France
Music Reissues Weekly: Serge Gainsbourg - L'Homme à tête de chouSunday, 22 October 2023Marilou 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.... Read more... |
Flowers for Mrs Harris, Riverside Studios review - lovely, low-key musical finds a London berthMonday, 09 October 2023Although 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,... Read more... |
The Great Escaper review - Glenda Jackson takes her final bowFriday, 06 October 2023This 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... Read more... |
Annie Ernaux: Shame review - the translation of painTuesday, 26 September 2023The 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... Read more... |
Blu-Ray: Partie de CampagneMonday, 18 September 2023Partie 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... Read more... |
Private Lives, Ambassador's Theatre review - classy revival lacking physical excessThursday, 14 September 2023There 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... Read more... |
The Innocent review - muddled French crime comedyThursday, 24 August 2023Thespians 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... Read more... |
Lie With Me review - a bittersweet enchantmentFriday, 18 August 2023The 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... Read more... |
Marie Darrieussecq: Sleepless review - in search of lost sleepThursday, 17 August 2023“I lost sleep.” So begins Marie Darrieussecq’s elegantly fitful book, Sleepless, now perceptively translated into English by Penny Hueston. The sentence, suspended against the page’s whiteness, a clause unto itself, is simple, short, and... Read more... |
Prom 31: Dialogues des Carmélites, Glyndebourne, BBC Radio 3 review - full force on airTuesday, 08 August 2023“There will be more incense,” promised Glyndebourne Music Director Robin Ticciati of the company’s annual visit to the Proms. He was talking to my Opera Zoom class between the final rehearsal and first performance of Poulenc’s great masterpiece... Read more... |
World on Fire, Series 2, BBC One - return of Peter Bowker's panoramic view of World War TwoTuesday, 18 July 2023Writer Peter Bowker apparently had plans to make six series of World on Fire, but the arrival of Covid after 2019’s first series threw a spanner in the works. Anyway, here’s the second one at last, and it’s a little strange to find that this... Read more... |
Disturbing Disappearances, More4 review - headstrong 'tec tackles Pied Piper mysterySaturday, 15 July 2023This five-part policier is the finale of the current Walter Presents French season, and takes us to the town of Montclair on France’s eastern border. The opening self-contained episode, occupying a chunky two-hour slot, took for its theme the legend... Read more... |