Archive for the ‘french’ Category
Author: James
Radically different visions
Gerald Loftus returns with his take on an EFA winner…
The Germans have entitled it Warten auf Couscous, the original title is La graine et le mulet and it is known as The Secret of the Grain to the anglophone world. Yes, couscous does feature prominently in the film, but that is like saying that Gone With the Wind (1938) should have been called She Grows Cotton.
Author: James
The past is another country…
Felix Van Groeningen (Steve+Sky (2004)) brings a determinedly unsentimental perspective to this tale of friends reunited. Arne Sierens’s screenplay portrays the lives of a disparate group of college friends grown older but not necessarily wiser that are disrupted by the reappearance of one of their number, Zwarte Kelly (Wine Dierickx), who has come back to Belgium ostensibly to see her mum, but who may also have a hidden agenda.
Author: James
Family matters
Olivier Assayas, who made the fascinating (and underrated) demonlover (2002), analyzes the emotional angst that is the dividend of choosing between nostalgic attachment and financial gain, in this somewhat clinical but nevertheless engaging study of family dynamics.
The sudden passing of family matriarch Hélène (Edith Scob) sets her children to confrontation over the painful dissection and distribution of her home, personal belongings and the remainder of a valuable art collection previously owned by her late Uncle Paul.
Author: James
Vive Mesrine!
Let’s face it – no one does Real McCoy, well-’ard gangster flicks like we Europeans. Of course, Stateside, you can cite Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) or Casino (1995) and, at a pinch, Coppolla’s The Godfather (1972) but sorry, when it comes to what violence, fear of violence and callous characterizations are really all about, we have (among many others) Get Carter (1971). We’ve got The Long Good Friday (1980). Frankly, you’ve never really had a glass smashed into your face unless you’ve had it this side of the Atlantic, and there is a gritty, seamy, downright dirty side to the 70s gangster look and feel that only European pubs, bars, clubs and strip-joints can effectively convey.
Author: James
As promised in our recent article on the European Parliament LUX Cinema Prize, we begin our assessment of the three films up for the gong. A review of Občan Havel (2008) will follow on Picturenose presently, and you can check out Delta (2008) on our sister site, European Film Awards Reviews…
Author: James
Fools’ gold
Another one that I’ve been meaning to immortalize on Picturenose for some time – no word of a lie, this is among the funniest films ever made and its hilarity is in large part due to the fact that it is in French, rather than in spite of it. Not interested? Allow me to convince you otherwise…
A little history – Le dîner de cons (1998) was originally created by writer-director Francis Veber (Tais toi! (2003)) as a stage play back in 1993. Then, as in the film, François Pignon, the central ‘con’ (which translates as jerk, idiot and, in fact, a much stronger four-letter word) was played by Jacques Villeret, who sadly passed away, aged only 53, in 2005.
Author: James
Learning curve
The clear favourite to take the top prize at Cannes (and it duly lived up to expectations, scooping the Palme D’Or), Laurent Cantet’s seminal study of ‘the blackboard jungle’ (which fully deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Richard’s Brooks 1955 work, Robert Mulligan’s Up the Down Staircase (1967) and James Clavell’s To Sir, With Love (1967)) features former teacher François Bégaudeau (who also wrote the screenplay from his own autobiography) as himself during a school year spent with a class of 14-year-olds, trying to impart lessons in French and life.
Author: Paul
Amazing Amélie
Pre-Iraq II, Time magazine ran a cover story rationalizing the ‘freedom fries’ line – WHY FRANCE IS DIFFERENT. Interestingly, the cover star was Audrey Tautou, which was a pic ed’s nice take on softening the editorial frog-bashing. This was indicative of the unarguable fact that nobody could quite rationalize – beyond Tautou’s indescribable beauty – what made Amélie (as it was known in the anglophone territories) such a sensation in spite of its unashamedly atavistic celebration of a dying Frenchness, right down to Amelie’s clogs, the Catholic notion of charity, the Proustian notion of nostalgia.
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