Paris
Liz Thomson
You can take the woman out of the Left Bank, but you can’t take the Left Bank out of the woman. Madeleine Peyroux would be perfectly at home in a boîte in the Latin Quarter, or perhaps Montparnasse. Alas, we were in the sadly unromantic surrounds of London’s Barbican, where the lighting crew had done a good job of creating a smoky vibe before curtain-up.If the smell of Gauloises and Lillet were of necessity left to the imagination, Peyroux and her four-piece band provided a 90-minute transport of delight to the near-capacity audience that was, surprisingly, notably older than the singer Read more ...
graham.rickson
One of those rare films that leaves you speechless after the closing credits, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (L'Armée des ombres) sounds on paper as if it shouldn’t work.Melville’s penultimate film (it was released in 1969), this World War 2 thriller unfolds at a daringly slow pace, the dialogue pared back to essentials. Melville based his screenplay on a semi-autobiographical novel by Joseph Kessel, a fictionalised account of the author’s experiences as a member of the French Resistance. The big set pieces are viscerally exciting, but the mood is subdued, cinematographer Pierre Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Madeleine Peyroux made her name with her second album, 2004’s Careless Love. It consists almost completely of cover versions, delivered in a quiet, jazz-bluesey shuffle redolent of singers from the 1930s. She’s never flown as high again but has maintained a decent career, mostly mining similar sonic territory. Her new album, and first in six years, does not wander far from the path, but is all originals, written with regular collaborator Jon Herington. Despite being spiked with songs that have something to say, it’s a deliciously lazy summer listen.Contrary to a common perception, Peyroux is Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are many women whose outstanding science was attributed to men or simply devalued to the point of obscurity, but recent interest in the likes of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin and NASA’s Katherine Johnson has given credit where credit is due. Marie Curie was never diminished, the woman with two Nobel prizes and the discoveries of radium and polonium on her CV needs no such championing, a figure known by schoolchildren the world over. And yet there’s something that stirs in the back of the mind, something that complicates a story of stunning success often against the odds. When the Read more ...
James Saynor
Adaptations of Henry James have often failed to click over the years. The author’s private, introspective works – sightseeing trips around people’s souls – seem hard to transpose into a crowded gathering where someone keeps yelling “Action!”.So it’s a bit surprising that three reworkings of his ever-so-subtle 1903 story, The Beast in the Jungle – by Brazilian, Dutch and Austrian directors – have reached the screen since 2017, one of them last year. You might think this proves that buses always arrive in threes, but you’d be wrong. For here comes a fourth version of the story from France’s Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Beth Gibbons, once the voice of Portishead, and later a wonderful solo singer and songwriter, hasn’t been on stage for a long while. She makes the most of a paradoxical yet magical mix of being at once fleeting and totally present.Something of Miles Davis's cool refusal to play for the gallery, often turned away from the audience at the close of each song, as if drawing strength from the back line of her orchestra. This may be one of the keys to her unique appeal. All of this was very much in evidence at her recent Paris show, a spectacle delicately built on brave self-revelation and self- Read more ...
Mark Kidel
One hundred and twenty sculptures, and so much more: the current Brancusi blockbuster at the Centre Pompidou, the first large Paris show of the Romanian-born sculptor’s work since 1995, provides an exhilarating and in many ways definitive perspective on one of the founding figures of 20th century modernism.“Beaubourg”, as the great tourist attraction is known, will undergo major changes in 2025, including a new setting for Brancusi’s studio, which the artist gave to the French state, along with all his papers, sketches and studio contents, when he died in 1957. In the meantime, we are given a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Isabelle (Eva Green) leans over, her long hair catches fire from a candle, and Matthew (Michael Pitt) devotedly snuffs it out. She doesn’t miss a beat at this real-life accident, consumed already by The Dreamers’ closed world of a Left Bank apartment in May ’68, where sexual transgression stands for the barricades and baton charges outside.Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaptation of Gilbert Adair’s novel The Holy Innocents emphasises straight over gay sex, and further infuses it with cinephilia. Naïve American Matthew, bee-stung lips pursed and head tilted towards adventure, crosses the Seine to the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Justice are a couple of super-suave rock star analogues. Leathers and aviators, yes, but with a very Parisian insouciance. Their music is the same. It has a rocker-friendly je-ne-sais-quoi, but air-brushed with the glitzy sci-fi futurism one might expect from a couple of guys whose origins lie in design. Their new album, their fourth and first in a leisurely eight years, retains their usual slightly-gnarly-but-smartly-turned-out vibe, but reaches towards new and entertaining musical directions.Justice blew up with Noughties monster remix “We Are Your Friends”, then rode the proto-EDM wave, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Fashion has a very short memory. Maybe that’s part of its charm,” says Robin Givhan of The Washington Post in Kevin Macdonald’s documentary. Whether anyone can forget John Galliano’s drunken anti-Semitic and racist outpourings at La Perle, his local café in the Marais in Paris in 2011, followed by his sacking by Dior, where he’d reigned as creative director for 14 years, is doubtful.But will people, or rather the fashion world, forgive him? It seems, judging by the acclaim for his recent Maison Margiela show in Paris, a spectacular, strange event (lots of corsets and cinched waists - on the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At the turn of the 20th century, London’s smart set queued up to get their portraits painted by American-born artist John Singer Sargent. Sitting for him was a performance, a way to show the world just how rich, glamorous, clever or important you were. And everything – from the pose to the hair, jewellery and clothing – was stage-managed to create the best impression.At Tate Britain, the brilliance of Sargent’s showmanship is on display from the start in his 1907 portrait of Lady Sassoon, who stands decked in an opera cape. Beside the painting is the garment itself, a gorgeous confection that Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The downstairs of the Whitechapel Gallery has been converted into a ballroom or, rather, a film set of a ballroom. From time to time, a couple glides briefly across the floor, dancing a perfunctory tango. And they are really hamming it up, not for the people watching them – of whom they are apparently oblivious – but for an imaginary camera.We seem either to be witnessing a film in the making or the reenactment of a well known scene from an old movie. There they are again, upstairs. This time the couple appears on screen performing the same sequence (main picture), but for a camera on a dolly Read more ...