France
Tom Birchenough
Set at the beginning of the 1970s, Catherine Corsini’s Summertime (La belle saison) is a story of love in a political climate, one in which the post-1968 assertions of a changing society have infused the public context in theory but do not ultimately translate into liberation for the film’s two lead women characters. The restrictions of tradition, especially in the rural world in which the greater part of Summertime is set, finally prove too strong for their relationship.Delphine (Izïa Higelin) has grown up on the land, the only child of smallholders in Limousin: it’s a beautiful, sparsely Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone looking for some psychedelic pop to at least give the illusion that we might now actually be in the middle of summer could do much worse than try out the debut album by Anglo-French duo Bosco Rogers. Their 21st century twist on the Monkees’ good grooves is just what the doctor ordered, and Barth Corbelet and Del Vargas’s sun-drenched harmonies and catchy, fuzzy guitars are guaranteed to generate big smiles and some serious rump-shaking from even the most unconfident of dancers.Post Exotic comes straight out of the traps with a bucket load of swagger and the knowing smirk of “Anvers”. “ Read more ...
Bill Knight
Nous avons Brexité but we are still welcome at the 47th Rencontres d'Arles. Each summer this beautiful French town gives itself over to an international photography festival which this year features around 40 exhibitions of varying sizes with countless lectures, parties, book signings and fringe events.A photo fair is a collection of images for sale and Arles is not that at all. It is a well-organised series of exhibitions, some around a theme, others showing the work of particular photographers, but all presenting a body of work and showing us what photography can do better than other art Read more ...
David Nice
"He is one of the few pianists who will not make them sound like angry birds," said young pianist-animateur Víkingur Ólafsson in Reykjavík when I told him that in little over 24 hours' time I'd be hearing Pierre-Laurent Aimard work his way through Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux at dawn, in the afternoon and evening and close to midnight at the Aldeburgh Festival. Of course there are a few ferocious birdcalls in the craggier of Messiaen's landscapes, but Vikingur was right: a more lucid, rhythmically alert and, where necessary, hypnotically even performance of this music you will never hear. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Disappearance, shown in France a year ago, was adapted from a Spanish drama. Both shows had a more gender-specific title: Desaparecida or Disparue. A less abstract translation into English might have been The Missing, but that title had already been taken by a recent BBC drama with which The Disappearance shared a dogged fidelity to a template (see also Broadchurch, plus a lot of Nordic noir): one fresh suspect per episode, enough false leads to set up a red herring factory, and then a big reveal to finish [spoiler alert: the denouement is discussed below].The titular absentee was Léa Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was an exhumation waiting to happen. As the UK ponders trashing Europe, Eurotrash was summoned from the grave to remind voters what they’ll be missing if enough Brits put an X in the exit box. The Europe of Eurotrash is not grey suits and fisheries legislation. It’s a place where a ruling on the straightness of cucumbers is a gag waiting to happen, where pooches and porn stars stand for political office, where the then future Madame Sarkozy could be distinctly heard to ask, “Do you like my titties?”.It’s not easy or appropriate to write about Eurotrash the day after the referendum Read more ...
David Nice
Britten fathomed Phaedra's passion for her stepson in a shattering quarter of an hour's dramatic cantata. Euripides' Hippolytus takes about 90 minutes in the playing. Director Kryzsztof Warlikowski's fantasia on the Phaedra myth is more than twice that long, but it's worth every riveting or disconcerting minute thanks largely – but by no means exclusively – to the encyclopedic range of Isabelle Huppert."Star vehicle" may be a term at odds with this sort of total ensemble theatre, but that's in part what it is for Huppert (pictured below). This is a triptych like no Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
In the middle of the last century the worst thing that could be said about a working-class housewife was that she had “run off with a black man”. Well, the Queen of France, no better than she ought to be, has had it off with a black man (in fact her pet dwarf). Last week’s opening episode of Versailles ended with Louis XIV (George Blagden) setting eyes on the resulting black baby for the first time.The second episode immediately picks up the baby and runs with it – all the way to a blind wet nurse from whose breast the sinister henchman Marchal (Tygh Runyan) plucks it before attempting Read more ...
Mark Hayhurst
Nothing quite prepares you for your first sight of Thiepval, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. I had read about the events it commemorated and, before that, been told about them as a young boy. I’d studied the war poets at school and as a teenager had been introduced to Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I knew about the vast numbers of war dead, of how they exceeded the populations of famous cities. But once there, in Picardy, gazing for the first time on Sir Edwin Lutyens’s gigantic monument, it was impossible not to gasp Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Suzy Klein, writer and presenter of this three-episode series, is a trained musician and a ubiquitous presence in cultural programmes across a wide spectrum. This opening film, "We Can Be Heroes", was an engagingly populist piece about a complicated subject as she enthusiastically described a major cultural shift in the way musicians and composers engaged with patrons and audiences across Europe.The catalyst was a combination of the industrial and political revolutions that began to transform European society and culture 200 years ago. In the course of this initial journey we visited Vienna, Read more ...
stephen.walsh
War may be a dramatic affair for anyone involved in it, but staging it is another matter. In fact describing it satisfactorily at all needs either a Tolstoyan flair for the large canvas, or else a poetic genius for directing its force inwards, into self-reflection or religious contemplation or the kind of intense verbal music, rich in historical and literary allusion, that the great Welsh artist and writer David Jones made his own in his long, tragic prose-poem, In Parenthesis.I can just about imagine an In Parenthesis opera in the form of a one-man show with the author seated on a wooden Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Allegedly one of the worst plays Shakespeare wrote (which he may have done in cahoots with Thomas Nashe), the first part of Henry VI emerged victorious from this TV adaptation. Whereas one might think twice about chopping and rejigging Hamlet or King Lear, director and co-adapter Dominic Cooke had applied some muscular compressing and reshaping which meant that the piece gathered pace steadily, and was thundering ahead at full steam by the time it hit the final credits.Mind you, it wasn't strictly Henry VI Part 1, since some of the later scenes (most notably the harrowing denunciation and Read more ...