France
Trans Musicales Festival 2022 review - vibrant eclecticism rules in RennesTuesday, 13 December 2022
It’s Friday night and I’ve finally arrived at 43-year-old French music festival institution Trans Musicales. Due to some dreadful nonsense, it’s taken a 12-hour train journey, two baguettes, one short Stephen King novel, six large beers, a tumbler... Read more... |
Charlotte review - the story of artist Charlotte Salomon, murdered in AuschwitzTuesday, 13 December 2022
“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... Read more... |
Hold Me Tight review - Vicky Krieps mesmerisesFriday, 09 December 2022
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... Read more... |
Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, Wigmore Hall review - nine haute cuisine courses, twelve happy musiciansMonday, 14 November 2022
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,... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Strange DoorSunday, 06 November 2022
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 –... Read more... |
Yiyun Li: The Book of Goose - fame, reality and two teenage French girlsWednesday, 28 September 2022
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... Read more... |
Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022)Thursday, 15 September 2022
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... Read more... |
Her Way review - turning tricks for her son's sakeSaturday, 27 August 2022
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-... Read more... |
The End of Eddy, Edinburgh International Festival 2022 review - powerful but lacking compassionTuesday, 23 August 2022
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.... Read more... |
Anaïs in Love review - she wants what she wantsSunday, 21 August 2022
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... Read more... |
First Person: tenor Cyrille Dubois on recording all Fauré's songsTuesday, 16 August 2022
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... Read more... |
La Voix humaine/Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Glyndebourne review - phantasmagorical wondersMonday, 15 August 2022
“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... Read more... |
