France
Suite FrançaiseFriday, 13 March 2015
Saul Dibb dispenses with the first half of Irene Nemirovsky’s great novel Suite Française in about a minute. Grainy newsreel footage disposes of the Fall of France in 1940, then it’s on to the occupation of Bussy, the country town where Lucille (... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Calais: Simon Faithfull – To the Bottom of the World and BackSunday, 01 March 2015
The sea is the theme uniting Simon Faithfull’s mid-career retrospective. It makes the port of Calais the perfect host for this splendid exhibition and, to put you in the mood, ideally you should make the crossing by boat. Faithfull spent six days... Read more... |
CD: The dø - Shake Shook ShakenMonday, 26 January 2015
Whether intentional or not, the third album by French chart-topping duo The dø is effectively a renewal of “Sweet Dreams”-era Eurythmics. The synth bubble-‘n’-pulse and vocal lines nodding towards the choral and gospel inescapably evoke what Annie... Read more... |
DVD: Trans-Europ-Express/Successive Slidings of PleasureTuesday, 20 January 2015
Still best-known in Britain for scripting Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s films as sole auteur develop that landmark work’s slippery reality. Like the novels with which he first made his name, Trans-Europ-Express... Read more... |
La Maison de la RadioTuesday, 20 January 2015
Beyond being a portrait of a day in the life of French national broadcaster Radio France, it is hard to work out what La Maison de la Radio might be about. There is nothing about what the institution is meant to be for, little hinting at the... Read more... |
Spiral, Series 5, BBC FourSunday, 11 January 2015
It's a poignant moment for the return of this superior French police drama. With the Paris terrorist crisis the top story across all media, we rejoin our fictional police captain Laure Berthaud to find her still in emotional fragments following the... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: MagmaSunday, 11 January 2015
Magma: Köhntarkösz, Köhntarkösz Anteria, Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré“They were a Seventies phenomenon,” said snooker ace Steve Davies of Magma. “But they were a bit too far out there for most people, even if you liked progressive music. I didn't dare put... Read more... |
The Green RayFriday, 02 January 2015
French actress Marie Rivière had a specially close relationship with director Eric Rohmer. After seeing his work for the first time in the early 1970s, Rivière expressed her admiration in a letter, which led to a succession of parts and culminated... Read more... |
DVD: The Kidnapping of Michel HouellebecqSaturday, 20 December 2014
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... Read more... |
CD: Etienne de Crecy - Super Discount 3Saturday, 06 December 2014
Once up on a time, a long time ago, the pop music of France was a joke to the outside world. Serge Gainsbourg and certain Parisian chanson auteurs received occasional plaudits but, for the most part, coverage consisted of throwaway sniggering at... Read more... |
School of BabelTuesday, 02 December 2014
“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... Read more... |
Eastern BoysMonday, 01 December 2014
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... Read more... |
