France
David Nice
It could have been a winner: a charismatic star soprano of great emotional and interpretative intelligence, a top pianist given a little space to shine on his own, a programme that looked good on paper, of distinguished German/Austro-German women composers in the first half, French dark versus light in the second. But Milton Court is an unwelcoming venue, like being inside a dark-wood coffin, and the singer seemed uneasy between numbers to begin with.The voice itself, that bright but far from light soprano, had settled by the time we reached three songs by Clara Schumann; the first group, by Read more ...
David Nice
Sometimes all the stars align in musical performance. There’s no soprano more alive to the expression of musical joy and rapture than Louise Alder, no composer more levitational in his strange later adventures than Fauré, no instrumentalists strings better than pianist Joseph Middleton, the Doric String Quartet and double-bass player Laurène Durantel at being supernatural companions throughout his song-cycle La bonne chanson.Fauré's other miracles among his chamber works turn up with comparative regularity in concert, but for some reason I've not experienced his nine-song tribute to Paul Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sir Ridley Scott has taken umbrage at the French critics who weren’t too impressed with his new movie. Not only do they not like his film, but the French “don’t even like themselves”, according to the dyspeptic auteur.But I feel our French cousins may have a point, especially the one who described Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of the fabled emperor as “a sullen boor and a cad with his wife, Joséphine.” Like Steely Dan sang, “I have never met Napoleon”, but one might reasonably expect that a man who masterminded a European empire which stretched from Spain to Poland and temporarily as far as Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
There’s a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer, said Graham Greene, and that ice plays a part in French director Justine Triet’s superb fourth feature, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.Set in the French Alps, the film begins with successful novelist Sandra (an amazing Sandra Hüller, totally inhabiting the role) being interviewed at home by grad student Zoe (Camille Rutherford) for her dissertation. They’re drinking wine and chatting flirtatiously.Then music on a loop, an instrumental version of P.I.M.P. by 50 Cents, invades the chalet. It’s so deafening that the interview can’t continue Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Marilou lies on the ground. She’s been bludgeoned to death by a fire extinguisher. Its foam covers her body. Her murderer is a forty-something man who has become obsessed with her. She shampoos hair in a barbers, where he first comes across her. Their affair turns sour after he finds her in bed with two other men. After the murder, her killer ends up in a mental hospital.This depraved, sordid story is told on a song-by-song basis by its provocative creator Serge Gainsbourg on his 1976 album L'Homme à tête de chou. The narrative of the album whose title translates as “the man with the cabbage Read more ...
Paul Vale
Although based on the 1958 Paul Gallico novel Mrs 'Arris Goes To Paris, this musical adaptation arrived much later. With a book by Rachel Wagstaff and music and lyrics by Richard Taylor, Flowers for Mrs Harris premiered in Sheffield in 2016, directed by then artistic director Daniel Evans and starring Clare Burt (now appearing across town in Stephen Sondheim's Old Friends) as the eponymous Ada Harris.When Evans transferred to the Chichester Festival Theatre the show was revived there in 2018, but this production marks its London premiere, a year after Lesley Manville led a film version of the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This wasn’t a film to go and see with my 94-year-old father and hope I’d come out with my critical faculties intact and my handkerchief dry. The Great Escaper is an old fashioned, old school weepie about ageing, guilt and the horrors of war. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as well written or directed as its stars deserved. Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson have had better scripts in their long careers, but they both do a magnificent job with what they’ve been given and tears will flow.The Great Escaper is based on the story of Bernard/Bernie Jordan (Michael Caine below Read more ...
India Lewis
The latest translation of Annie Ernaux’s Shame – a text most closely akin to a long-form essay – is an absorbing examination of how one fleeting moment from childhood can have lasting and unpredictable consequences, and how a life might be irrevocably defined by such contingencies.Originally published in 1996, this translation by Tanya Leslie is a sensitive treatment of the Ernaux’s words, bearing across her typically confessional – and much lauded – style. It is also a timely translation, riding the wave of Ernaux-interest following her Nobel Prize win in 2022.Shame opens with the pivotal Read more ...
mark.kidel
Partie de Campagne (1946), while not being one of French cinema giant Jean Renoir’s best-known films, unfinished and just under 40 minutes long, is still regarded as an important if not essential example of the director’s multi-faceted and often innovative work.The somewhat fragmentary story, based, along with many French movies, on a short story by Maupassant, focuses on a brief moment of love between Henriette and Henri, a fun-loving charmer, and evokes the transience of romantic love. The theme of class-difference, which runs through the left-wing director’s work and is central to his Read more ...
Heather Neill
There is a grainy piece of black and white film on YouTube featuring Noel Coward as the celebrity guest on a 1964 edition of the popular television panel show, What's My Line. He signs in with panache, paying careful attention to the diaeresis over the e in Noel and enveloping his first name with a stylish C from the second. Artifice, self-invention, elegance – these are qualities inseparable from the Coward reputation. If they applied to his own persona, so they frequently do to the characters in his plays. An underlying sadness in the man himself is now acknowledged and, similarly, the Read more ...
James Saynor
Thespians and thieves have often pooled their resources in movies, notably in the work of Woody Allen. Since acting is basically a form of lying, goes the joke, actors dine at the same Runyon-esque table as people who nick stuff, and this French comedy offers a new story of a crim who needs some muscle from the theatrical arts.Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg) is an actor at a time of life when she wants to quit the stage and settle down with a charming, burly convict called Michel (Roschdy Zem), whom she met when giving an acting class at the local Lyon slammer. She dotes on him to the point of Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The English title of Olivier Peyon’s new movie is a rather hackneyed pun that not only doesn’t work in the original language but also manages to convey exactly the wrong meaning. Arrête avec tes Mensonges is a faintly Almodóvarian love story about the importance (and sometimes difficulty) of facing up to the truth about yourself. However, instead of Stop With Your Lies, we get Lie With Me.The faux pas, if that’s what it is, is hardly the movie’s fault, although a movie star, Molly Ringwald, is to blame. She isn’t in the film, which has an all-male cast except for two walk-on roles, but it was Read more ...