Paris
Adam Sweeting
Verdi's La Traviata has become one of the best-loved and most-performed works in the operatic repertoire, but this is no thanks to sections of the English press. In this entertaining romp through the opera's history, presenters Tom Service and Amanda Vickery drooled over the juiciest bits from some of the reviews from La Traviata's London debut in 1856 – for instance The Times of London deplored "an exhibition of harlotry upon the public stage", adding that this was "the poetry of the brothel" – before splitting up to examine the musical and historical background of the piece.Once you'd got Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Confounding expectations from the first frames, Girlhood is the endearingly scrappy and staggeringly beautiful third film from French writer-director Céline Sciamma (Tomboy) and no relation to Boyhood. Intimate and exuberant, it's a coming-of-age story that takes us into the company and confidences of a quartet of teenage girls. They're part of a community of marginalised minorities living in the rundown Parisian suburbs, and have forged their own alternative family unit as a sanctuary from and defence against domestic abuse, poor prospects, societal assumptions and criminal opportunists. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
All the politicians lined up to chorus "Je suis Charlie" after the nauseating massacre of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris in January, but three months later, how is that emotional declaration of solidarity against murderous extremism holding up? For this documentary, British Muslim Shaista Aziz went to Paris to find out.Her inquiries suggested that France is split in two over the issue of Western values versus Islamic fundamentalism. So is much of the rest of Europe, but France's rigorous insistence on maintaining the state's secular status, and therefore banning such faith-based Read more ...
ellin.stein
If anyone thinks high fashion is an airy-fairy world populated by flibbertigibbets preoccupied with frills and furbelows, Frédéric Tcheng’s feature-length documentary Dior and I, a behind-the-scenes account of the race to prepare the 2012 Christian Dior couture collection in record time, should set the record straight. This is a serious business, with investors’ money and employees’ jobs riding on the quality and execution of one person’s artistic vision. In fact, in this aspect, and in the number of dedicated and highly skilled craftspeople it employs, launching a collection resembles Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Here is an exhibition that tells us how something we now take totally for granted actually came about: how our love affair with the Impressionists was masterminded by an art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel (1831-1922). He was a prime mover in inventing the way art is dealt with by commercial galleries and even museums, and is credited as the inventor of the modern art market.It is to Durand-Ruel, we discover, that we owe the parade of public retrospective monographic exhibitions devoted to single artists and accompanied by catalogues, publicity, private views, critics, and general furore and hubbub Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Captured in monochromes ranging from the most delicate honeyed golds to robust gradations of aubergine and deep brown, the earliest photographs still provoke a shiver of surprise and excitement. Even now, their very existence seems miraculous, and the blur of a face, or the lost swish of a horse’s tail signifies the photographer’s pitched battle with time, never quite managing to make it stop altogether. And with their chemical concoctions, their images emerging gradually, apparently from within the paper itself, it is no wonder that from the outset the photographer’s art was cloaked in the Read more ...
David Nice
"The fantastical should come so close to the real that you must almost believe it," declared Dostoyevsky on Pushkin’s ghostly short story The Queen of Spades. Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota and his superb French ensemble have brought off the feat twice now at the Barbican: two years ago with the pachydermal transformations of Ionesco’s masterpiece Rhinocéros, and now through the intrusion of Pirandello’s nightmare family into a rehearsal of one of his plays.In a way, it’s a tougher task than the scary metaphor of man-into-beast. Pirandello’s ghostly six (pictured below) become beasts, or at least Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This has been Scarlett Johansson’s defining year. Previously seeming a slightly dazed, limited beauty, she bravely abandoned her comfort zone in Jonathan Glazer’s gruelling and strange Scottish s.f. vision Under the Skin, then had her biggest hit with Luc Besson’s Lucy.Lucy is a fun-loving student whose time in Taiwan takes a turn for the worse when she is handcuffed and flung into the clutches of Korean gangster Mr. Jang (Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik). A bag of CBH4, a drug accelerating our brains’ supposed 10 percent usage is sewn inside her, bursts when she’s kicked, and floods her system. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a wonderful drollery to Guillaume Nicloux’s wry and eccentric comedy The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (L‘Enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq) which is quintessentially Gallic. Three years ago the enfant terrible of French literature disappeared for some days from a book tour, giving rise to rumours as extreme as that he had been kidnapped by Al-Qaida. The truth – though “truth” is a very relative word in this world – as shown in the film is that Houellebecq was vanished to the suburbs of Paris where he was held in circumstances that couldn’t be friendlier.Houellebecq plays gamely Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“God isn’t in this class, we’ll leave God outside.” Although teacher Brigitte Cervoni declares that matters of religion are not appropriate for her class of non-French children learning the language of their new country, a lengthy section of School of Babel nonetheless finds them debating Adam and Eve and the differences between faiths. It’s not the only disconnect in director Julie Bertuccelli’s documentary.Despite chronicling a year of a group of immigrant children in the French school system, School of Babel (La Cour de Babel) is not about the politics of France’s attitude to immigrants or Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Eastern Boys is a disturbing film. Robin Campillo’s second feature as director catches the often aggressive world of immigrant grifters in Paris – they’re a gang of young men largely from the former Soviet Union – and their interaction with the society that surrounds them, through prostitution and crime. The issue of prostitution itself is given a complex nuance in the film’s central relationship, where control and care, exploitation and protection become uneasily mixed up, before the film’s closing third moves into thriller mode. It won the director the Best Film award in the Horizons Read more ...
Katie Colombus
This is a simple story told in the most creatively chaotic way. A kaleidoscope of stunning visuals, intricate mechanics and curious characters unfolds, revealing the tale of Chloe (Audrey Tautou) and Colin (Romain Duris) who fall in love.Their Parisian romance, set in a non-specific era, is based on the 1947 cult novel by writer and musician Boris Vian, L'Ecume des Jours. The story is predetermined by an orchestrated manuscript, constructed on a revolving conveyor belt typewriter. It dictates the development of Colin’s Pianocktail – a piano that mixes cocktails to the tune played; Read more ...