Paris
Tom Birchenough
The Russian director Alexander Sokurov has never been afraid of tackling weighty, often philosophical issues head on, and his latest film Francofonia is as pioneering – and, some might say, unnecessarily uncompromising – as ever. It’s nothing less than a meditation on civilisation, its potential for preservation or destruction, and history, seen through the prism of Paris's Louvre. Stretching, and evading, the conventions of both documentary and fiction, it’s perhaps best considered as an art project in itself.Sokurov’s cinematic fascination with the museum as a concept stretches back to his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The original 1961 poster for Paris Blues trumpeted it as “a love-spectacular so personally exciting you feel it’s happening to you”. Would it were actually thus. Instead, it’s ponderous and features a cast so obviously “acting” that any verve implied by being filmed in Paris and set in the world of jazz is missing in action. Paris Blues is worth seeing, but don’t expect the pulse to quicken.Ram Bowen (Paul Newman) and Eddie Cook (Sidney Poitier) are American jazzers living in Paris with a residency in a smoky basement. One member of their band is a drug addict and a local Juliette Gréco type Read more ...
David Nice
Stravinsky's music, chameleonic yet always itself, offers so many lines of thought. One struck me immediately with the descending, even harp notes and tender, veiled strings at the start of his 1947 ballet Orpheus last night: the inexorable beat of time is so often pitted against an expressive, human voice. Esa-Pekka Salonen, who started out as a rhythm and textures man, now gets the humanity too. This triptych of three Greek myths startlingly revisited offered other dualities, giving him and the Philharmonia the chance to move constantly between heaven, hell and somewhere in between.It’s the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
One of the many astonishing things in Mia Hansen-Løve’s fifth film is watching Isabelle Huppert hold back tears. In one scene they smear almost involuntarily down her face, in another she transforms them into a bark of nervous laughter. Huppert plays Nathalie Chazeaux, a sixty-something Paris philosophy teacher, who paces the film with almost frantic speed while her life unravels around her.Finally, when the immediate causes of her grief have passed, she surrenders to sobbing. It’s a beautifully delayed scene that catches the build-up of emotions (pictured below), her only company in her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Set at the beginning of the 1970s, Catherine Corsini’s Summertime (La belle saison) is a story of love in a political climate, one in which the post-1968 assertions of a changing society have infused the public context in theory but do not ultimately translate into liberation for the film’s two lead women characters. The restrictions of tradition, especially in the rural world in which the greater part of Summertime is set, finally prove too strong for their relationship.Delphine (Izïa Higelin) has grown up on the land, the only child of smallholders in Limousin: it’s a beautiful, sparsely Read more ...
David Nice
Common wisdom has it that the prolific output of 20th century Czech genius Bohuslav Martinů is very uneven, a judgment surely made without a complete hearing. Some listeners shrink from his fidgety polystylism. Many of us on the fringes of the Martinů hardcore, though, have found ourselves giddy with each new discovery of music we didn't know before: last year, string duos on a CD from viola-player Maxim Rysanov, this year piano trios from the Czech label Supraphon and now two one-act operas, this time live from Guildhall students.Before voicing any reservations, it has to be spelled out that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
John Le Carré made it quite clear what he thinks of the new world order in The Night Manager. All together now: a nexus of corrupt money and sinister establishment interests make for cynical realpolitik. It’s a persuasive weltanschauung that plays well to millennials priced out of their own future by ungovernable global forces beyond the reproof of electorates. But the message can become a bit of a stuck record. Take Our Kind of Traitor.The latest Le Carré adaptation features an innocent bystander sucked into a plot to bring down a shady business organisation which has links to self- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This Paris-set thriller was one of several films which had its release date postponed in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the French capital last November, giving the impression that it might be shockingly violent or provocatively political. In fact, it's a slightly uneasy mix of caper, buddy-movie and spy adventure, as its protagonists battle a high-level conspiracy involving the mother of all bank robberies.You can imagine that director Jason Watkins (The Woman in Black) and screenwriter Andrew Baldwin may have had in mind such vintage Parisian adventures as Charade or Polanski's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you were expecting Rowan Atkinson to say "bibble" or make those Mr Bean gurgling noises, you came to the wrong classic detective drama. To play George Simenon's timeless French detective in a story subtitled "Maigret Sets a Trap", a melancholy, interiorised Atkinson spent most of his time sitting and thinking. Despite the mumsy ministrations of Mme Maigret (alias Lucy Cohu), he relied mostly on his pipe for company as he struggled to unmask a serial killer of women in Montmartre.It was a determined effort by the star to set aside all his familiar comic tricks and tics, and this was a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You may never have heard of Florence Foster Jenkins, although she has definitely earned a certain renown among music-lovers. For all the wrong reasons: the American soprano, who performed at private recitals in the early decades of the last century, before a climactic Carnegie Hall appearance a month before her death in 1944, was famous for the sheer awfulness of her voice.More a phenomenon than an artist, she was certainly a paradox: her dedication to classical music was all-consuming, as total as her inability to perceive that she had none of the technical accomplishment required to perform Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Christopher Wheeldon's new ballet Strapless scores a first on a number of counts. It’s the first co-production between the Royal Ballet and the Bolshoi (London gets first dibs – Moscow doesn’t get the goods for another 12 months). It forms part of the first ever triple bill the Royal Ballet has devoted to its most famous son. It’s the first ballet music Mark-Anthony Turnage has written to order. And it’s the first ballet on the Covent Garden main stage to feature a passionate gay male kiss.But that’s incidental. The thrust of the Strapless narrative – based on a book of the same title by the Read more ...
David Nice
Why have all attempts to make French comic opera funny to British audiences fallen so flat, at least since ENO's 1980s Orpheus in the Underworld? That company's La belle Hélène simply curled the toes, while Opera North managed to make a pig's-ear "special edition" of Chabrier's Le roi malgré lui. L'Étoile in its first staging at the Royal Opera fares better, not least because it's mostly performed in impeccable French, but does it ever reach the potentially hilarious pitch of Gilbert and Sullivan?The case for Chabrier's Star twinkling again is made by his first (1877) steps in a very Read more ...