The Well Digger's Daughter ***

Daniel Auteuil, of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources fame, makes his directorial debut in the rather gentle, rather old-fashioned, but really rather sweet The Well-Digger’s Daughter. Astrid Bergès-Frisbey (who you may recognise despite the lack of mermaid tail from Pirates of the Caribbean 4, but don’t hold that against her) is the daughter in question, Patricia, a beautiful 18 year old who was brought up in Paris and has a repressed yearning for the finer things in life. Her father (Auteuil) thinks that he will be able to keep his beloved daughter close if she marries his good-hearted workmate and friend Felipe. She however only has eyes for the rich general store owner’s son Jacques, who is in the Air Force. Faced with the choice between a middle-aged well digger and a dashing pilot with a motorbike it‘s hardly a tough decision.

Alas we are in pre-war France, and after Patricia succumbs to Jacques’ charms he is immediately sent to the front line. Jacques unknowingly leaves Patricia pregnant; her father is appalled that she has lost her honour, Jacques’ parents are appalled that he would get involved with a girl from a poor family, and some mild parent vs. child, honour vs. love drama ensues.

Its mild drama is reminiscent of Downton Abbey and Sunday tea-times, where there’s never really any risk of danger. Its nostalgic charms therefore won’t appeal to everyone. If the idea of a boy falling in love with a girl as he carries her over a river because there is no bridge and she can’t manage to untie her shoelaces just makes you want to throw the couple, or yourself, in a river, then perhaps avoid this one.

If however you’re not averse to a bit of sentimentality then there are some fine sun-drenched performances to enjoy here. Don’t be so grumpy - sugar‘s good for you every once in a while.

Original review here

Beautiful Lies (De vrais mensonges ) ***

If you’re looking for a bit of mindless escape for a couple of hours, you can do much worse than Beautiful Lies. You can probably do quite a lot better too, but in terms of undemanding, frothy rom-coms, this one doesn’t fare too badly.

Audrey Tautou plays Emilie, a salon owner, who receives an anonymous love letter. In order to cheer up her mother, who is still struggling to get over the breakdown of her marriage a couple of years ago, Emilie secretly forwards the letter on to her. The audience know, but Emilie does not, that the letter is from Jean, the salon handyman. Wacky circumstances result in Emilie eventually paying Jean to take out the mother, and love triangle ‘hilarity’ ensues.

Regarding said love triangle hilarity, I did have some issues with a mother and daughter being romantically involved with the same man, and at times the light hearted tone sat strangely with the manipulative actions of Emilie, but maybe this is just my uptight Englishness ruining the French fun.

There are plenty of laughs to be had, despite the reservations, and Audrey Tautou manages to bring charm to a pretty unsympathetic character. Saying that, I could probably watch her watch paint dry and find her delightful.

Go expecting Amelie and you will be sorely disappointed. This doesn’t have a fraction of the warmth and heart of that film. But if you seek amusing, beautiful-looking distraction, and perhaps inspiration for a holiday on the Cote d'Azur, then this will do the job. Don’t expect to remember it ten minutes after the end of the credits though.


Original review here

Love Like Poison ****

We learn many lessons as we move from childhood to adulthood, about love, and sex, and guilt, and death. But we’ll come to that later. Another, perhaps less soaring, but nonetheless important, lesson we learn is: don’t judge a book by its cover - or a film by its title. Love Like Poison, about a 14 year old girl coming to terms with her parents’ break up and her own emerging sexuality in the lead up to her Confirmation, sounds a bit like it’s going to be a post-Twilight melodramatic angst-fest. It is not.

For one thing, it’s French. Forgive my wild generalisation and stereotyping, but the French are better at talking about sex than us. Here, 14 year old Anna’s nascent sexuality isn’t presented as something controversial or shocking, nor is it sentimentalised. There is no clear divide between childhood innocence and adult experience. The adults are just as confused as Anna is. Her mother is falling apart after the breakdown of her marriage; the priest who tries to offer support is struggling with his faith as a result of his feelings for Anna’s mother. The one thing I struggled with was Anna’s relationship with her dying grandfather. In one scene she is giving him a bed bath and he gets an erection. He tells her he feels handsome and she promptly runs off. There are a couple of scenes like this, and maybe it is done to purposely unsettle the audience. If this is the case then it hit the mark with me.

The film brilliantly captures the awkwardness and insecurity that are not solely confined to adolescence, and subtly weaves together the complexities of love, guilt, and religion, without ever being judgemental. A beautiful quiet mix of melancholy and hope. Much like life itself.


Original review here

Of Gods and Men *****

Of Gods and Men opens in a monastery in Algeria in the 1990s, with a small group of French monks quietly and methodically going to prayer. Everything is symmetrical, orderly, and peaceful. They live in harmony with the Muslim villagers, selling honey at the market and running a medical centre. This harmony, however, is about to be broken. 

Their serene balance is disturbed by a group of violent fundamentalists, who are now looking for medical supplies as some of their members have been injured fighting. The head of the monastery stands up to them, but they know that they will be back. The monks must decide whether to stay, and almost certainly be killed, or to leave, and abandon the people who rely on them so much. When talking to the villagers one of the monks compares the brotherhood to birds on a branch, unsure whether or not they are about to fly away. A woman replies that the monks are actually the branch, and it is the villagers who are the birds. Without the monks they have nothing to stand on. 

The film, frankly, is remarkable. The power of emotion it inspires is something I have rarely experienced in the cinema. A particularly effecting scene occurs towards the end of the film, when the monks have their ‘Last Supper’. There is no dialogue, it is just a group of men eating, while Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake plays in the background. The camera pans round each of their faces, and we see every line, every flicker of fear, of happiness, and of faith, in themselves and in their God. 

This is not the kind of film to just pop to in order to while away a couple of hours. You feel every single one of its 122 minutes. Normally I would say that a film feeling long is a bad sign, but that is simply not the case here. The pace is slow, and the scenes are long, but it is somehow fitting that a film like this leaves time within it for contemplation. 

Of Gods and Men will stay with you for a long time after you leave the cinema. And you may take a while to leave. I had to sit until the end of the credits to gather myself, as did a lot of the audience. Astonishing, beautiful, captivating, devastating; I could go through the alphabet. But I won’t, don’t worry.


Original review here.


PS Just to clarify, I did not see this Of Gods and Men.  Though I'm sure the above review would apply to that, too.

My Afternoons with Margueritte ***

My Afternoons with Margueritte is not exactly a film full of high-octane thrills and spills.  But you can probably tell that from the poster: Gerard Depardieu and an old lady sit on a bench, feeding the pigeons.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that the poster is a plot spoiler - sitting on a bench feeding the pigeons probably takes up a good half of the film.  

Depardieu plays Germain, a lovable loser.  He lives in a trailer in his mother’s garden.  He has friends in the village, but they all laugh at him and think he is stupid.  Then he meets Margueritte, an intelligent, highly literate woman in her 90s, and she reads to him, and thus unlocks the door to knowledge, and enlightenment, and self-respect, and respect from others, and all those other clichés that we get from this ‘gosh, isn’t reading good?’ kind of film.

But, despite it winning no prizes for originality, My Afternoons with Margueritte is actually very sweet and touching.  The relationships between Germain and the women in his life - his scary mother who has never shown him any love, his ridiculously pretty, young, vivacious girlfriend (sorry to be shallow but, really?  French women don’t like dungarees, do they?), and of course Margueritte - are all very sensitively and movingly conveyed.  

This is very much Sunday afternoon cinema.  Themes of ageing, of mother/son relationships, of different kinds of love, are covered at a very gentle pace, but it never fails to be charming.  Oh, apart from at the very end where an awful saccharine poem is read over the end credits.  I would advise you to leave before that bit, as the sugar content may send you over the edge.  You’ll get horribly hyperactive on the way home.

[Original review here]

A Town Called Panic ***'

Don’t judge a book by its cover?  And don’t judge a film by its milk advert.  A new personal code I intend to live by.  I find this advert quite unbelievably annoying, but 70 minutes of a basically identical premise is somehow extremely funny.

It’s Horse’s birthday, and Cowboy and Indian have forgotten to buy him a present.  They decide to build him a barbecue, but don’t have enough bricks so buy some off the internet.  But, zut alors, they accidentally buy 50 million bricks instead of 50.  This leads to a manic adventure taking in the centre of the earth, the North Pole, and the depths of the ocean, with barely time to breathe.

Watching A Town Called Panic feels a bit like watching Postman Pat, or Pingu, on speed.  By the end I was exhausted.  The animation is delightfully crap, and hides what was undoubtedly an enormous amount of hard work.  It’s not quite Adam and Joe Show levels of charming unsophistication, but it doesn’t feel far off.  (Yes, I know that reference is about ten years out of date now, and isn’t really relevant anyway, but I wanted to link this clip in somehow, just because it makes me laugh).

If you like your comedy clever and highbrow, then this film is not really for you.  If, however, you want to escape in silliness for an hour, with the main thought running through your head being ‘this is actually insane’, then I highly recommend.

I would have given this four stars, but took off half because I think you have to be in a very specific mood to enjoy this, otherwise funny could too easily become being-repeatedly-bashed-over-the-head irritating.

Gainsbourg ***

Biopics are a tricky genre. The challenge is to engage someone who knows all the facts already, and someone else who knows none. I fell into the latter category. The only things I knew about Serge Gainsbourg before the start of the film were that he was French, and he wrote the song that was used in the beer advert with the sexy ladybirds. 

Now I know a bit more, though the actual biographical details are quite confusing. Wives and lovers come and go without much explanation. And I have no idea how many children he had. Though maybe he didn’t either. 

This is more than a run of the mill ‘The Life and Times of Serge Gainsbourg’ movie however. It is based on the graphic novel by Joann Sfar, who also directs the film. We meet Serge as a young boy in Nazi-occupied Paris, when he still went by the name of Lucien Ginsburg. He makes up stories for his sisters, and from these stories springs the most surreal, and probably most enjoyable, part of the film. He invents a character, a kind of nightmarish man-sized puppet alter-ego that follows him round into adulthood, whispering to him his insecurities and ambitions. 

This surreal element disappears about half an hour from the end of the film, and with it went my interest. Maybe a huge fan of Serge Gainsbourg would have enjoyed seeing him record a reggae version La Marseillaise, but for me it really added nothing to the complex and interesting character that had been presented for the first three quarters of the film. 

So, basically, I think for a Serge Gainsbourg fan it would be great: a biopic with lots of songs, plus quirky, innovative elements. And lots of beautiful women. No ladybirds though.

Heartbreaker ****

Heartbreaker (L'Arnacoeur) is the perfect antidote to the below par romantic comedies that have been offered up in recent months.Sex and the City 2? Letters to Juliet? Non, merci. This is so far superior it's almost silly to compare. 

Admittedly, the plot is quite predictable. Alex (the remarkably attractive Romain Duris), his sister, and her husband get paid, by fathers or siblings or friends, to split up couples. Don't worry, only couples where the woman is unhappy and doesn't realise it. We don't need to get distracted by morals here. Alex breaks up relationships, he doesn't break hearts. Even though the film is called Heartbreaker. Hmm, maybe there's a nuance lost in translation. Anyway, quelle surprise, Alex falls for his mark, Juliette (the equally remarkably attractive Vanessa Paradis), but will he be able to steal her away from her fiance? (Her fiance played by Andrew Lincoln. Yes, Andrew Lincoln from Teachers and This Life. In a French film.) And will he be able to keep professional and personal feelings separate? And will they kiss in the end?

You can probably guess the answer to those questions. So why go and see another predictable romcom? Firstly, the guilt factor from seeing a frothy film is completely blown away because it's in French. It's got subtitles, therefore your friends will think you are very cultured and highbrow. Secondly, predictable can be wonderful when it's done well. Most of Audrey Hepburn's films were predictable, but they were glorious because they were charming. And this is certainly charming. It is silly, and funny, and warm, and irresistible. And beautiful to look at, both in cinematographic and aesthetic terms (did I mention how attractive the leads are?). And they recreate the iconic scene from Dirty Dancing, and the only thing that was lame and embarrassing about it was the very big grin left on my face.  Formidable!