Paris
stephen.walsh
It’s always tempting, at curtain-up in La Traviata, to settle back, half-close one’s eyes, and soak up the familiar without the anxiety of the new. Not this time you won’t. David McVicar’s lavish 2009 text-true staging is being revived with a generally strong, stylish and dependable cast.But one particular performance will have you sitting bolt upright in your seat, hardly able to believe that this is the third or fourth or whatever revival of an elderly production of a repertory standard in (many Welsh believe) Verdi’s native town.I’ve seen and heard some fine Violettas in my time, and some Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
From Forty Shades of Blue, 20 years ago, to Keep the Lights On and Love is Strange, writer/director Ira Sachs has proved himself to be a master at exploring romantic relationships – and the messier, the better. So, after the whimsical, inconsequential ensemble Frankie, he’s back to his best with a good old-fashioned love triangle. Passages is set in Paris, where German filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and English printer Martin (Ben Whishaw) are an expat married couple, with a gorgeous apartment in the city, a country house, and some understandings, nay Read more ...
James Saynor
People have been making films about the unreliability of memory since, oh, I can’t remember. Often it’s a cue for a genre escapade, but here French filmmaker Alice Winocour gives us a social drama, telling the fictional story of a survivor of the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, which killed 130.To recover, the lead character has to sort out an understanding of events from the Escher staircases of her upside-down recollections. It’s an absorbing movie that becomes slightly less so in the final third.Mia (Virginie Efira, pictured below) is a good-natured translator who one evening Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This frothy bio-fantasy about the 18th century composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges and top tunesmith to Marie Antoinette at the French court, could have been a powerful and revealing shout-out to a woefully under-appreciated composer.Directed by Stephen Williams with a screenplay by Stefani Robinson, it’s more like Bridgerton Goes to the French Revolution, an absurd bouillabaisse of melodrama and characters who may be elegantly dressed but are uniformly paper-thin.Bologne was born in the French colony of Guadeloupe, the illegitimate son of a French plantation owner and an Read more ...
David Nice
Union Jacks could be stowed away, and EU ones figuratively, furtively flourished: this was a concert of celebratory music for a Hanoverian king by a Saxon composer, by then recently become a British citizen, performed by a French ensemble in a Roman Catholic church which once served the Spanish Embassy. The present King, having already made a start repairing Britain’s damaged reputation on the continent by speaking German in Berlin, surely approved.How do I know? Because there he was, as we all suspected he would be because of tight security, enjoying among other things a more relaxed Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As any archaeologist knows, digging up a sarcophagus is a nailbiting business. How small are the chances that inside the shredded linen wrappings will lie a recognisable body with some vestiges of its former life upon it?Enough DNA and bone to reconstruct the person's age, state of health, status – perhaps even enough detail on the face to bring the dead features back to life and a guess at personality? Properly mummified, a human body can yield an extraordinary amount of living information after thousands of years. But ballets vanish far quicker.Stop performing a ballet for a decade and a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nadia & Lili Boulanger: Les Heures Claires - The Complete Songs Lucile Richardot (mezzo), Stéphane Degout (baritone), Raquel Camarinha (soprano), Anne de Fornel (piano), Sarah Nemtanu (violin), Emmanuelle Bertrand (cello) (Harmonia Mundi)This 3-CD set of 63 songs and instrumental pieces by the Boulanger sisters, Nadia (1887-1979) and Lili (1893-1918) really is a treasure-trove. It is claimed that it is the first “intégrale” of the songs by both sisters; these are occasionally interwoven with instrumental pieces. To over-generalize, the first two CDs give an insight into the level of Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In the first scene of Mia Hanson-Løve’s wonderful One Fine Morning, Sandra (Léa Seydoux in a minimal, nuanced performance), is trying to visit her father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), in his Paris flat. But, stuck on the other side, he can’t find the door or turn the key to let her in.He’s unreachable in more ways than one: he has Benson’s syndrome, a neuro-degenerative disease that is similar to dementia and affects speech and vision, a particularly cruel fate for a professor of philosophy whose life has been devoted to thinking and reading.This end-of-life sadness is juxtaposed, in a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When Berthe Morisot organised the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, along with Monet, Degas, Renoir and co, she’d already exhibited at the Paris Salon for a decade – since she was 23. That’s not bad for someone refused entry to art school because she was a woman!Luckily, Berthe and her sister Edma had parents wealthy enough to employ artists like the renowned landscape painter Camille Corot to give them private lessons. They even had their own studio and, judging by the landscape included in the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s (DPG) show, Edma was rather good; but as was expected of an upper Read more ...
Nick Hasted
May 1968. As France’s Fifth Republic shook, radical director Jean-Denis Bonan divided his time in the Paris streets between filming protests and the fictional hunt for a cross-dressing serial killer. A Woman Kills lay unfinished and forgotten till 2010, a rough-edged film maudit from a tumultuous time.Hélène Picard, “a runaway…[with] a penchant for homosexuality and violence”, is executed for the serial murder of prostitutes, yet the killings by a woman seem to continue. Her executioner Louis Guilbeau (Claude Merlin) meanwhile creepily romances beautiful policewoman Solange (Solange Pradel, Read more ...
Mark Kidel
This is an enchanting album which brings together four outstanding musicians, brilliant in their own right, but also adept at the kind of collaboration in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.The distinguished cellist Vincent Ségal – with roots as varied as can be imagined – has known how to bring out the excellent musicianship of the Malian kora-player Ballaké Sissoko, in a series of beautiful albums for the adventurous French label No Format, which has once again brought the two perfectly matched players together. They are joined by accordionist Vincent Peirani and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What a feast! Congratulations are due to the National Gallery for its latest blockbuster After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art. Such a superb collection of modern masters is unlikely to be assembled again under one roof, so this is a once-in-a-lifetime, must-see exhibition.Room after fabulous room is hung with a hundred artworks, mostly paintings, on walls painted navy blue. This daring decision works well for most artists, the exception being Van Gogh whose landscapes die against the dark background. Luckily the dark blue offsets the cream wallpaper and pale pink blouse of Van Gogh’s Read more ...