France
Kieron Tyler
It could so easily have been The Walking Dead, where the living endlessly battle an ever-increasing tide of returnees from the beyond. The resurrected in the contemplative Returned weren’t zombies, but actual living people with a desire to pick up where they left off and reintegrate themselves into day-to-day life. Unfortunately for them, and for those they became reacquainted with, it couldn’t go smoothly. The first series of The Returned ended with the formerly deceased seemingly returning to where they came from, even bringing a couple of the living with them.The unnamed French mountain Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Sophisticated Boom Boom!! – The Shadow Morton StoryWithout Shadow Morton, Amy Winehouse could not have made Back to Black. The songs the enigmatic sonic wizard wrote and produced for The Shangri-Las in the mid Sixties were integral to what made Back to Black tick. Amazingly, Sophisticated Boom Boom!! – The Shadow Morton Story is the first career-spanning collection of Morton’s work. For that alone, it would be, at the least, exciting. But with its massive, well-illustrated booklet, the involvement of and interviews with Morton – who died in February this year, before he Read more ...
stephen.walsh
André Messager is one of those fringe composers whose music you feel you know something about until you try to think of a specific piece. His ballet Les deux pigeons is still sometimes revived. But to students of French music, he’s actually best known as the conductor who brought Debussy’s Pelléas to the stage and conducted its first performance. Of his own operas and operettas, Fortunio seems to have been the most successful in its day (1907); but I confess I’d heard never a note of it until this new production at Grange Park by Daniel Slater.It’s a work which reminds us that French operetta Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote Hippolyte et Aricie in 1733 at the age of 50. It was his first opera and his greatest. In its five acts, its visits to the woods of Diana, the groves of Venus, the fires of Pluto and the domestic meltdown in the house of Phaedra, is some of the most assured, inventive and stylish music ever written for the stage. As operatic debuts go, it is a miracle. That William Christie, the pre-eminent French Baroque specialist of our age, would be capable of summoning up some of the premiere’s dazzle was not surprising. But that Jonathan Kent would be able Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Given the breadth of Marcus du Sautoy’s cultural scholarship, it was a small surprise that British poet Andrew Marvell wasn't name-checked at the start of the presenter’s new three-parter Precision: The Measure of All Things. “Had we but world enough and time,” the great Metaphysical wooer called to his Coy Mistress, touching directly on the subjects of episode one, “Time and Distance”. Time was equally of the essence for du Sautoy, who barely caught breath in his (more respectable) urgency to explain everything behind his subject, and how it touched on the world we live in. The unforgiving Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Maybe everything that dies someday comes back," Bruce Springsteen posited in "Atlantic City". The residents of the French Alpine village at the centre of The Returned may conclude that he had a point. The Returned (Les Revenants in the original French) might sound superficially as if it's the latest in the ongoing vogue for zombies which (along with a parallel strain of photogenic vampires) is exerting a stranglehold on the entertainment industry. Brad Pitt goes to war with a global zombie plague in the new movie World War Z, The Walking Dead needs no introduction, and we've had Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Read theartsdesk's review of episode 1 of The ReturnedThe Returned, which hits our screens on Sunday night, is the first foreign language drama to appear on Channel 4 in 20 years. Under its original title Les Revenants, it was a ratings-topping hit in France when it was broadcast on Canal+ last year. It looks like having every chance of cashing in on the current British vogue for stylish European dramas with subtitles, predominantly (though by no means exclusively) Scandinavian, and Sunday's debut episode will even feature an all-French ad break.To make doubly sure of grabbing an audience, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Writer-director Régis Roinsard's feature debut is a perky French rom-com which brings together the talented, easy-on-the-eye trio of Déborah François, Romain Duris and Bérénice Bejo. Set in the late 50s it contains oodles of delicious period detail along with shades of the much-loved Amelie and the adorable 60s TV series Bewitched. It should be likeable; it should be full of fun. So why doesn't it work? Two words seal its fate: speed typing.The year is 1958 in the small town of Saint-Fraimbault and - against the wishes of her conservative shopkeeper father - Rose Pamphyle (François) is Read more ...
David Nice
Down Whitehall, the English Defence League had been making ripples, and at 7.40pm some of its packs were still roaring round Trafalgar Square. At that moment, Berlioz’s March to the Scaffold from the Symphonie fantastique drowned them out in one big va t’en which you could have translated into a hundred languages.For here was the music of a Frenchman conducted by a Russian, played by an orchestra of many nationalities to a packed-out crowd of many more and every creed, made up of adults, children, babies and dogs. As in last week’s horrific murder, for every minus, however gross, more than a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Cinema sometimes seems to have left the Age of Aquarius behind. The filmmakers who came of age in the Sixties have long since said what they needed to, and nowadays the decade’s evanescent aura feels confined to 50th anniversaries of the likes of Billy Liar and The Leopard. Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air plunges us right back in as it which harks longingly back to the heady days of the soixante-huitards when apparently, for those who were there, it seemed possible the world could be fashioned anew.Assayas wasn’t quite there hurling bricks at the police at the Battle of the Sorbonne, Read more ...
James Williams
The ICA was the perfect location for the UK debut of hotly tipped new duo Tomorrow’s World, consisting of Air’s Jean-Benoit Dunckel and English synth-rockers New Young Pony Club’s ivory tickler Lou Hayter. The venue added a prestigious edge to what promised to be an auspicious occasion. A scant crowd suggested this was more of a test run than a full-blown debut, but they needn’t have worried about the reaction. Their music spoke for itself.Support came from another alumnus of London’s New Young Pony Club, guitarist Igor Volk. His set was impressive, the newly-released single "Voice" really Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A female hiker is naked. A village is close. Lying on the slope down to a river, she invites the taciturn man she’s followed to have sex. They do. She begins shrieking and foaming at the mouth. He fastens his face to hers. She could then be dead yet begins crawling into the water, looks heavenwards and spreads her arms.The images of baptism and rebirth are clear. But the motivation of the man, David Dewale’s Le gars (the man or guy), is less clear cut. Bruno Dumont’s Hors Satan (Outside Satan) is hard to read in terms of specifics, but overall it dwells on the arrival of a mystical outsider Read more ...