproduced below. It was in Paris in January 2018, shortly before the Belgian-born filmmaker was to become the oldest Oscar nominee in history, for the wonderful documentary Faces, Places. The encounter felt like a lucky break – blessed exposure to an icon and one of the most grounded and delightful inspirations one could imagine.On paper, the event was of the sort that journalists loathe, a ‘round table’ that, due to Varda’s popularity, grew by the second until there were perhaps 30 interviewers surrounding the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Abdellatif Kechiche, the Tunisian-French director, is perhaps best known for the lengthy and explicit sex scenes in La vie d’Adèle (Blue is the Warmest Colour). His latest film opens, slam in your face, with a sequence of passionate love-making: well-shot, edited and played by the actors, but almost as raw as porn. We watch, along with Amin (Shaïn Boumédine), the film’s main character, who peers, fascinated through a gap in the blinds.This voyeuristic moment resonates with the filmmaker’s own almost obsessive need to expose without subtlety the details of sexual activity. A kind of voyeurism Read more ...
Tom Baily
This is a love that begins sweetly, turns terrible, and is told with unflinching directness. Directed by Catherine Corsini, An Impossible Love is based on a novel by Christine Angot (known in France, and increasingly elsewhere, for her powerful autobiographical fiction), which is in turn based on Angot’s own troubling early life and family experiences. If the film is too direct – an anti-melodrama melodrama – it is only because it is honest and treats emotional extremes with great fidelity.It all begins with romance, as Rachel (Virginie Efira) – working class, Jewish and beautiful – meets the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Laurent Cantet’s The Workshop (L’Atelier) is something of a puzzle. There’s a fair deal that recalls his marvellous 2009 Palme d’Or winner The Class, including a young, unprofessional cast playing with considerable accomplishment, but the magic isn’t quite the same. And the film’s interest in a social issue, how the young and disaffected come to be engaged with far-right politics, remains an adjunct to a story that becomes finally more involved with itself.As in The Class, Cantet (together with his co-writer for both films, Robin Campillo) has developed his story around a strong sense of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You have to turn to the brief interview with director Anne Fontaine that is the sole extra on this DVD release to discover the real source of her film Reinventing Marvin. Though Fontaine and Pierre Trividic’s screenplay is credited as original, it draws heavily – Fontaine calls it a “free interpretation” – on Edouard Louis’s bestselling 2014 autobiographical novel The End of Eddy, which told the story of his growing up in the French provinces in an environment profoundly hostile to his emerging gay identity.It’s an undeniably powerful picture of a youthful outsider, one for whom lack of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
On the eve of her tenth decade, the marvellous Agnès Varda embarked on the enchanted journey that we see in Faces Places. For admirers of the great French director – of whom there are a great many: indeed, it is hard not to be won over by her resolutely independent, profoundly humanistic substance and style – its spirit will recall her two earlier documentary films of the century, The Gleaners & I (2000) and the more autobiographical The Beaches of Agnès (2008), though the mélange between personal and social is here complete. This is a journey that celebrates a life richly lived as Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For viewers challenged by the work of French auteur classic Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Hazanavicius’ Redoubtable catches the moment when Godard himself began to be challenged by Godard. The irony, a considerable one, is that Godard was rejecting precisely those films that most of the rest of us delight in, the ones from the first decade or so of his career. From his debut Breathless in 1960, through the likes of Vivre sa vie, Contempt, Alphaville and Pierrot le fou – what an astonishingly prolific time it was for him – they practically constitute a roll call of the Nouvelle Vague.Hazanavicius Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A slow tracking shot over the gassed corpses of soldiers, their masks having failed the ecstasy of fumbling, opens The Guardians. This French art house film would perhaps have been better served by the English title The Caretakers; it's closer to the original French meaning and would have made it less likely to be confused with a superhero movie. Set during the years when the Great War devastated France, the battle front only makes two dreamlike appearances in Xavier Beauvois’ meticulously crafted, slow-paced drama. Instead the focus is on a family farm in the Limousin and the women Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête had been planned as a slice of wartime escapism, a distraction from the privations of war. The film was also a chance for Cocteau to give his male lead Jean Marais a less overtly sexy role than his fans were used to, though there’s still a lot of smouldering going on, some of it literal. Many would argue that this is the greatest cinematic fairytale, and it looks stunning in this high definition restoration (its first appearance in HD in the UK). Everything works here; Cocteau’s unfussy, poetic screenplay brilliantly served by Christian Bérard’s designs and Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Un beau soleil intérieur, the film’s French title, is part of a piece of advice given by a clairvoyant (Gérard Depardieu, in a surprise 15-minute cameo at the end of the movie). Try to find the beautiful sun within, he tells Isabelle (a glowing Juliette Binoche) and be “open” (he uses the English word). His huge, dented face seems to take up most of the screen. Isabelle, a lonely, recently divorced artist, who wants him to tell her which of her potential lovers is the best bet, laps his words up tearfully. Any port in a storm.Whether you enjoy this film by revered director Claire Denis (Beau Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The literary allusions and aspirations come thick and fast in this roomy, novelistic, most French of films from Arnaud Desplechin. Naming its characters after Joyce and Melville, interpolating passages from Philip Roth and Bernard Hermann’s score for Hitchcock’s Marnie, it’s a fictional film à clef within a partially real one about a neurotic director from Roubaix (which is also Desplechin’s hometown).Its opening scenes grip and intrigue, as middle-aged spies in Paris contemplate the misadventures of their strangest recruit, Ivan Dedalus (Louis Garrel), with his “unlikely face” and enigmatic Read more ...