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I have to be honest, I had to check what I’d written on Twitter while watching this movie to remind myself what I did or did not like about it, lol, ‘cos it was a while ago now. Luckily, I made a few comments. This is the French take on Wuthering Heights, and as such the only one I’ve seen so far to feature nudity and a lot of flashes of underwear. There’s something perfect about even the idea of a French Wuthering Heights, and not just for the romantical aspects. There is that old thing about European women not shaving under their arms etc, a certain, if not “dirtiness” then at the least earthiness, which suits the love between Heathcliff and Cathy to a T, in my opinion at least. It’s odd that even though this version of the story is a contemporary adaptation, it’s grimier even than some of the more tired TV costumed attempts, and I loved that. It surprised me, too, how faithfully it follows the story. Because of the setting and title I expected something more “inspired by” than the transplanted retelling I got. There are some wonderful touches in bringing certain aspects of the original story into the more modern setting, like for example the feather print Cathy’s nightgown. It’s another interesting version of the story – not a favourite of mine but I’d take it gladly over yet another ITV period drama.
Posts Tagged ‘French’
Le Dîner de Cons
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009I’m going to try and watch as much French cinema for the next week or so before a short and long overdue trip to Paris, mostly pulled from the recommendations of a fantastic podcast I found on iTunes called FrenchPodClass (seems not to have been updated in almost a year but there’s still plenty of free downloadable content). This was the first recommendation and appealed to me in particular as it’s only just over 75 minutes in length.
Well, I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard in a long time. This is a true comedy, truly simple, almost entirely set in one room and never actually getting to the dinner mentioned in its title (well, metaphorically notwithstanding). It reminded me of a play by John Godber I once saw (and, by connection I guess, just about all those class war plays) except that as opposed to wealth and status being the great divide here, the French version seems to be the war of intellects (of course, wealth and status come into this too). If you’ve read more than a handful of my reviews you might already know that I don’t usually go for pure comedy, nor do I often like movies about characters so mean as some of the protagonists here, but I guess for this I must make an exception. Though this does take a fairly melodramatic turn in the last act and I liked this part very much, I was still hoping that it was leading up to one final gutbusting gag, and I wasn’t let down. The movie, like those Northern British plays of old, has a very serious point to make on one level, but it’s also incredibly entertaining about it. I don’t know if it’s a movie I’d watch over and over, it really gives you its all in one sitting; but I’m very happy I took the short time required to see it. Highly recommended even if you never watched a foreign film before.
JCVD
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009This one kind of intrigued me and I was far from disappointed. You may have heard the story here: Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a version of himself in much the same way – in an at times similarly surreal story – as John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich. Needless to say I haven’t really followed Van Damme’s real life for a while if ever so I was interested before writing this review in finding out how much, if anything, of the truth seeps in here; before realising that any “truth” I found could easily have been doctored to fit in with the film, lol, so I gave up. Which I guess is just one of the many things the movie could be about, that inevitable blur between fact and fiction that exists today, our sense of wanting and wanting to be celebrities and others in high places, and perhaps how they feel about the situation.
Unlike, apparently, many of those who praised the movie when it was released, I wasn’t overly wowed by the big surreal monologue moment here. Van Damme is fantastic for the duration, not just in this slightly too whiney segment, and I prefer the more subtle glances at the camera for breaking the fourth wall. It’s the kind of movie you can take mostly as tongue in cheek, a kind of clever curio, yet still get swept away by the drama. When the chaos is at a maximum inside the post office, I found myself genuinely fearful for the hostages etc. There’s a believability to the whole thing beneath the Brechtian pretense that kind of took me by surprise. It goes without saying that it’s Van Damme’s best film by leaps and bounds, but it works on its own merits as a heist movie too, and its originality is unquestionable.
La Belle et La Bête
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009I’ve gotta begin by saying I’d still sooner revisit the Disney version having seen this, though that’s probably one of the least objectionable of my “I prefer the remake/sequel/more recent version” statement I’ve ever made here lol. However, though this begins fairly creakily and there is a slight need to stifle a laugh when the Beast first appears, the visuals and the fact that its heart is very much in the right place make it well worth the watch. There are significant differences in the story to the Disney version, particularly its Cinderella/Sleeping Beauty-like setup where Belle is the lowliest of three sisters rather than a quirky loner; and the fact we’re not fully informed as to the Beast’s backstory as in Disney’s prologue makes for a different story too. Something else that struck me about this movie was that, though I had subtitles, I could follow the fairly simple language most of the time; truly proof of great cinema is where the language is almost unnecessary. A movie I would check out again, but likely only in HD or the big screen.
À Ma Soeur aka Fat Girl
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009Okay, these are kind of running together in my mind now, lol. This, the third of Catherine Braillat’s movie’s I’ve watched in the past few days, differentiates itself from the others by its violence right at the very end which I can’t deny kind of stunned me. The movie is all about this ending, not fully making sense re: why Breillat would cover the same area yet again until the very last line spoken almost direct to camera by the girl of the title. It’s kind of worth seeing once for the shock of those final moments, but what precedes them is really the same as RYG and Fillette … being more recent the production values are slightly higher but I don’t know if this is even a good thing for Breillat’s style. I’ve yet to be convinced she’s capable of anything more unique and memorable than her debut.
36 Fillette
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009Though a poster for this movie declares “the French Lolita!”, like Lola, this is in reality just Lolita-lite … I mean, you’d expect the French anything to be a little more extreme, right? But though the guy is older here than Charlie Bronson’s Scott, the girl looks even more like a young woman (though it appears this actress really was the fourteen years of her character at the time of filming) and it really doesn’t look like that awkward a partnership. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s not a “Lolita story” if the girl in question could quite easily make it through the rest of her life without developing any further, lol. But I guess that’s the marketing peoples’ problem, not the film maker’s.
It’s a slicker effort than Catherine Breillat’s first movie I watched yesterday, and like A Real Young Girl it deals with the ugly side of adolescence. The very 80s setting of it, however, has me speedily recalling the Vanessa Paradis movie Elisa and wishing I was watching that instead. This feels much emptier than A Real Young Girl, too … I could almost imagine Breillat’s debut in novel form such was the arresting and poetic nature of imagery in places, but this just felt like one of those Amy Fisher TV movies without the attempted murder. Then, I know how empty some people like their literature, so what do I know?
A Real Young Girl
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009I read a few things about this before putting it on and feared a kind of similar experience to The Cheerleaders re: whether I would even end up reviewing it or not, lol. Let’s not delay the obvious here: this is one genuinely filthy movie. How it’s filthy, however – that really needs to be elaborated on. I found a fantastic line from a review on the movie’s Wikipedia page that actually applies to a lot of the things I happen to find, as they say, visually stimulating … Brian Price is quoted as saying, “[it …] does not offer visual pleasure, at least not one that comes without intellectual engagement, and more importantly, rigorous self-examination.”
So, you might ask, what does that mean? Well, it means that though this movie shows, as the title suggests, a real young girl and all that entails – it also shows you a real young girl and all that that entails. The girl in question is played by Charlotte Alexandra, who infuriatingly it is hard to find much info about online other than that she was born in the “late fifties”. For the most part she looks far older than the fourteen years of her character, in voiceover even declaring herself “well developed for my age”; but there are times that the lighting and camera angles conspire to make her look actually much younger. And boy does she like to “do things”. But if you’re coming to this movie purely for titillation, be aware that you’ll also see her do other things – like throwing up on herself, having pieces of an earthworm scattered around her “area”, plucking a chicken and feeding its entrails to its family, and other less visually exciting activities.
The overall effect of these 90 minutes is mixed. At times I found it overwhelmingly sad. The story here is really of this teenager way back when, bored to distraction with only her parents for company in the summer holidays on the French countryside. There are long stretches of uncomfortable silences that truly capture that feeling of being stagnant in the family home. At times it’s hypnotic, so raw is the reality of the title that it captures – one can barely believe someone took the time to put such things on film, but it feels right somehow that they did. Then there are times it’s uncomfortable, embarrassing. One thing’s for sure, though, and that’s that it’s never entirely exploitative despite all the things that it shows. It’s not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a curious one as worth seeing as it was worth making and, finally, releasing. The acting’s not too bad, the slightly muffled photography sort of apt, and that song is far too catchy.
The Fox and the Child
Monday, January 19th, 2009“Some people thought them pests, but I found them beautiful and fascinating … but my opinion didn’t count.”
I’m more than likely to be too nice to this one. After stretching my beloved “girl/horse” subgenre in my Prancer review, I guess here I may as well say it’s pretty much girl and any animal on film kind of makes it completely impossible for me to be objective about a movie. From the moment I saw the poster for this movie over a year ago, I was in love. But I say that even as I ponder just how hard a heart could be to be brutally honest about its substantial deficiencies.
I spent most of the movie’s 90 minute duration perfectly happy with the photography, the girl, the fox; Kate Winslet’s narration on this dubbed version is of course perfect, and even the dubbing of the girl is good (there’s only a couple of moments where we see too much of the off lip motion and it feels like a Petit Filous advert); but just like March of the Penguins, I just felt like something was missing … like it was just too much like a plain old nature documentary. At the same time, however, I figured, it’s probably just about perfect for kids … one of those things you simply must fill their heads with while you can before they get to school and stop listening to you (and I stand by that except for the caveat that follows, lol).
It was around about the time one of these, “ah, bless, the kids will love it,” thoughts was floating around my head that … the thing … the thing that happens at the end, I can’t even begin to touch upon because I would wish everyone watching this movie to react the exact same way I did over it, lol – well, this thing happened. And it kinda changes the movie entirely. It changes it from a pleasant time-passer, something wonderful for kids if you can show it to them before they’re jaded, into something absolutely unforgettable … especially if you’re a kid, no doubt. I don’t think I’ve seen anything since The Snowman when I was 7 or 8 years old that is so perfect for kids and yet so bound to be so distressing. The BBFC deserve some serious kudos for giving it a U certificate but even I would heartily recommend parental guidance for younger kids watching the end of this movie.
I wrote in my review of The Fall the other day about how the girl in that movie is great because she’s just a little girl. The moment I’m talking about above takes that idea a whole step further. The moment comes so starkly out of nowhere that I can imagine some people would find it ridiculous, amusing, and at worst, just plain implausible. But this is exactly what a child would do, I think; in fact, another review I read pointed out how perfectly the moment nails the danger of the way other movies and stories of this kind, like the girl here, anthropomorphise their animals. I’m kind of left wondering if my initial thought – that it would be perfect for kids to watch – is so true afterall, and maybe that the movie is as much suited to simply getting adults to understand (remember?) children as much as it is about teaching and warning children of the responsibility they have. It’s all there in the wonderful last line of Winslet’s narration, as the fox walks away. I kinda saw another way of reading this movie right from that first look at the poster but never once thought my personal interpretation could be so perfectly captured as it is here:
“It was in that moment that I understood why foxes always flee when they see us. They have known for a very long time that we can never truly be friends. It wasn’t by keeping her that she would remain mine. What I loved was the excitement of the wait. I’d confused possession for love.”