France
Markie Robson-Scott
“Only by doing something mad can I hope to stay sane,” says Charlotte Salomon (voiced by Keira Knightley) to her lover, Alexander Nagler (Sam Claflin). “I feel it inside me, the same demon that’s haunted so many in my family.”Both are Jewish refugees in Villefranche, near Nice in the south of France, in 1943. Her mad, courageous plan is to paint the story of her life (it’s considered by some to be the first graphic novel). The demons are not just the Nazis, but the suicidal impulses that claimed her mother, her great-uncle, her aunt Charlotte and now her Grossmama (grandmother, voiced by Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Mathieu Amalric's Hold me Tight (Serre moi fort) keeps springing surprises. Perhaps the first is the title. It sounds like an invitation to settle down with the popcorn to enjoy a light French film dealing with intimacy. Not even close. It's a quote from a song by Étienne Daho. Apparently, Amalric could just as well have called it the opposite: “Serre moins fort” (hug less tight). He has also said the ideal title (“if it hadn’t already been taken” by Douglas Sirk) would have been Imitation of Life.That is telling. The film is a melodrama, a constant Read more ...
David Nice
How do they do it? Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective ticks all the boxes of diversity and reaching out to all ages without needing to draw attention to it all. The answer is quite simple: the repertoire – in Saturday’s morning and afternoon concerts, French chamber music both known and unfamiliar – is beautifully chosen and programmed, the performers all born communicators as well as musicians at the highest level.Among the first and last artists to appear were recent BBC Young Musician finalists, horn-player Annemarie Federle (2020) and percussionist Jordan Ashman (2022; another, Laura van der Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Under the umbrella Maniacal Mayhem, 1951's The Strange Door has been released on Blu-ray by Eureka Classics with two scarier Boris Karloff movies, The Invisible Ray (1936) and Black Friday (1940). It features one of Karloff’s least maniacal turns – as an abused, dungeon-dwelling servant loyal to his sadistic master’s imprisoned brother (Paul Cavanagh) and beautiful niece (Sally Forrest).The Strange Door, though, is all about Charles Laughton, whose lip-smacking portrayal of the villain, Sire Alain de Maletroit, is one of his fruitiest. Few directors could rein in Laughton when he’d got Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The Book of Goose, Yiyun Li’s fifth novel, is the gripping story of two teenage French girls and their intense, uneven friendship.On the surface, at least, it’s more accessible and light-hearted than some of her fiction, such as The Vagrants, an account of life in totalitarian China, where Li was brought up (she moved to the USA in 1996 and is now a professor of creative writing at Princeton) or Where Reasons End, (2019) a hauntingly beautiful dialogue between a mother and her dead 16-year-old son.This, tragically, mirrors Yi’s life: that book is dedicated to her own teenage son, Vincent, who Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Paris, 16 March 1960 – and cinema ruptured. The first public screening of the 29-year-old Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature, A Bout de Souffle, breathed life into an arthritic medium, announcing a new world of possibility.Its story, of a French petty criminal (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who kills a cop and goes on the run with his pretty young lover (Jean Seberg), was deliberately drawn from the Hollywood films Godard and his fellow critics at the magazine Cahiers du Cinema had consumed with monastic devotion in post-war cinématèques. But its execution liberated.In its first few minutes, the smooth, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Marie (Laure Calamy), the efficient fortysomething sex worker protagonist of the French drama Her Way, doesn’t have life easy, but she calmly works the badly paid street corners of Strasbourg because she can choose her clients, some of them long-term regulars, and dictate her hours. What Marie doesn’t need is having to find €9,000 euros in a few weeks.As the frustrated single mother of lethargic 17-year-old Adrien (Nissim Renard), who says he aspires to being a chef, Marie steers him toward a college that is both more prestigious and expensive than the one from which he's already been Read more ...
David Kettle
Those working-class people really are appalling, aren’t they? Racist, sexist, definitely homophobic, violent too. Thank god our young hero can escape their clutches into the safety of a nice, bourgeois acting academy where he can be his true self.Okay, the degradations and brutal humiliations inflicted on the gay central character in Édouard Louis’s autobiographical 2014 trauma memoir The End of Eddy are undeniably horrific, and apparently unending. But to call Louis’s portrayal of his working-class background in northern France problematic is a bit of an understatement. He surrounds himself Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s 2022’s art-house image du jour – a self-absorbed 30-year-old running to get what she wants, irrespective of the long-term consequences to herself or anyone else.Watching the pell-mell scurry of Anaïs Demoustier’s title character in Anaïs in Love, it’s impossible not to compare it with the elegant canter with which Renate Reinsve’s Julie freezes time in The Worst Person in the World. If they were running toward the same admirer or career opportunity, you’d back Anaïs to leave Julie in the dust because, as her ex-boyfriend complains, she’s a bulldozer.The knowing first feature written and Read more ...
Cyrille Dubois
The year 2024 will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of the phenomenal Gabriel Fauré. For Tristan Raës and me, who have been exploring the repertoire of French art songs for nearly 15 years, first meeting in the class of art songs and Lieder interpretation of Anne Le Bozec in Paris's Academy of Music, it was clear that paying a tribute to the "master of the Mélodies" was a necessity.At first, it was not planned to do the complete songs, but only a selection. But after digging through the music of Fauré, it became impossible to make a choice. We wanted to make a proposition of our Read more ...
David Nice
“Variety is the spice of life! Vive la difference!,” chirrups the ensemble at the end of this giddying double bill. And there could hardly be more singular variety acts than a potential suicide at the end of a phone line, a woman who lets her breasts fly away and grows a beard, and a husband who breeds 40,049 children on his own.Favourite Glyndebourne Director Laurent Pelly has gift-wrapped Poulenc’s two one-act one-offs with intelligence, verve and visual brilliance - which in the first case means semi-darkness, in the second all the colours of the rainbow - and conductor Robin Ticciati Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The French seaside has been the setting for all kinds of summer holiday capers. We are used to the idea that this is a place where young people set about finding out who they are. At the top of the quality spectrum are Éric Rohmer’s well-observed comedies of manners like Pauline at the Beach (1983) and A Summer's Tale (1996). Down at the bottom, there are shockers like Axelle Laffont’s Milf (2018).The trope normally involves a portrayal of a relatively carefree existence. Emilie Aussel has a different idea in mind, however. Her feature debut Our Eternal Summer starts off Read more ...