Petit Tailleur + Belle Epine Q&A

I went to a Q&A at the Institut Francais in South Ken, right before moving back to Paris.
Two films were shown: Belle Epine, and Le petit tailleur. They were discussed with their directors (Louis Garrel who was behind the camera for once, and Rebecca Zlotowski) and the star of both films, Lea Seydoux. Lea Seydoux was unsurprisingly stunning and luminous. We can see her in the new Mission Impossible. 

PETIT TAILLEUR

Louis Garrel is just as sexy in the flesh as he is on film. Especially when he's funny - well I thought he was hilarious but his dark humor didn't quite work on the predominently british audience. I've always loved him as an actor, but there he showed a lot of promise as a director in his black and white short (of 44 minutes) Petit tailleur. Heavily influenced by the Nouvelle Vague among others,he still has his own voice in this cute love story between beautiful Arthur and Marie-Julie (Arthur Igual and Lea Seydoux). 

BELLE EPINE

The director, Rebecca Zlotowski was very likeable. She was so sweet and probably a bit pissed as she said in her broken english that her actresses in the film are naked a lot because 'they just have the most beautiful pussies'. Interesting. Well we do see Lea naked a lot in it. 
It's a coming of age story that knows not to fall into nostalgia or sentimentality - even if it treats of a young girl (Seydoux)' concealed grief for her mother's death, and fascination for reckless,illegal motorcycle racing. Great vibe, great music, great acting but I'm not 100% convinced how I feel about it, therefore I feel a little uncomfortable writing a review...

best of the year

Best of 2011:

The Skin I live In

Melancholia

Weekend

Tyrannosaur
Shame (or is it 2012?)

DVD favourites:
Enter the void
Irreversible
I am love

I'm still a bit confused about....

Drive

The tree of Life

Submarine

We need to talk about Kevin

Midnight in Paris

True Grit

Most stupidly overhyped:

The Black Swan

Blue Valentine

The King's speech

Bridesmaids

And the ones I missed and will catch up on ASAP:

Meek's cutoff

Snowtown

Senna

L'appolonide

Polisse

Tomboy
Take Shelter
Certified copy

'Parlez moi de vous'

I love Karin Viard, and I love Nicolas Duvauchelle. So that's the film I went to see at the cinema with a friend as I landed in Paris.
click below for my opinion...

Weekend

I saw this a few months ago at the Brixton Ritzy on my own (as per usual...). I had no idea what it would be about, i just saw an excellent percentage on rottentomatoes (94%). When I found myself at the screening with about seventy Vauxhall gay bears and no feminine presence other than myself, I got the hint. Yay! A gay film!

The Weekend here starts on Friday night, at a gay bar. Reserved Nottingham lifeguard Russell, after a gathering with his straight friends, goes cruising in a gay bar on his own, and picks up outgoing Glen. 

The morning after the first night, Glen gets a tape recorder out, and asks Russell very intimate questions for an art project (a bit of Sex lies and videotapes...). Their own encounter is discussed as well as more general questions about what it means to be gay nowadays. This is no ordinary end to a one night stand... And as the two end up spending the weekend together, having sex, staying in, going out, discussing many things, we feel like we're there, and we're sad to know their romance has a deadline : Glen is moving to Portland on the Sunday night.

The dialogue throughout the film is so natural, we feel we get to know them in 'real time', just as they do over those 48 hours. Should they reveal as much as they can in the short time they're given, or not even bother at all?

One of the best films I've seen in 2011. It's just really sweet (just be ready for some anal sex).

Old: A streetcar named desire

Le jizz!

Arguably one of the best acting performances of all time from Brando, in the claustrophobic, controversial play from Tennesee Williams. Yet in 1951, he had lost the Best Actor Oscar to Bogart , although the film won four other statuettes.

To put it simply, sweaty, violent, sexual animal Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski blows all our actors out the water in terms of charisma, and sex appeal. Vivien Leigh looks like a terrified, hairless cat and has lost much of the beauty that made her Scarlett O'Hara but displays a great case of the crazies. Why can't more recent films show the sexual tension and manipulation meant to happen before the actual sex the way Williams and Kazan did?

Hable con ella

I remember being a child and a teenager, and reading film magazines and the Canal + film catalogue, and seeing all sorts of films I wasn't allowed to see yet. Before films were put online, I couldn't get access to all the films I wanted beyond my parents' Kubrick and Hitchcock dvds... and I remember watching a feature on Canal + about Hable con ella, and seeing the scene of a tiny man entering a p***y and I thought wow I cant wait to see weird shizz like that. (I have yet to find the film on necrophilia I had read so much about ).

So last night I saw Hable con ella and it was worth the wait of a decade. I loved it so much. We already knew that Almodovar is a master at mixing comedy and tragedy like no other... But I find this one more mature maybe than his other works, well, let's say more in the vein of his 'Piel que habito' (again, a lot about skin...) . As usual he gives a story that's compassionate and brave, but the thing is slowed down, less scattered, less... 'spanish'?

I wasn't a big fan of his work just after that though...I wasn't taken with La mala educacion, and I didn't find that open love letter to Penelope Cruz that was 'Los abrazos rotos'.

But like his latest, 'The skin i live in', 'Hable con ella' is unmissable!

I enjoy Almodovar like I enjoy Tennessee Williams plays and it's a very big statement.

I think this one will stick with me for quite a while.

Enter the Void by Gaspar Noe

Gaspar Noe's first film since his ultraviolent, commercial success Irreversible, took over 10 years to materialize. Thank God he waited to make it because I doubt the CGI could have been that great then. I had reseen Irreversible that week, this time without skipping the worst bits (I was a young teen the first time around). I loved it and thought I'd go for 'Enter the Void' the following night.

Gaspar Noe hasn't calmed down since Irreversible, and Enter the void is just as mad and ambitious, if not more.

Oscar (Nathaniel Brown, here acting for his first gig/you can tell), an American drug dealer in Tokyo is joined by his sister Linda, played by clumsy bombshell Paz de la Huerta. He's set up by a mate, and finds himself shot by the police in the toilets of a bar of a club called The Void.

Click below for the rest...

The Deep Blue Sea

Terrence Davies 'interpretation of Terrence Rattigan's play, The deep blue sea, was exactly like I expected. Kinda bad, but kinda good as well. I went to the Curzon Chelsea on my own with tissues and chocolate.

First I'd like to say that British history bores me to death. Tbh most history bores me to death if I haven't studied it yet in detail yet. So I'd say apart from periods I've played in video games (which covers a pretty broad spectrum actually) or studied in the french curriculum, I can't really be bothered. (That's my low coming out right there.)

Hester (Rachel Weisz) is the young wife of a wealthy, dull (fat, old) judge but she has a passionate affair with Freddie, a handsome ex RAF pilot, around 1950. The film depicts a day in her life, a pretty bad one since he starts it with a failed suicide attempt following her lover forgetting her birthday. She is masochistically in love and miserable- both in a passionate love affair, and a stable marriage, and we don't quite know why. It becomes clear Freddie doesn't really love her but she remains hysterically in love and would rather kill herself than return to her husband.

I think a big theme of the story was that bourgeois post war desperation but it was only an accessory to me. Love stories should be timeless and any silly parallel would be embarrassing. We see them hide in warm London pubs, and argue in streets still ravaged by the war, which I assume are metaphors for the damage in Londoners' hearts... cringe.

There's a strong artistic veneer that stops us from getting the true emotions of the characters... I do appreciate Davies' slow, patient elegance but something with the overbearing Barber's violin concerto, the constant cigarette smoke, the yellow lighting and the soft focus... seems to cover up the true tragedy which is the shallowness of the story. Just stop moaning Hester, no one really gives a s***, no matter how exquisite you look.

It should probably be best left as a play where melodrama is much more easily forgiven... on screen it falls a little flat. I feel bad saying this because it was a fully commited piece of work, but it's just disappointing.

Melancholia

I went to see Melancholia on my own, late at night at the cinema, a few months ago, in a fragile state of mind. My friend Lucas told me to mix Prozac in my popcorn, I even know of a few friends who left before the end. But if I’m down I’ll watch Gaspar Noe, or a documentary about cannibals or pedos, as no matter how bad I feel I still haven’t eaten my parents, or turned up to UCL with a gun, so I think I’m ok really. But in Melancholia I met my match. Something to do with Wagner ( ‘Tristan and Isolde’ in the prologue), accompanying the mesmerizing hyper real paintings. It’s a film that eats you raw and spits you out at the ending, like any Lars Von Trier (Dancer is the dark remains one of my favourites of all time), but I could only feel uplifted and happy by the end.

Justine is going through a pretty rough patch, a depression of seismic proportions. She doesn’t see the point in trying to even be happy at her own wedding (where obviously everything that can go wrong does go wrong). Dunst is so perfect at just giving off the bad vibez. You kind of feel like saying, Justine you’ll get over it, it’s not the end of the world…

Cue the planet Melancholia getting dangerously close to Earth and threatening to wipe everything out. That’s when the roles are reversed, and the depressed finally find peace, and the others start freaking out (like her sister, played by charlotte gainsbourg).

“I’m trudging through this grey, woolly yarn. It’s clinging to my legs. It’s really heavy to drag along” mumbles Justine (Dunst). I had never seen melancholia so well depicted. Justine is so convinced that ‘she knows things’, so justified in her pessimism, she is immune to any form of happiness around her, and worse, she just wants her despair to take shape in real life events and the whole world to go down with her. No point even pretending to be happy in front of her groom, the wedding planner, her parents, her brother in law who financed it all. Even less point grieving in advance for an Earth which is she tells her sister is ‘Evil’. She is selfish, self-destructive and unstable. She doesn’t believe in silly rituals, all the speeches, the cake, the fakeness at weddings, as well as the proper way to wave goodbye to life as we know it. The german grandiosity is a tad laughable, but it had to be done. I know it can all easily be seen as grotesque but Dunst is just so good. I love love love her for this. It was compared to the Tree of life, which I had found a bit boring and narcissistic... I couldn't relate to it the way I did to Melancholia.

Personally I’ve always fantasized about the apocalypse... Any film about it, more or less, can make me interested. Something about needing our inner chaos to be reflected in the violence of natural disasters... sometimes we want the world to end so we can all get it over and done with. We’ve done a shit job. But for now this film will suffice.

I've been recommended the film 'Les derniers jours du monde' (the last days of the world), a French interpretation of the apocalypse, therefore obviously one where everyone starts humping on everyone.