France
Marina Vaizey
A 19th-century silver and wood pot in which to make chocolate, pertly graceful; 17th-century blue and white Delftware; a Chinese calligraphy panel; a 19th-century carved wooden god from the Ivory Coast; a bronze and gold earth goddess from South-East Asia. These are but a tiny sampling from the multitude of objects with which Matisse surrounded himself in his studio(s). A treasure trove of objects that Matisse once owned has been brought together for this Royal Academy show, combined with the work that they inspired.Matisse thought to ennoble the humblest of objects, to find delight in the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Now in its 35 year, Womad is embedded into British festival culture, flying the flags of a musical multiculturalism that is about breaking down barriers and building new relationships. It’s not something you want to lose.Aside from pleasurable headliners – the likes of Oumou Sangare, Toots and the Maytals and Ladysmith Black Mambazo – it’s the names you don’t know who often leave the deepest impression. The BBC Radio 3 Charlie Gillett Stage hosted numerous full-flavoured festival debuts – the London-Greek sound of Kourelou, for instance, or Italian acoustic trio Vesevo’s folk tunes from Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For viewers not familiar with the background story of Cézanne et moi – which surely includes most of us without specialist knowledge of late 19th century French artistic and literary culture – the moi of this lavish yet curiously uninvolving double biopic is Emile Zola. Danièle Thompson’s film tells the story of the friendship between the eminent realist writer and the genius of Post-Impressionism – to whom acclaim came only late in life – that lasted, despite their differences, for almost half a century.They first encountered one another as schoolboys in Aix-en-Provence in the early 1850s, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
All the accolades heaped onto this documentary in the near 50 years since it was made are wholly deserved. Over 251 minutes, Marcel Ophuls weaves together an extraordinary collection of interviews and archive to tell the story of France during the German occupation from 1940-1944. The resulting film calmly eviscerated the legend that the French had resisted the Nazi regime and presents a far more complex history of collaboration, compromise and collusion.Initially conceived for French television, the documentary was withheld from broadcast in France in 1969 and caused a storm when it opened Read more ...
graham.rickson
Falla: Nights in the Garden of Spain, Ravel: Piano Concertos Steven Osborne (piano), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Ludovic Morlot (Hyperion)Steven Osborne's solo Ravel anthology is among the best available, and it's good that he's now tackling the composer's two very different piano concertos. Not all pianists succeed in both. Osborne does, understanding each one's distinct character. His Concerto in G major is sharp-witted and joyous in the outer movements, the pounding Gershwinesque writing urging the music forward. Any hint of brittleness is offset by Osborne’s delight in Ravel’s Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.” I’ve quoted these words by John Berger many, many times. They are in my bloodstream, as it were, since they provided me with an explanation for my experience as a young woman in the world. The 1972 television series and accompanying book Ways of Seeing from which they came also changed the way people looked at and thought about art. The clarity and conviction of Berger’s observations about how we Read more ...
stephen.walsh
A drama of passion for essentially passive characters, Debussy’s one and only completed opera is a masterpiece of paradox. How do you stage a work whose dramatis personae hardly seem aware of their own destructive feelings, and who inhabit their island world like the blind who, according to Pelléas, used to visit the curative fountain but stopped doing so when the king himself went blind?Michael Boyd, in his beautiful but occasionally frustrating production for Garsington Opera, approaches - if he doesn’t wholly solve – this problem by treating each of the 15 scenes as a kind of static Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
W Somerset Maugham, who knew a thing or two about the dark side, summed up the Riviera as “a sunny place for shady people”. On the evidence of this first episode, Riviera is a funny place for shitty people.The first few minutes flung us between London, Monaco and New York. Bright lights, big titties. The connection between money and sex was made straight away – and in the case of Christos Clios (Dimitri Leonidas, pictured below) in doggy style. Talking about money in Canary Wharf – “there is nothing more rigorous” – turns him on. According to him, the unregulated international art Read more ...
Nick Hasted
After Eyes Without a Face, came this. Georges Franju is largely known for the grisly, surreal horror of his second feature, about a mad surgeon grafting stalked young women’s faces onto his disfigured wife. His all but forgotten follow-up, Spotlight On a Murderer (1961), is a breezy lark by comparison. It relocates the Agatha Christie-style country house mystery to a Breton chateau, where a complicated inheritance causes the corrupt de Kerloguen family to revert to murderous type. Its flightiness is tethered by Franju’s elegance and wit, and his mostly young cast’s charm.This could easily be Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
François Ozon’s Frantz is an exquisitely sad film, its crisp black and white cinematography shot through with mourning. The French director, in a work where the main language is German, engages with the aftermath of World War One, and the moment when the returning rhythms of life only emphasise what has been lost. The eponymous hero of his film is one of its casualties – we see Frantz only in flashbacks – and his death has left a gaping, if largely unarticulated wound. His erstwhile fiancée Anna (Paula Beer, a revelation) has become effectively his widow, living with Frantz’s parents. That Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
So here’s the thing: a heavily pregnant woman is hanging by her ankles above a raging torrent. Two teens, one with a broken arm, are stuck down a well. And 15 miners, deep below ground, take refuge from a fire in an emergency chamber, unaware it has been sabotaged by the serial killer among them, who then, using “a gadget”, proceeds to switch off the mine’s pumps so they will all slowly drown.It seems Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein – whose baby Midnight Sun (Sky Atlantic) is – have long had water on the brain. Eight weeks ago, when their Franco-Swedish thriller began with a man in a suit tied Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Three teenage boys meet at dawn. One of them, blonde and beautiful Simon (Gabin Verdet), jumps out of his girlfriend’s window and rides his bike through the dark Lyon streets to meet the others in their van. They drive almost silently to the beach, put on wetsuits and catch waves. A grey sea, a grey sky: we can hardly see where foam ends and cloud begins. It’s mesmerising, wordless, and the camerawork is superb, as is Alexandre Desplat’s score. We’re inside the curl of the wave, as immersed in it as Simon. Then the surfer dudes are back in the van, exhausted, on the road home. It ripples Read more ...